Reunited and it feels so Good!

Raclette to welcome us

As I said a few days ago, being away has made me more than I ever expected to appreciate my family.  My husband is a super star for taking care of four kids without one complaint and my daughters are totally my favorite people. I love their smiles, their personalities, their goofy selves.  So, it was about the best thing today to see their smiling faces and run to them in Zurich, hold them all, kiss Jeff again and again, and cry with joy.

Jeff and three of my girls on the train to Zurich Hauptbahnhof

Now, there is also the possibility that I was crying with joy for other reasons on top of seeing my family.  Number one:  the Zurich airport when you walk out of the gate area into the shop area smells like chocolate.  Chocolate smells better than just about any smell I ever smelled in Israel (sorry people at the yummy bagel shop on Ben Yaruda).  Germany smelled fine, but not chocolatey, so if I were to totally go on chocolatey smells, Switzerland has it in the bag.  

Anyway, we are here!  We are together and it is good.  Jeff, the girls and I all landed in Zurich only minutes apart.  Apparently, the girls only slept an hour or two on the flight through Amsterdam, even though Jeff had carefully crafted a plan of getting the girls up yesterday morning at the insane hour of 4am in order to make them so tired they would sleep the whole night on the flight.  It didn't happen, I think they all were too excited, and really, in Hamburg this girl was excited, too, and barely slept last night in anticipation of seeing them all again.    

Our little cafe for lunch in Zurich

The plan was to walk around Zurich, grab some lunch and then take a train around 4 to Appenzell in eastern Switzerland.  We ate lunch in a little place that was recommended in the Rick Steve's guide and it was good.  We dove right into Swiss style eating with roesti, sausages, raclette and bread for lunch.  Totally great.  The girls and Jeff at this point were not zombies, so we decided to walk some more after lunch and peeked into the Frauenkirche which was beautiful and then rambled our way up the streets of Zurich back to the main train station, looking in all the windows of the upper end shops and taking all the picturesque architecture in.  It really feels (sadly) like you are in Epcot but it is for real!  

We made it back to the train station after a pit stop at a chocolate shop (of course) and a cool toy store that had a slide that went from the main floor all the way down to the lower level.  That was a highlight.

We hopped back on the train and made our way to Appenzell with a transfer at the Gossau station and had no problems at all thanks to the Deutsche Bahn app for my cell phone.  We are now in Appenzell, have walked around this cute town, got a delicious dinner at a little empty restaurant that didn't look promising at all, but was great.  When we got there they even had to turn on the lights for us, that's how empty it was, and because we were breaking my personal law about eating only in crowded restaurants I really thought it would be awful.  But, we had just about the best appenzeller cheese macaroni and cheese and dried beef (sounds yucky, but we all loved it), and a vegetable platter that had so many good things on it that I have been craving.  

Dried beef and gerhkins. awesome appenzeller chese

Anyway, you'd think I only care about food, but what I really meant to say this whole post was that life is good, my family is awesome and being on this long journey makes me appreciate not only my family, but the fact that we are all really just the same the world around, we all long to know peace and to possess hope.  That is what I've learned.