More Peanut Butter in the Snow

It’s been four days since my last post and I’ve received a few emails from concerned individuals, gently inquiring after my well-being. No, I have not been quietly shriveling up like a month-old head of cabbage, shut up in the Swiss mountains, growing pale and limp as my hemoglobin levels plunge and my muscles atrophy.

Rather, I’ve been training - and feeling stronger every day. I’ve also been cooking up a vegan storm in the kitchen. There have been moments of triumph, including a dozen balsamic spinach stuffed mushrooms that I ate like one-bite candies after a day of snowboarding, a batch of homous that (for the first time in my homous-making life) tasted like the stuff of a Greek restaurant, and my second attempt at a lentil and chickpea curry that made a really good dinner, even better next-day lunch, and the rest will freeze well. The greatest triumph of all was realized on Friday night, when I gingerly invited Michael to share a vegan meal with me. I assembled a small smorgasbord (I wanted to give him options): spinach salad with honey mustard dressing, sautéed garlic green beans and toasted almonds, a three-bean salad tossed in a light soy and sesame dressing, an assortment of oven-roasted winter vegetables and the aforementioned triumphant homous and wholewheat flatbread. I was ready to take the proverbial gloves off if he rose from the table to fetch cheese from the kitchen, but he cleared his plate and then proceeded to declare ‘that was really good, and no animals had to die to make it taste that way’. I suspect he surprised himself as much as he surprised me with this insight.

My daily runs, still somewhere between 30-50 minutes at this stage, are starting to feel comfortable. But the ground remains icy around Lake Geneva and worse, a perpetual fog has been hanging in the valley for days, so I replaced today's run with another snowshoe session to break the grey monotony. Michael decided to join me, and we chose Les Paccots as our sun search destination. We were rewarded with blue skies as soon as we ascended above 700m on the drive. Even more rewarding, we were accompanied by one of our few authentically Swiss friends, Francois. Francois was first Michael’s colleague and later became our neighbour when we moved to the village of Chexbres last summer. He has been an invaluable insider for us, helping us integrate into small town Swiss life. We (more specifically, me) have tirelessly peppered him with questions on critical daily-living items such as where to take our household recycling, how to insure our road bikes, what restaurants are open on a Sunday, and how long it would take the other locals to accept us in the community. In response to the latter question, he gave a characteristically glass-half-full answer:

‘Give them time; they are still getting used to you. The Swiss people are not unfriendly, they're just busy.’

I got a less optimistic answer to the same question when I recently posed it to a fellow expat and long-term resident of the region:

“It takes time, lots of time. It took ten years for our neighbours to invite us over for coffee. This year [year sixteen], they invited us to their Christmas party for the first time. Be prepared to wait a couple of years before they entertain a friendship; maybe longer if you’re vegan.”

In light of this, we are always extremely pleased when our friend Francois agrees to accompany us for an outing. In fact, besides enjoying his company and valuing his knowledge of local custom, we secretly harbour the hope that he will help us make further inroads with the locals. However, today we learnt that outings in the snow with Francois are a bit of a challenge. Like most Swiss, Francois was born with skis on his feet. But unlike most Swiss, he embraces a spirit of ad hoc adventure and a freestyle approach to life that makes me feel positively soft and overly urban every time I ask him what he did on the weekend. I’ve heard him use such phrases as “we’ll figure out the details as we go,” and “I don’t make plans that far in advance” that have left me marveling at how he hasn’t been expatriated by his fellow countrymen. So when we arrived at the trailhead and he pointed in the general direction we should go (straight up, apparently), and then shot off in a poof of powder on his touring skis, we took it in our stride. We shuffled along behind on our snowshoes, trying to understand how Francois had skied up an 8% gradient. We thought we were making good time until Francois glided past us on his descent, having already summited and taken in the view. He was now ready for lunch-time fondue and we weren’t even half way up. We shuffled on until we achieved the desired goal of a good two hours of cardio activity and then settled on a viewpoint that seemed as good as any for semi-frozen peanut butter sandwiches.

Speaking of which, I am going to have to bring some variety to my sandwich life. The peanut butter sandwiches travel well and are not so bad at sub-zero temperatures (if I really use my imagination, they are a close cousin of Ben and Jerry's peanut butter swirl icecream), but too much of a good thing is going to lead to an inevitable burn-out. Tomorrow, I'm experimenting with other nut butters (there's a world of nut butters - cashew, pecan, walnut, almond, macadamia nut - that I have yet to explore). I'm hoping these options will see me through to the first thaw.