Sluglife

So, if you don’t know, I’m in Switzerland. Specifically, Ecublens, Switzerland at the headquarters of Lemo for two weeks. This is my first time out of the country, so that passport and international driver’s license are both spankin’ new.
We flew from SFO to New York’s JFK on United. That was a ghetto flight. It was a 757 and it felt like the first 757. And in front of me was an Asian woman and her two kids. The kids interpreted their time on the plane as an opportunity to leap around the chairs, shriek, and just be obnoxious. It was bad.
From New York, we flew Swiss Air to Geneva. The plane was the Airbus equivalent of the 757, but it was much nicer. Despite the cattle-car conditions in coach, the flight was uneventful. I didn’t get much sleep, though.
When we arrived in Geneva, we made a bee line for the money changing area:

Once we had money, we grabbed the first train for Morges. The plane got in a half hour early, and we managed to grab an early train. So once we took a cab from Morges to Lemo, the caretaker of the apartment wasn’t here! We didn’t have to wait very long, fortunately. Right next to the factory, there’s a house with two apartments upstairs. One of the workers lives in an apartment downstairs as the caretaker. The apartments are really nice – here’s my bed:

This is a bit farther back, looking across the room:

Both apartments have full little kitchens, and the caretaker made sure to stock the fridge with odd foreign fruity beverages.

This is the view out the window from the apartment. They’re planning to expand the factory into this field in the not-so-distant future, but until then it’s pretty!

And this is our headquarter’s building. If you’ve seen the building in Rohnert Park, then you know they’re not afraid of unique architecture. And this is certainly…. Unique!

We were given use of one of the company cars – a poor decrepit Chrysler minivan. It’s a manual transmission, but rowing the gears is awful – there’s so much play in the gearbox that the shift gates are hardly a suggestion. I suggested we give it some fierce sounding French name like Le Predator or something, just to make it feel better.

On the other side of the factory there’s another field with horses – apparently these horses are used for riding therapy. That’s cool! Plus they’re really cute.

That Sunday when we arrived, we drove Le Predator as far in almost every direction as we felt comfortable without getting lost. We drove back to Morges, to the outskirts of Ecublens proper, and to the outskirts of Lausanne. When we finally decided we had to actually stop and eat something, we managed to find a Chinese restaurant near HQ. So, yeah, our first dinner in Switzerland was Chinese. Go figure.
Monday after work we asked where we should go eat. Our boss recommended we head the one direction we didn’t go, down to the little village of St. Sulpice:

This. Did. Not. Suck.
We found a little place called Le Skipper. From the street it didn’t look like anything, and we weren’t sure there was going to be seating. Well, they’ve got a patio. Here’s David, my coworker, at our table:

And that view? Yeah:

And…

And…

The lake is Lake Geneva, and the other side of the lake there is France. One of the guys in IT here commutes by ferry across the lake. He lives in Evian – where the water comes from!! :)

The food was good – we got there relatively early (6:30) and they were only serving pizza. It was yummy though! We’re still getting used to the fact that dinner here is epic. I guess we’re just in some sort of an American hurry – we’re done eating, we’ll take the check and you can turn the table. Nope. They were in noooooo hurry to bring us the check. It was the same the night before at the Chinese place. However, the Chinese place didn’t have a view like this:

And that’s it for my first 48 hours in Switzerland! A storm blew in shortly after we left St. Sulpice, and it’s actually pouring right now. I’ve got more pictures from today, but it’s 11 (another epic dinner tonight, and then I called Anna), and I have to be at work at 8 tomorrow. So I’ll hopefully post again then!