Yummy Yummy Day

Friday May 27^th

Yesterday we stopped at the train station to try to book passage on a specialty trip called “The Chocolate Train”.  On this trip you take the train to Gruyeres up in the mountains above Lake Geneva and tour a cheese factory, then transfer to a bus to go to a neighboring village to tour a chocolate factory, and then come home. It was pretty pricey, but we thought it might be fun.  However, too bad for us it was sold out.  We thought about what we should do instead, and since when we got up this morning it was grey and rainy it wasn’t a good day for the lake.  So we decided to see if we could at least get ourselves to Gruyeres on the train to tour the cheese factory. 

It turned out to be pretty easy – we went on a train to a nearby town about 15 minutes away and transferred there to a small trolley that went up through alpine meadows and many small regional villages before stopping in Gruyeres.    Katie and I have been trying to read literature that matches with our destinations, and as the small trolley wound itself up the alpine pass we both read Heidi.  How relaxing to see the wildflowers through the windows in the shadow of the Alps as we read about Heidi frolicking with her goats on the slopes of her mountain!

We read Anne Frank’s Diary and the Da Vinci Code in Paris, Swiss Family Robinson in Germany (yes – I know it is Swiss, but the family feels kind of German), Heidi in Switzerland and we plan to read Pinocchio in Italy. If any of you have suggestions on other location appropriate books for us, let me know.

We when arrived in Gruyeres we saw the cheese making house (La Maison Du Gruyere) right outside the train station. Literally 20 steps away.  Pretty convenient for tourists who don’t like to walk!  We decided to go into the town of Gruyeres first since the rest of the trolley was disgorging into la Maison du Gruyere.  The town of Gruyeres is very touristy, but is a nice example of an intact walled city.  You walk about 15 minutes up a nice hiking trail ( covered with snails and slugs to Katie’s delight) from the train station and enter through the wall into the cobblestoned center of town. It is very small as would be common in medieval times, and is fortified by a large castle at one end, which you can tour.  Otherwise, inside the walls are two small museums and a bunch of restaurants and souvenir shops.  Nothing else.  We skipped the museums and the castle, but the museums are odd enough to mention.  One is a museum dedicated to the artist who designed the aliens for the iconic Alien movie.  The other is a museum that displays a collection of Tibetan art.  All in all, both vey odd for the walled cheese making town of Gruyeres.

We decided instead to hike on a small path that circled the castle.  We got some great views of the castle and the Alps. As the path ended, we saw what looked like a set of street signs pointing in all different directions. Upon closer inspection, it was a hiking signpost.  Switzerland is covered in hiking and walking trails and marks them very well.  You could see the way to about 10 different villages with the estimated walking time to each.  I noticed that the town of Broc was on the signpost, with a walking time of one hour. As that is the town with the chocolate factory, I began to think that perhaps we could do both the cheese factory and the chocolate factory, and work in a hike in the Swiss Alps between the villages!

We returned to the town of Gruyeres and went immediately to the TI (Tourist information – there’s one in every town). We spoke with the lady there who confirmed it was easy to walk to Broc and she even printed out an official hiking topographical map for us with the trail marked.  So we now had a great plan – see the cheese making, eat a big lunch and hike to the chocolate factory, then return on the train from Broc instead of Gruyeres.

We went back down to La Maison du Gruyeres and took the cheese making tour.  It was actually kind of disappointing and I was glad we now had additional plans. The entire tour took about 30 minutes and had self guided audio head sets. The premise was that a cow talked you through the cheese making process.  I did learn a lot about how cheese was made, but again, it wasn’t necessarily worth an entire trip to Gruyere just for this.  I liked seeing the cheese cave where the big wheels of cheese are aged for 12 months.  The newer cheese wheels are almost white, while the older ones are a nice deep yellow. It looked like a wine aging room but with racks of cheese wheels instead of wine bottles. Plus a cool robot went up and down the rows filling the big wheels over to improve quality.  We got samples of cheese aged 6, 8 and 10 months. Since we were heading now to lunch, I put the cheese away for later.

We walked back up into the walled town of Gruyeres, and we treated to an incredibly touristy site, but yet we were intrigued.  Two old men and an old women were dressed in traditional costumes and blowing those big horns.  It sounded much prettier than you would expect, but looked just like a Riccola cough drop ad.

