The stowaway attempt was, unfortunately, detected and thwarted.

Rainy Morning in Paso Robles

Mark and I were driving to work on Friday and noticed the double rainbow shown here. It's a pretty magical time of year; the ground cover starting to grow bright green, pruning taking the fuzzy look off the vines. Everyone here is glad for the rain. It hailed here this afternoon--ending just as fast as it came. The picture below is how it looked just after the rain.

Europe - The Little Things

Here is a list of small things that I noticed during the month spent in Switzerland/France/Italy:

• Alcohol has little or no taboo. Ex #1. At the Italian university, which is run by the Catholic Church, there is wine on tap in the cafeteria. Ex #2. At the Changins campus, the vending machine sells Heinekens.


• After your football (soccer) team wins a match (game), you are allowed to honk your car horn for an hour, but after that it is illegal.


• Eggs and milk are not refrigerated in the supermarket.


• Everyone eats French fries, or pomme frittes. Everywhere. To an alarming extent.


• Horse meat is actually quite tasty when cooked properly. Not sure how I feel about this one, but I'll roll with it for now.


• You can bring your dog on public transporation, but you have to buy them a half fare ticket, as if it were your child.


• Ordering a latte at a coffee shop gets you a curious look and a cup of steamed milk.


• Scooters in Switzerland are very quiet, but extremely loud in Italy (4 stroke vs. 2 stroke).


• Bus drivers can get a big bus through almost any small, medieval city, unless the road construction guy gives you the thumbs down when your round the corner.


• Everything in the super market comes in little tiny packages.
• In restaurants, a beer is usually cheaper than a Coke.
• In restaurants, its nearly impossible to get a glass of tap water, and the beer is still cheaper.
• There are a lot of really expensive cars in Switzerland: Ferrari Enzo, Porsche Carrera GT, and Bugatti Veyron were all seen within one mile of eachother, and there was a Lamborghini used as a daily driver that we frequently saw in Ouchy.

Fresno State Wine & Society students, with Swiss organizers

The Kaigas' with Mr. Sebastien Fabre

Bastille Day

Monday 7.14.2008

Today is Bastille Day in France, a major holiday that celebrates the beginning of the overthrow of the French monarchy. We had three lectures in the morning session:

André Lehman from Solutech, who displayed a machine that charts the progress of a fermentation by differential air pressure through tubes of different lengths. Pretty interesting, but they are coming out with an improved model soon.

Mark Welch from Cal Poly gave a talk on sustainable winegrowing in California. He also talked about IPM (Integrated Pest Managment) in California. This takes into account the life cycles of the pests, and coordinates the treatment plans accordingly.

Ken Fugelsang from Fresno State then gave a really good talk on Brettanomyces, an organism that lives in barrels and wine (after fermentation). Brett was isolated originally from British beer, a fact that our Dr. Thornton failed to mention.

We then went to Ouchy, where we got on a boat and headed to Evian, France. Yes, the home of the water. We can honestly say we've seen & tasted water from the source of Evian water!

The setting sun was absolutely beautiful this night.The Evian sprin, where people were filling up lots of water bottles.

There were a lot of booths set up along the waterfront, and we enjoyed some really good kabobs. They sell fireworks, and Pierre bought the largest firecracker I have ever seen. There was a nice fireworks show that night, and we caught the boat back across the lake to Ouchy and caugth the last bus home. Great night.

Mark shooting bottle rocket - action shot Big fireworks show

A Day in mARTigny

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Mark and I decide to take a trip to both Neuchatel and Martigny today. We chose Neuchatel because of its proximity to a lake and the fact that you got to ride the "tipping" train there; we selected Martigny because it seemed appealing as an artsy town. We wanted to go to the art gallery that had a large sculpture garden and in particular, a Nikki de St. Phalle sculpture.

As luck would have it (as well as a little bad timing) we missed the train to Neuchatel by about 2 minutes. So we went to Martigny first instead. We were still flying from the excitement of our day yesterday and were hoping to have as much fun. At the train station we took a few minutes to get our bearings and then set off for the museum. Immediately it became clear that the museum would be easy to find--we found fliers/posters for it everywhere! To see their website, check out: http://www.gianadda.ch/wq_pages/en/expositions/

Mark and I perused the exhibits-we weren't too fond of the paintings by Balthus, but we enjoyed the da Vinci exhibits and the sculpture garden--sadly only one Nikki de St. Phalle, but I've included pictures!

After leaving the Gianadda museum, we went to visit the St. Bernard museum. Todd would have enjoyed this museum--you got to pet the dogs! They had at least 6-8 at the museum, and started taking them for walks as we were leaving.

The rest of our afternoon was okay--we took a walk out to the castle--not all the way, but part of the way. Then we paid $4 Swiss francs to take a bus tour of the city--not our favorite part of the trip--but we ended on a positive note, had a great lunch and headed back to the train station to head out to Neuchatel.Mark enjoyed the tipping train! We didn't end up having dinner in Neuchatel--it was just too rainy, but we did purchase some beautiful cheeses and meats with fresh bread to have a nice dinner in our room while we did laundry. Quiet Sunday night:)