The club sandwich to end all club sandwiches

Here's the saga of the sandwich. Our office is in a building that also houses an Italian restaurant. (It also houses a BMW repair shop, but that's another story.) Last week, one of the administrative folks in the office sent out a message saying that the restaurant was offering a club sandwich this week. This was odd because we don't usually get messages about what the restaurant is offering. No one else in the office seemed to know anything about the club sandwich. I couldn't pass it up. Today, I ordered the club sandwich to go just to find out what it was all about.

I still occasionally get sticker shock here in Switzerland, and I experienced it when I got the bill for the sandwich: 17 Swiss francs, about 15 dollars. This had better be a heck of a sandwich, I thought to myself. And then the plate came, and oh, what a sandwich. Between the two slices of bread were grilled chicken and a third slice of bread, sauce, lettuce, and tomatoes. Several strips of bacon had been placed on top of the sandwich. There were sausages on top of the bacon, and then tomatoes on top of the sausages. There were steak fries (or chips or whatever we should call them) on the side. I could have fed two or three people with this sandwich.

Here's the picture.

It beats 81 hours of driving

I booked my Norway flights over the weekend. I'll be going in early July. I'll first fly to Oslo and hang out for a couple of days. I'll then fly to Tromso, which is north of the Arctic Circle. ("Only 2000 kilometers from North Pole!" the Tromso website tells me breathlessly. Since Las Vegas is about 2000 kilometers away from the Twin Cities, I'm finding it hard to get that excited about the proximity.) I'll then fly back to Zurich. If I were to drive those distances, it would take me a total of 81 hours in the car.

I'm excited. In Tromso, I'm going to run out of my hotel at 2 a.m. to see the sun above the horizon.

Not too bad

Take this for what it's worth, but according to the annual Worldwide Quality of Living Survey, Zurich is the second-best place to live in the world. (Vienna took first place by a whisker.) Here are some funny quotes from the report:

"The Swiss cities are very pleasant, the natural environment is clean, and we weigh heavily the presence of hostilities, and Switzerland is neutral. . . . . If you can't be safe in Switzerland, you can't be safe anywhere."

Also, "There's probably a little bit more to do in Austria than in Switzerland." Ouch.

Math stories

We were in the car on the way back from church on Sunday, and Lindsey made up her own math problem. Here it is, as close to her own words as I can remember:

There are two people biking around a lake. There's a shark in the lake. The shark eats the two people. How many people are left?

(Answer: zero. I suspected at first that it was some sort of a trick question, but it's actually pretty straightforward. And we didn't really get into a discussion of how a shark got into a freshwater lake, nor did we discuss how this freshwater shark managed to eat two people on bikes.)

Back from Germany

It was a quick trip, but fun. The Passion Play is quite an experience. There were points where it was obvious that it was not a professional Broadway production, but it's an amazing bit of work for a village of 4,000 people. And I'd forgotten how beautiful that part of Germany (known as "Bavaria") is. It was also fun to catch up with Stuart.

I took a few pictures that didn't turn out great, but here are a couple. (You can't take pictures during the show, so all I have is the stage.)

More info about the Passion Play here.

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Off to Oberammergau

Tomorrow morning, I'm off for a quick trip to the small German village of Oberammergau to see the Passion Play. This is a play that the village puts on every ten years as a result of a promise the villagers made to God back in the 1600s that they'd do a Passion Play every ten years if they were spared from the plague. Of course, I imagine that it's now more of a tourist thing than a religious experience, but I'm looking forward to it.

It's about a four-hour drive across part of Austria. I don't actually get very far into Germany (so I don't get to go nuts on the German autobahn, darn it). I'll be meeting my friend Stuart, who's doing his annual teaching gig in the Netherlands right now. The package includes lunch on Friday at our hotel, then the first half of the play in the afternoon, then dinner at a hotel in town, then the second half of the play Friday night, and then breakfast Saturday morning. Like everything else around here, it's not cheap, but as I tell people, it's not very often that I find myself living in Europe in a year that's divisible by ten, so I have to take advantage of the opportunity.

Don't be such a tightwad

Everything went fine with the presentation yesterday. It was quite an ordeal. I stayed up late Tuesday night getting ready, got up Wednesday morning and went to my seminar, left my seminar after an hour, rode the Tube (subway) to the expensive shopping district and bought a tie (thanks for the new tie, Thomson Reuters!), rode the Tube to the other side of London, gave my presentation, rode the Tube back to my seminar, stayed out late at the dinner they had for the attendees last night, and then collapsed.

My valuable lesson was this: sometimes, fork over the cash. My boss told me to take a cab if I felt I needed to, but it was an easy Tube ride from the seminar to the presentation. There were no transfers required, and it was just a short walk to and from the station on both ends of the trip. The price difference was $10 versus about $100. Why not save the company some money, right? So I just took the Tube.

I got there on time with no trouble. On the way back, though, there was a problem at one of the stations, so we were stuck on on the Tube for about fifteen minutes without being able to exit. There's no cell phone signal down there. If that had occurred on my way to the presentation, I would have been late to the presentation and stuck underground with no way to tell anyone what was going on. The lesson for me is that next time I have an important presentation, I'll spend the extra money to make darned sure I show up when I'm supposed to. No harm done, but it could have been scary.