We went into a restaurant which served all kinds of cheese food. We had fondue the night before and disappointingly learned that we didn’t really like it.  It starts out good, but tastes weird the longer you eat it.  Of course I wasn’t swirling the cheese properly with my fondue fork and was corrected by our waiter, but still, it was weird.  So for lunch today Katie had cheese pasta with ham. It came with an extra pot of shredded gruyere to put on top, and a small Swiss flag on top of the mountain of shredded cheese.  She said it was excellent.  I had rösti, which is awesome! If you like hash browns, rösti is for you.  This was rösti with cheese, so it was a big warm iron skillet with nice greasy hash browns covered in a thick layer of bubbling gruyere, which was crusty around the edges. Oh so GOOD! Of course it also had a miniature Swiss flag on top. We also had a basket of bread on the table, which we didn’t need, so I put it all in my bag to eat with the cheese from La Maison du Gruyeres for dinner. Katie was embarrassed, but later ate the bread and cheese with relish for her dinner.

After lunch we did a little souvenir shopping, and one of the shops is attached to a restaurant and they make their own Gruyere to sell in the shop and use in the restaurant. Just as we were in the shop it was time to pull the curds out of the whey and we got to see the process.   The curds then get put into a mold and pressed to become the Gruyere.

We then set out with bellies full for Broc.  Unfortunately it had been raining off and on all day, but we had planned for rain and had our rain jackets with us.  With our hoods up to protect against a light drizzle, the hike took us first down the hill from which the castle towered over the valley.  Steps were carved into the hill, and the path was well marked.  We went down into the valley, across an alpine stream on using a covered bridge, and the hugged the side of the mountain as we headed to the next village.  Broc was not far, and the pleasant part of the hike through the woods was over too soon. Once in Broc we got a little turned around and missed the turnoff for the chocolate factory. Unfortunately at this point it started to rain pretty hard.  We paused and got our bearings and then headed down to the chocolate factory in the rain. All told it took about 90 minutes, but felt longer just because the last 15 were miserable.

It was a little disconcerting arriving at the chocolate factory because we had been alone in the woods and Gruyere was not that crowded, but the chocolate factory was PACKED.  There were a lot of big bus tours and people everywhere.  It was the world headquarters of Cailler, which has been making chocolate in Switzerland for 200 years.  The grandson of the founder of Callier teamed up with the founder of Nestle in the 1920s and it has been a Nestle business ever since. 

We signed up for a tour, and waited just about 20 minutes for an English tour. Tours were going off every five minutes in many different languages including German, French, English and Spanish.  We were joined by about 15 other English speakers and set off on the tour. 

It was really quite strange.  We descended in an elevator which opened up into an Aztec temple, like a Disney ride!  We were treated to a history of the development of chocolate beginning with the Aztecs.  The tour went from the Aztecs to the coming of Cortes.  The booming narration informed us that the Aztecs presented Cortes with a Cacao tree and he repaid them by “DESTROYING THE AZTEC EMPIRE”.  Then a door opened and we walked t the next room which was made to make you feel like you were on Cortés’s ship back to Spain loaded with Cacao beans. The tour continued this way, leading us through other high points in the history of chocolate including the Spanish Inquisition, Versailles and the French Revolution, where Marie Antoinette apparently had a glass of hot chocolate as her last meal.  It was VERY ODD and not at all what I had expected.

At the conclusion of the guided tour we had a self-guided tour through the process of making chocolate and saw an actual line in production and received fresh chocolates at the end of the process.  We then went into a tasting room, where they had UNLIMITED TASTING!  Samples of every Callier product were laid out n silver platters and you could work your way around the room trying everything.  I ran out steam mid-way around the room and surreptitiously began putting a sample of each candy into my jacket pocket.

After the tasting room, the tour was over and we headed to the train station to head back home. While we waited for the train to depart a couple from California engaged us in conversation and all I could think was , Please stop talking and look away from me as I need to empty my pockets of this candy before it all melts.  Once I could get it out of my pockets it turned out I had about 15 pieces of chocolate. Katie and I rode home in peace on four different trains – Broc to Bulle, Bulle to Palezieux, Palezieux to Lausanne, and Lausanne to Ouchy. We made all the connections with ease and enjoyed our dinner of cheese samples, fresh bread, and chocolate samples with gusto. We had been able to complete our own chocolate train tour, as well as throw in an alpine hike for half the price and got a free dinner to boot!