Mmmm, the land of chocolate

Homer might have been thinking of Germany when he dreamt of "the land of chocolate", but the Swiss certainly know how to make chocolate. Ironically, it's also one of their cheaper products, which meant of course that we had to buy more.

Today (Wed 16 June) started with a trip into Luzern to board a boat for a cruise around the massive lake and to perhaps visit one of the towns in the mountains that we can see from our motel room. But unfortunately the weather was very 'Melbourne' today with a constant drizzle and a lot of fog making the 120 franc (roughly $AU120) 1 hour boat cruise a bit of a waste of money. So Sandra pulled out the female handbook and consulted it for things to do in wet weather. Just like 'things to do in good weather', the single word 'shop' was offered as advice, so that's what we did today.

We found the new part of town to be nowhere near as interesting as the older, medieval section with its fortified walls (and hundreds of tourist shops which I'm guessing are a more recent addition). I picked up a Swiss Army knife, because you just never know when you'll be stranded in the middle of nowhere and need to hunt down a deer for food (besides, it's come in handy cutting the tags off the kids' toys!). Unfortunately I didn't get time to set up a Swiss bank account like I wanted to (again, you never know when you'll need one), while Sandra took to the shops to buy some clothes and is looking more European each day.

But the real objective was to check out the chocolate shops. While there was an awesome range to choose from, we ended up with a 4kg pack of 20 blocks (pictured), though not all of them made it back to the motel. And what's the best way to wash down excessive chocolate consumption? That's right, with a hot chocolate ... which is what the kids did when we visited a tea house to finish up the day.

On the way back to the bus / train station we past dozens of pubs and cafes with people pouring out into the streets watching Switzerland eventually pull off a surprise 1-0 victory over Spain in their opening World Cup game. There was a special big screen set up at the train station and there were hundreds of fans screaming at every kick of the ball (bottom picture).

Just like this morning, I finished the day with a nice easy 4km run around the hilly area where we're staying (like AFL footballers I thought I might try some altitude training!). We've just got back from the bistro that's part of our motel where we had dinner and the kids were given some cartoons to colour in by the waitress. However Johanna had no interest in that so she and I judged Lachlan and Sandra's colouring efforts over a glass of wine (Jo had a lemonade).

This might be my last blog post for a few days as tomorrow we pick up a hire car and drive about 4 hours west into Austria to meet up with our Dutch friends Sofie, Daan and their two-year-old son Paul whom we're looking forward to meeting for the first time. We'll be there for five days before moving on to Venice. I'm hoping they like chocolate, because we might be eating it for a few days.