Spitting Image

Marimekko Unikko (Marimekko Poppy)

My coffee this morning after adding crappy budget sweetener that doesn't
 a)dissolve b)sweeten

Meatball Mayhem

To cheer up my tired husband I decided to cook some simple comfort food. As the day had been dark and rainy, I felt like comfort food, too.

I hadn't done meatballs for some time now so I thought... Let's make some Mafia Meatballs!

Meatballs themselves had nothing too extravagant in them, bread that was dissolved in hot milk, herbs, grated parmesan cheese, eggs, salt, pepper etc. 

After the mixture was roughly combined, it was time to shape the balls and coat them with flour. Please note that the balls began to get bigger and bigger as my patience wore thinner and thinner. Goddamn balls. 

I sent my husband a picture what was going to be the dinner. The little boy He was very excited, clearly comfort food was very high on his list.

Next, I quickly browned the meatballs in a large skillet and then drowned them in tomato sauce that had been simmering away for a couple of hours already. 

As the balls were pretty big, I then let them happily swim for half an hour or so while I prepared the pasta.

I then served the Mafia Meatballs (my father-in-law calls me  lovingly as "Mafiosa", hence the Mafia Meatballs) with pasta and more parmesan cheese. You should've seen the huge grin on my little boy's husband's face. It was literally from ear to ear.

To top it all off, I toasted a slice of my no-knead-wholegrain-bread (I make it a couple of times every week).

Conclusion: Operation "Cheering up people with comfort food" was a great success. However, as the dinner was pretty lardy, today I think I have to survive on lettuce. 

Only kiddin' peeps, round is a shape, too! There are 16 more meatballs to go, I think I know what my mission tonight is. Stretchy pants, get ready!

Location, location, location....

There is one novelty thing I never seem to get used to while living here in the continental Europe:
all the other countries are so damn near. 

I've always lived in quite excluded/logistically challenged countries and it always took some effort (read: blood, sweat and tears) to travel from/back to.

When I was a kid back in the days when travelling was still considered as quite a luxury (80s and early 90s), my parents would pack us 3 kids & camping gear and we'd either take the ferry to Germany or we'd drive through Sweden to reach the continental Europe.

While all the others retrieved to their cottages for the holidays, we'd spend our summers on the road. Driving all over the (Western) Europe by car, sleeping at the camping sites. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, UK....You name it. I literally grew up in the backseat of our family car watching the blurry, ever changing landscape through the window. We were like travellers, restless, always needing to be on the move. It was the time before navigators, Tom-Toms and such. It was just us, the car and the Michelin map of Europe. We only knew the day we'd have to go back home but everything before that was organic. We went where the wind blew us (as long as there was a camping site nearby).

When we started growing up, my parents ditched the tents and we began staying at Guest Houses, B&Bs and hostels. As we grew even more (both horizontally and vertically) the next logical step was staying at hotels. When we reached that point, though, it was simply cheaper to start flying to places. Road trips became a thing of the past. We discovered the convenience of air travelling. And solo travelling (which I began at the tender age of 15).

Flying was never that cheap and it always still took some time to reach the destination, however. It was still "somewhere there" far far away. Continental Europe back then was what China is today.

And things never really changed when I left Finland. When I lived in UK, it was a damn island. And Australia was far from...Well... Absolutely everything.

Where am I going with this? What does this all have to do with Switzerland?

Now knowing my history a little, try to imagine my feelings when my husband tells me that he's off to France for training. The training takes 3 days in total.

My heart automatically sank, of course. France... The country of baguette, red wine and garlic. Au revoir mon amour, send me a postcard...

It's only when my husband continues "so, it's closer to home than the office I go every day so I'll be home for dinner earlier than usual" I realise....

Effin' hell....

Everything is so.....damn.....CLOSE.

Day Trippin'

After finishing the morning sport session, my husband and I decided to venture to Vevey. Weather was good, Vevey is near and there would be retro cars on a display for free. Hey-ho, let's go!

It's the first time I actually went to Vevey instead of only passing through. What makes my dirty confession even more shameful is the fact that my childhood idol Charlie Chaplin used to live there for decades and yet, I had never visited the place. So close, yet so far away....10 minutes by train can sometimes be a lifetime away.

It was a hot and humid day, there were many storm fronts circling us but like most of the times, we never got the actual storm/thunder/rain, just the sticky promise of it. Grrrrr....
Unlike at the Geneva Car show, this time I heard no Finnish spoken. Usually those two go together. Oh well!

My husband loves the "vrooom vrooms", like most of red blooded men (I've noticed), and he was like a little kid in a candy shop seeing cars like Morgan while there were some quirky ones for me, as well.

Morgan

BMW

Messerschmitt KR200

Can you tell I don't drive....? What tipped you off? Messerschmitt KR200? Are you CRAZY? Who WOULDN'T want one???

Anyways, after we got enough of the retro car display (well, after I got enough of the display) it was time to take a little walk around Vevey, eat some ice cream and enjoy the hot weather.

