Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Trip to Europe (Switzerland-Fall 2011)...Exploring Luzern


(Day 13)
On the second day in Switzerland, I visited Vlad & Karin in Luzern.


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From Zug, I took a direct train to Luzern. It took only 20 minutes with the great scenery from my seat.


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They live in Luzern (Karin grew up there) and came to meet me at the airport. Luzern is another historic city from Medieval era. It's surrounded by mountains and lakes. It's so beautiful that the entire town is like from a postcard.


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I was lucky to be able to visit their farmers market, which takes place every Saturday. It was so huge with so many vendors and so many people! I went crazy for cheese. Also, Swiss apples are great. I've been eating many apples since I started this trip, and Swiss apples tasted better than French or Italian apples by far.


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Karin picked up roasted chestnuts. They were so tasty. They also took me to a popular pastry shop, and I tried their apple strudel. It was amazing. Wow, Swiss people really know how to do pastries. If I lived here, I think I would get even chubbier with all the pastries! After the pastry, I even had their popular (and seasonal) vermicelles (chestnut cream dessert). I was so excited to find it. It's a very popular western dessert (one of my favorites) in Japan, and we call it Mont Blanc. I didn't know that they have the very similar dessert in Switzerland and I wonder this is the origin of Japanese mont blanc?? Another discovery is that macarons are called Luxemburgerli in Switzerland.


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It was such a gorgeous day in Luzern, and in fact, it was too warm to even wear a jacket. I heard last week was so cold (low was below freezing). Luckily, the weather was welcoming my visit!


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Luzern's popular high-end department store, GLOBUS. I was told that I must check out their basement gourmet floor. There were so many goodies there. I wanted to buy more cheese, but my bags were already too full.