It rained last night, with snow not far above the village, and today it’s cold. I popped up to the Co-op this morning for bread, and this afternoon Val’s new phone arrived. Apparently it draws a map of her face instead of the usual fingerprint for security.
Getting that set up will doubtless take the rest of the day.
The restaurant at Allmend opens at weekends if the weather’s nice, so we head off up the hill. It’s quite a stiff walk.
Half of the village had the same idea.
The walk was well worth it, we had delicious pumpkin soup. Apparently this is the last fine day for a bit, so it was nice to be out in the sunshine.
Val had a marathon German session this morning, and while she was doing that a locksmith was hard at work. 5 new keys for us, 3 for Colin and 1 for the caretaker.
Up in the village it’s a busy Saturday, with lots of visitors enjoying the fine weather. Our cable car is closed for maintenance at the moment, and a big new TV showing which ski lifts are open has appeared outside.
It’s Saturday, so pub later perhaps.
The lovely weather continues, and this afternoon we had a walk down to the little hamlet of Wengwald. It’s very picturesque.
Beyond Wengwald is a viewpoint called Mönchblick, which literally means ‘view of the Mönch’. It’s a bit of a climb, but a bench awaits us.
And here’s the view.
The Mönch is the peak peeping out on the left. At 13,480 feet it is the second highest of our local mountains. The Jungfrau, on the right, is slightly higher at 13,642 feet.
We walked back up to the village to find Colin hard at work painting the outside of Central Sport. A nice afternoon in the sunshine.
This morning Val had her German class, and I popped up to the village to get shopping and go to the post office. After lunch we’re off down to the council office in Lauterbrunnen again. This time we’re sorting out our national insurance. Val already has an NI number because she works, but we both need to provide more information so that the authorities can calculate how much we have to pay. This is exactly the same financial stuff that we already provided for our residence permits, but we’ve learned by now that government departments here never share information with each other. Swiss bureaucracy can be maddening, but we have all the time in the world, and we’ll get there in the end.
The council have been busy putting marker posts along the paths. Around 50 kilometres of hiking trails are kept open through the winter, so there must be thousands of these posts.
Ali spent yesterday afternoon baking, and Colin has brought some pork pies from the U.K. So yesterday we had a delicious dinner.
Colin’s flat downstairs used to sleep a family of six, so there are two sets of bunk beds in the bedroom. Getting rid of one of them will free up a lot of space.
We’ll have the mattresses to replace the somewhat tired ones in one of our guest bedrooms. James and Julie will have the frame for the holiday apartment beneath their house. It was a lot of hard work, but apart from our old mattresses which will be collected by the council tomorrow, everything has been re-used.
The fine weather continues. We went shopping this morning, and then straight out for our walk.
The village is getting ready for winter. The ski lift has been installed on the nursery slope, and there are snow cannons everywhere.
Our house.
Ali has spent the afternoon baking, so dinner should be delicious!
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