Unleash your inner wallet

… and remind me next time to book a tropical holiday for a cool change.
Morning entertainment while munching my croissant, was the very charming arrest of a miscreant (a slightly pissed woman, though rather early in the morning) by two very cuddly looking police.

Lausanne. Smart, sassy and heaps of fun: stacked on a hillside overlooking Lake Geneva, Switzerland’s fourth-largest city is upbeat and hip, with vistas that pack a serial punch.
Lausanne is a city of steps and steep hills. Escaliers zigzag up through the Gothic old town and down to trendy bars squatting in the arches of majestic old bridges and find Doctor Gab’s craft beer or chilled white vin de Lausanne from urban vineyards.
That is the sell. Reality is that at these temperatures everyone is feeling a bit drained. I did not expect to see people swimming in the rivers, but most people’s dwellings are not air conditioned and are oriented to capture warmth in the usually chilly conditions.
The good news is my hotel room is nice and cool, thank you for your concern.
Delighted to catch up with Béa and Urs for a drink - on their way to their weekender in the mountains, they stopped off in Lausanne for a quick pint. Turns out Urs’s uncle worked in the Eastern Cape near where I grew up. And Béa gave me some invaluable local knowledge.
Switzerland is divided up in to many zones and folk on the other side of the valley may speak a different language. Bizarrely, as the train crossed the country, announcements changed to French from German (Swiss). This, of course, was not enormously helpful to me as the word “beer” is universally understood.Read more