It's too hot.

Right now it is too hot. The day I got a new jacket it was about 7 degrees outside. The snow has mostly melted, there is slush on the ground and it is raining. I think I much prefer -7 with the snow. Today we went to the markets at 7:30am to buy a whole bunch of food for our Christmas feast. Instead of going to a supermarket to get everything, it is much better to buy food by going to specialist stores. There is some really amazing food here, photos will follow shortly once we have prepared the food.

The snow from last week was beautiful, we got about 10cm, so it was all over everything: on the rooftops, on the road, on the footpaths, it looked quite good in the fields and open areas where it hadn't been cleared by the snow plows. Unfortunately by the time I decided to take a photo it was dark and the snow had pretty much melted by the next day.

I have now experienced a bit of the Swiss culture, it is quite different to the Australian culture. On the whole, people are much more friendly. At the university, many people will say bonjour when passing in the corridor and when walking into a room. It is also not uncommon to have people say bonjour when passing in the street, especially young children to everyone else. There aren't as many big supermarkets, and the small specialty shops seem to be where people get food from more, especially for bread and meat. The bread here is incredible, and not very expensive at all. The meat however is very expensive, half decent beef starts at about 40F per kilo (about $45); I saw chicken today for 35F/kg. Cheese is quite cheap here too compared to Australia. Good cheese is affordable, you go to the cheese shop and ask them to cut a chunk from a wheel and you buy it by weight. It generally starts at 20F/kg.

My French appears to be getting better. I have been able to understand things better, I actually managed to understand an announcement at the train station today saying that the train was late and that it had been moved to a different platform. To give credit to the Swiss rail system, the train actually left almost exactly 7 minutes late, they then apologised for the train being late. I've also managed to successfully buy things from shops without failing at language too much. A couple of times I have had to resort to arm waving and telling them that my French isn't so good, but I managed to get what I wanted.