5 April 2015 Update

It’s Tuesday. Up until this last week I was doing well at getting my weekly updates posted every Sunday. I think I have an OK excuse for this week though, because Melissa and I were gone from Friday until Monday visiting the Lindholms in Stockholm, Sweden. It was a great trip and deserves its own post. But there is always lots going on in Switzerland to write about!

The big excitement this week came Thursday when the top world-news headline came not just from Switzerland, but even closer to home, from here in Lausanne. The story is of course that The United States, along with China, Germany, France, Russia, and The United Kingdom agreed to a preliminary nuclear deal with Iran. All negotiated right here in Switzerland.

We’re not the best sources for the Swiss take on this; we don’t have a TV and get most of our news from the American Internet. However, I do pick up the free newspaper here whenever I can think of it, so it was interesting to see all throughout the month of March pictures of John Kerry every few days doing something here in Lausanne, or in Montreux, or Geneva.

When Kirsten visited we walked along the lakefront in Lausanne and saw a bunch of police guarding a hotel and a line of news vans. It took me a second to put it together that it was all for the talks. Tuesday Melissa was also out of the loop and had to ask around when the University shut down their library, and started to guard it with police. They were anticipating holding a press conference there when an agreement had been made, but ended up keeping it closed for over three days until the deal was reached.

Also this week, us Europeans celebrated Easter. It’s an important holiday, everyone (including Melissa) received the Friday before and Monday after as paid vacation. The grocery store, which normally has one aisle devoted to chocolate, fills up its seasonal aisle full of rabbit-shapped chocolate. Each day there was also a big Easter bunny handing out chocolate to everyone that came into the grocery store.