Neuchâtel

Yesterday was a public holiday in the Catholic cantons and Valais is Catholic so Roy got a day off work *smiling face*. He didn't know that he was going to get a day off until last week which is a bit surprising since most people that work full-time get to know their days off, off by heart. But anyway.. we decided to take a train trip to another canton that isn't Catholic since there's not much to do in a town when everything is shut, quiet and lonely. I had been keeping my eye on the the weather website meteoswiss to see what the weather was going to be like in various parts of Switzerland and up until yesterday, it was telling me that it was going to be a dull and overcast day full of rain and strong winds in majority of the country. Yesterday morning the website told me that it was going to be a little overcast, a small chance of rain and a bit of wind so it wasn't as bad as I was expecting.

We decided to jump on a train and head up north to a place called Neuchâtel which is situated on the bank of a large lake which is funnily enough named Lake Neuchâtel. It's always fun to catch a train to different cantons in Switzerland because there's heaps of different looking trains so it makes you feel like you're going on an interesting holiday somewhere.

After two hours of travelling through fields, mountains and towns we arrived at the nice lakeside city. I forgot to take advantage of the free toilets on the trains and since I wasn't prepared to pay 1 CHF to empty my bladder at the station toilets, we snuck into the music school nearby and used their modern, clean facilities for FREE.

After pretending to be music students we walked down to the lake and enjoyed a thermos of vin chaud (a must for every winter adventure) and admired the ducks in the water.

It wasn't a super cold day but a toasty beverage never goes unwanted. Vin chaud is definitely my new favourite winter drink.

Then we decided to check out the centre of the city which was bustling with people carrying on with their day (they had to work.. hehe). We stumbled across a gourmet grocer where I found something I had been searching for, for the last month or so.... Brown Sugar! It seems like a weird thing to be searching for but you can't find it in the normal grocery stores here and when you have a recipe that calls for brown sugar and you know you can't buy it, it makes you somewhat sad that you will be missing out on all of the tasty treats that you can make with that sweet, molassesy sugar.

Brown sugar and a few other gourmet things packed in our backpacks and a paper cone full of hot chestnuts we wandered the town admiring the old buildings.

This little guy was waiting patiently for a handful of bird feed from the old man that lived in there.

Since trains aren't very frequent we decided - almost too late, to head back to the train station and since we didn't know the city very well we almost didn't make it to the next train. But after a brisk walk (resulting in sweat on a reasonably chilly day) we made it onto the train with about three minutes to spare. One thing we have learnt is that the trains here are always punctual (it's something that the Swiss take pride in) so you can never expect to catch the train if you arrive there two minutes late. But we made ourselves comfortable for the trip back to quiet, ol' Saint-Maurice. I think I'd like to go back to Neuchâtel to explore some more. A short afternoon adventure just wasn't long enough for us to fully appreciate this nice city.