Solothurn

There are some mountains just south of Basel, the Jura. You may have heard of the word jurassic? That's because they found dinosaurs in them there hills. Anyway, today I didn't visit them. I went a little bit south (via Olten) to visit Katie, who is an assistant in Solothurn.

It's not a big city. Nor a big town by UK standards if we're honest. But it is really nice to look at. It's prevailing theme is "baroque" and the streets are lined with beautiful houses and churches, all set up against the Aare.

As it's still Advent, we spent the time wandering around and drinking Glühwein. What else would we do? We have made more energetic plans to visit the Jura once the snow goes away...

Weihnachtsgebäck

A Brit abroad will do a lot to recreate that special feeling of being on home soil for the run-up to Christmas. This Brit may have spent his time happily downing a lot of Glühwein and stuffing his face with Zimtsterne, but there's a little piece of home that has been missing.

Fortunately, M was here for the past three weeks and brought a lot of British loot in his suitcase, like sweets, converse, stuffing mix and mincemeat. Oh yes, you read the last two correctly. Yesterday is was freezing cold again in Basel and the fairy cake tin I bought from Migros almost froze to my hand on the walk home, but the afternoon was spent quite happily baking mince pies and listening to Christmas music on the 'tube.

The reaction to one of my favourite foods was expectedly strange. I can't help but feel that English food tends to have a strange taste to it- think of mincemeat and brown sauce, for example. I once read that in the past British cooks would happily mix sweet and savoury flavours (like the do in North African cuisine now). Anyway, my housemates didn't come across as convinced by mincepies. I wouldn't mind, but on Monday I'm cooking a Christmas dinner with most of the trimmings, and there's a Christmas Cake for dessert... Hopefully they'll be too drunk by then.

Bären in Bern

My time in Switzerland is plodding on slowly towards the Christmas holidays. Aside from dodging the rain that has now replaced the snow, my days have consisted largely of taking language notes on presentations at work and showing clips of Cheryl Cole to show the students how geordies should sound.

Yesterday we decided to go on another daytrip and caught the train south to Bern, the federal capital. Of course we looked at things like the Swiss parliament buildings and the river Aare, and strolled around the Old Town. But there was another aim to our trip: the Bärengraben, or bear pit, for the bear is the animal after which Bern is named (incidentally, so is Berlin). So we wandered down not expecting much but saw one of the bears, and can safely say we know the answer to the age-old question, because there wasn't any woods.

Frankreich

Yesterday morning as I was eating breakfast before work I got a text from one of the other asistants, asking if I wanted to go to Colmar in France to be Christmassy for the day. As the festivities are edging ever closer and France is a lot cheaper than Switzerland, M and I headed up on the train a few hours later.

To be honest, most (/all) or our time was spent drinking vin chaud as it was only 2€ a cup rather than 5chf (3 pounds) at cheapest. I also got to try the previously unknown mulled white wine. This was also delicious. Unfortunately, plans to buy cheese and meat and wine for today were scuppered because we were too tipsy to remember to go to a shop. Oh well. It was a fun day, and we certainly felt a bit more Christmassy on the train home last night.