Chocolate, mountains, lakes, wine and tequila!

It's official now, I'm an urbansexual. Yes, I fall in love with cities instead of people.
Last week, I spent a rather extended (5 day)-weekend at Lake Geneva, mostly in Lausanne, and there I lost a piece of my heart (also, all the cities I love start with either C or L. What would Freud make out of this?).

It's a quite small, studenty city right by the lake about 30 miles from the French border. And very French it is, only with less snotty French people, although they are only a 30 min ferry ride over the lake away.

There's a joke that Swiss wine doesn't get exported because the Swiss drink all of it, and boy I can understand why they do. The red are wonderful and I even enjoyed the white wines (which usually make me sick), and they barely cost anything. Plus, wherever you go in the Romandie, you can see the vinyards where the stuff.

Yet I ended up drinking tequila and beer - at the most awesome couchsurfing' accident' I have had so far. My host for Friday night dumped me so I started an emergency request and ended up with two awesome vegan, foodie, lefty kind of-Americans living right in the city centre.
We had pasta with lots of nooch, wine, tequila, beer. We talked about world peace, growing our own food (I even got to take some seeds home!), the status quo of all things cultural and political in Europe etc etc etc. - for breakfast, I got to sample some Follow Your Heart cheeses in the form of unphotogenic grilled cheese sandwiches. Once again thank you so much, Chema and Nassim :)
!


I also took the ferry to France, to Evian-les-Bains. Yup, that's the place where the overpriced fancy bottled water comes from. What looks a bit like a part of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory here is actually part of their headquarters.



I just had to take a picture of this bus stop - clearly French people over-estimate the awesomeness of their public transport :)



To be honest, the French speaking part of Switzerland is not exactly vegan friendly. While there are plenty of local products, the cuisine and snacks available are heavy on meat and especially dairy products, and there are no vegetarian restaurants in the area at all.

The German-speaking bit seems a lot better vegan-wise, but it did not manage to touch me in the way the Francophone part did. Anyway, stay tuned for the next post about vegan places in Zürich :)