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Published: June 25th 2013
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Flawil chocolate factory
Those chocolate bananas were superb! Raining again so we need to be creative with our activities.
We went out of town to Flawil the Maestrami/Munz Chocolate Factory to see the favourite eats of the Swiss being made. Who would have thought that so many chocolates could be turned out in one minute – one per second it seemed. Who eats so many chocolates? Most Swiss it would seem. We came away with a nice little stash of chocolates to last for some time including a Swiss Army Knife chocolate to present to Neil and Karilyn on their arrival in the morning. “Welcome to Swizerland Herr and Fraulein Froude. Please accept this wonderful gift from TTAT’s tours on your arrival”. The chocolate is wrapped to look like the real thing. An interesting way to spend an hour or so.
We drove back to St Gallen to the Sitter River valley close by to Abtwil where they are drilling for water. It was every bit like an oil drilling rig except they were drilling for hot water at 4000m. If they are successful the water will drive turbines and also get circulated to the townspeople for house heating. There is the likelihood that the controversial “fraccing” will be used but the people have voted to go ahead.
Proceeding on to St Gallen we bought our ½ Fare Swiss Tickets for the rest of the time in Switzerland as well as a ticket to Zurich and return to meet the Froudes in the morning. We then located the Textile Museum to take (mainly) Karilyn to tomorrow and then went on to the Parliament for the St Gallen Canton where we took seats in the public area and watched the speeches from the various parties discussing cutting costs ($150M) from their budget. Not that we could understand very much because it was all in Swiss German. However it was interesting to see the democratic process in this country where everything is achieved by the vote of the people. The Parliament resides in a previous monastery attached to the Cathedral and consists of 120 representatives of various parties from within districts of the Canton. It seemed a lot of people for one Canton when we complain about the same number for our whole country.
After a walk through the Old Town along part of the remaining town wall, we went up the hill to the University which Bruno is so proud of. We visited the various very modern and spacious building and learnt about the education system in Switzerland.
We duly arrived back at the house when we struggled to learn (all in French) how to set the NavSat system in the car to have the best route through to Gersau for tomorrow. What a mission. But we eventually sorted it out with a bit of perseverence. An English car book would have been nice…..
We had a dinner of raclette cheese and many accompanying dishes such as mushrooms, bacon, pineapple, banana, tomatoes, baby corn, and boiled potatoes. The cheese and whatever you want to cook with it is baked on a cooker on the table and eaten with the potatoes. It is a convivial way to spend a long time over a meal chatting and laughing about life. Add strawberries and schnapps to that (yum!), plus wine, tea and chocolate, and you have a fairly interesting dinner.
So, up in the morning very early (5.45am) to get the train to Zurich.
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