What a beautiful place it turned out to be! Definitely have to come back very soon.

And there we have it. Yet another pearl discovered from our neighbourhood and another super Sunday spent. 

One size doesn't always fit all.

Whereas my husband stood out in my home country, here I am the one who is "exotic".

Not because of my fair hair/skin or anything but mainly because of my height and shape. Here I could be considered as a (hopefully handsome) tall man. When my husband first saw me back in the day, his first thought was "Wow, two meter tall babies, here we go!". That's a true story, by the way. Who said romance was dead, sigh. Luckily, I didn't learn about this until after many years of being together.

Not only am I hovering in my own stratosphere but I'm also not the classical "junk in the trunk" pear shape, I'm rather an "egg on sticks" or "giraffe on roller skates" apple shape. My (unfortunate?) height doesn't come from my back but from my limbs.
And being this tall means also that my shoes are considered as canoes. Some locals could use them to paddle across the lake to France.

I usually haven't paid attention to my height or shape but here I feel it each time I'm trying to find clothes and/or shoes. If the trousers are long enough, they're for someone with more....uhm..."girth" than me. All fashionable skirts and dresses become mini skirts and cocktail dresses when I put them on. Shoes? Oh please. I might find a pair but rarely are they the pretty ones.

I'm not suffering alone as my husband's tall as well but there is far more choice for a tall man than there is for a tall woman. And I refuse to buy from any special shop as I don't consider myself to be a damn giant! I would be a shortie in The Netherlands, for example.

I think I have to visit home with an empty luggage and go on a shopping spree there before I freeze my boney ass here.

The giant has spoken.

Random |ˈrandəm|

I like randomness.

But I never expected to see an antique looking hot air balloon from our kitchen window.

At 7AM.

On a Sunday morning.

That, my friends, is a perfect example of randomness.

Just when I thought I had seen it all, this country surprises me.

I have been "Switzerlanded"

Like every fortnight, I ordered our groceries online. We've done this for over a year as we noticed it cuts our costs significantly. It's not 100% perfect but what is.

• Sometimes items are missing. No problem, those can be easily compensated. Insert smiley face here.
• Sometimes items are broken. No problem, those can be easily compensated. Insert smiley face here.
• Sometimes an item is not in stock. No problem, you either choose to replace the item with something else or the item's price is reduced from the bill. Insert smiley face here.
• Sometimes you place an order, get the delivery and notice some items have not been delivered. You check the list you submitted into the online ordering system but then they simply vanish from the order confirmation/delivery. Insert a pout here.

Ah. We have a problem, Houston. Ordered items seem to have disappeared. Vanished. Like they never existed, let alone ordered. Poooooof. Magic.

Yesterday it happened again. I usually do not care so much because I can always pop to the supermarket and purchase the missing item (as it has "vanished" from the order, it hasn't been included in the bill). But this time, the item was nearly 40L of water and my only reason for ordering it was not having to carry that load myself. But the water never came. I saw online I had ordered it but it had disappeared from the confirmation. No notification of items being out of stock, no nothing. Interesting.

As an old customer service specialist (back in the day, long long ago, before electricity), I thought I'd inform them that they might have some online glitch which makes some items disappear from the order. I composed a rather dry, neutral e-mail to the customer service, explaining what had happened and asked if they had any idea why this order went how it went.

Promptly, I received a reply which pretty much said: "Ordered item was out of stock, you must have missed the information about it on your computer screen. What you order is not relevant, only confirmation counts. Thank you for your understanding, blah blah blah".

I see. I am dumb. A bimbo. I don't know how to order stuff. Hell, I can't even walk and chew chewing gum at the same time.  I was in the wrong. Sorry. You're correct. Silly for me to question your holy system.

As a thumb rule... You never accuse a paying customer being in the fault/too dumb/being ignorant. You say "oh, I'll put this to our IT team to look into", "it was the scary monster under our bed that did it", "it was the Martians". Anything but the customer. Do. Not. Blame. The. Customer. Because when you turn it to be the customer's fault, you can be sure that you'll now get Mrs. Marvelous pretty angry.

So I e-mailed again. This time not so neutrally.

Yes I have been ordering around 27 times a year so I know how things work. In the same order another item was out of stock, it notified about it and we replaced the item with another one. Also, if the item has been out of stock but the order went through without notification of it, we've received a text message before delivery that the item will not be delivered. All this is ok.
But what is not acceptable is items vanishing into thin air without notifying the customer. As we placed the order and the system didn't alert that the water was out of stock (come on, it's a friggin' pop up with big red letters, only missing a klaxon sound) we couldn't replace it with another brand. If Mrs. Marvelous doesn't get a notification, she thinks everything's fine and dandy like cotton candy at Disney Land and is expecting the item to be delivered. Which didn't happen. Which is why I contacted the customer service in the first place.

And their reply was....

....It was.....

Yohhooooo....?

....Anyone there....ere....re....? *echo echo echo*

Indeed. I forgot customer service here works differently.

I have been Switzerlanded.