Sunday's Lesson...

We decided Sunday's shopping-less adventure would be a train downtown, a nice lunch, window-shopping, and a safe return home. Since I've been commuting, it's been easier to embrace the train, although I haven't embraced buying tickets, because no one appears to purchase them, and no one ever checks if you have them. Why spend $4 for one ticket, especially when it equates to just 20 minutes on the train itself? I guess it's the 'thrifty me', so rarely seen.

So, we board the train ticketless, against Jay's silent protest I'm sure, and as we are arriving to our stop in the city, the never-before-seen-or-heard of ticket checkers step into our car. Unlike so many other Swiss merchants, they spoke English, so my pleas of ignorance and newness fell on too-cognitive ears. Which was too bad, because 5 minutes later, we were $70 lighter. Ouch! On the bright side, I did convince him to charge us for just one person, vs. the usual per-person violation - so that was a 50% discount! And, I find that acting nonchalant about losing money for no good reason seems to help when muddling through these situations with someone else - I convinced Jay by example not to be mad!

So, jointly yet pleasantly deciding not to let it bother us, we went off in search of Jay's craving for the day - pizza. Now on Sundays, stores in Geneva are closed, but restaurants can open if they want. Interestingly, we could find a wide variety of food (Burger King should not qualify - but it was packed!), but not a single Italian restaurant of any kind. That was kind of funny.

Despite Jay's next choice being a smoke-filled English pub offering fried-whatever, I convinced him to opt instead for "Cafe de Paris", a nice little outdoor place. Restaurants here do a great job of posting menus and prices, but this one seemed to have just a letter, in French, which we could not read. But I saw french fries (I can recognize that French food from many distances), so decided how bad could it be. We were seated, and waited for the menu...for several minutes, and it never arrived.

Instead, the waiter simply asked "medium or rare?". That's a winning strategy for a waiter in the USA, but not one we were expecting in meat-starved Geneva. To our delight, we had stumbled upon a restaurant that only served one dish: steak, served at your table in a flame-lit pan of garlic/onion/butter/gravy! True, there was bread, and salad...and yes, french fries, which dipped in said gravy was almost artery-crushing. But steak served in a literal boat of butter gravy? For that, I will learn to say 'Voila'! It was so delicious, it made us forget the whole train drain, and was a wonderful discovery considering our other options at the time.

Afterwards, we waddled past some expensive watch stores (there are so many here!), then waddled back to the train (with paid tickets in hand), and five minutes after arriving home, the sky opened up with rain for the rest of the day - a bonus that we didn't get wet! All told, our adventure in whole was a success, and I did learn a valuable lesson: things you like to eat are even better when served in butter!