Monthly Archives: March 2015

Food

Tribest Personal Blender Review

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In another effort to get more protein, fruit, vitamins and more in my diet at breakfast, I was keen on buying a personal blender in January. I debated between the Nutribullet and what I now know is the Tribest Personal Blender.

I say “now know” because at the time, the blender’s manufacturer on the Personal Blender’s pages was listed as Vitamix, which is a little wonky and they have since changed it and added a link pointing to a Tribest page. Seeing as Kunzvital printed their own user manual with Kunzvital branding on a folded A4 paper, I think they were trying to market the Tribest blender as their own creation, which it is not. It ships in a box with Tribest labeling for heaven’s sake.

(Tribest blender re-branded by Kunzvital)

I was a little annoyed that the same blender is available for $89.95 on Amazon with a US plug, while I had to pay 165CHF ($171) to get it. It’s a big, fat, Swiss markup.

I have mixed feelings about how it works, but I like the blender alright. Sometimes I feel like it does a great job of blending and other times I really feel like I am eating my smoothie, which is not cool when it’s spinach leaves or nuts. Last week I was on a date kick and the blender just whirled the dates around the whole time, knocking into the blades, but not breaking down at all.

The blender also advertises that it cuts up ice, but if you stick only ice in here… one cube for example, it does not do well with either the grinding or the mixing blade. But if you put an ice cube in the mix with your spinach, fruit, juice or water and more, it does fine and grinds up well.

In the end, I’m still happy I bought this for now, because my other option was spending over 1000CHF for a Vitamix, which are also a lot more expensive in Switzerland than the US. Maybe I will still get one one day, but I do really like the convenience of washing and using single-use mixing cups for work every morning. I think the Vitamix would be annoying to clean every day. Who knows!

Do you have a special blender for breakfast smoothies?

Health

One Year Gym-iversary

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It’s hard to believe that one year ago I was heading to my first spinning class as I started my weekly morning gym routine. I honestly never thought that I could be a morning person, let alone a person who gets up early to work out. That was just not “me”.

(Sunrise in Zurich)

Now here I am on the other side of a whole year of waking up at 6:05-6:15am to get to the gym for 45minutes to an hour of exercise before showering and heading to work. I’m not going to say it was easy to do it everyday, but deciding to work exercising into my schedule with no excuse but to go every morning turned it from a question to a part of life.

It changed my lifestyle: When my muscles started slowly growing, I became excited to go to the gym and “work” on my goals. I also stopped staying out past midnight during the week not only because the trains stop running, but because I’d be feeling it at the gym the next day.Exercising every day forces me to prioritise sleep. I need my sleep if I’m going to do anything productive at the gym and it’s too depressing and painful to be at the gym while I’m tired, knowing that I don’t have enough energy to do much. I also won’t allow myself to slag off the gym if I had a late night because Kay will be getting up then anyway, so off I go. No excuses!

People told me it was too much, but for me, it feels just right. Because working out is a part of every workday, I cannot decide whether or not it’s worth skipping some days or not. An everyday schedule also gives me the opportunity to have a balanced mix of cardio and strength training with cycling, running, machines, lifting weights and stretching.

Also, I’m not going to lie, a year of solid gym work definitely makes a difference in body toning. Like… I have some muscles now. When we went to Australia, Kay pointed out that some lady was checking out my arms while we were waiting in immigration in Zurich. People at work notice them. They aren’t nonexistent anymore! 🙂

I’m looking forward to seeing how my body develops in the next year, from stretching to cardio and strength, it is definitely making changes slowly, but surely! And moreover, I feel like working out is improving my overall health.

Running for the train is a breeze and for the first time on our trip in Australia, I was keeping up with Kay on a moderate incline and he commented how he was impressed because usually he’s miles ahead of me. Even when we went cycling together, Kay felt like he noticed a difference in “new Katie” vs “old Katie”. Old Katie would have gotten off her bike and walked up certain hills. New Katie pushes through. 😉

Do you work out regularly? What’s your biggest motivation to get out there and do it?

Switzerland

Eingebürgert… Finally Swiss!

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Forgot to mention this little detail, but I’m finally Swiss!!

December 2014:

After receiving my 765CHF letter in October stating that there was a positive decision, I needed to wait for all the final formalities where the Heimatort is given one last right to object. In the craziness leading up to our Australia trip, I received the official letter from the Heimatort confirming and congratulating me that I am now Swiss.

It was a little anticlimactic though, because although I was now Swiss, I didn’t know what the next steps were to get that little booklet up there. I thought there would be some sort of “How to” leaflet included. Not knowing what to do, I figured I would sort it out after our Australia trip. Anyway, my B-permit was still valid until August 2015, so no problems there… or so I thought.

When we got to passport control on the way out of Switzerland, my permit wouldn’t scan. I wondered out loud that maybe it has something to do with my naturalization. The lady asked where I was naturalized, because with my American passport and Swiss foreign permit in hand, it wasn’t really clear to her that I was talking about Swiss naturalization. I think she just assumed I am a foreigner with little to no right to be in Switzerland and was about to give me a telling-off.

Of course when I told her I am Swiss, she wanted to know where my Swiss passport was and I had to explain that I JUST became Swiss a week or so previously and wasn’t even sure it was totally finalized. Maybe the Heimatort is busy updating the town hall before I could apply for my passport?

They let me leave, but it was clear that my foreign permit was no longer valid because I was Swiss (why doesn’t it say that on their control screens??) so I was traveling without valid Swiss residence identification. Woohoo.

When we returned, I had to play the game again and they were a little more suspicious about letting me back into the country. They asked where is my letter confirming my citizenship and I told them that I didn’t think I had to bring that because my foreign permit was valid until August 2015,  and nobody explained that it would automatically terminate!

We arrived home on a Monday morning and headed straight to work. In the evening at home, I realized that the town hall had been informed about the final decision and they did send me a helpful little leaflet about how to get the passport. The kicker was that they said they don’t have anything to do with it and I could have done it all on my own in December if I had known the steps!

On Tuesday I made an appointment to go to the Travel Office. The appointment slots fill up very quickly in the evening, but I managed to get one for the next day on Wednesday and after a 15 minute stop in the morning, I was done. By Friday morning, I received my shiny new passport in the post and the following Monday, a week after arriving home, I already had the Swiss identification card as well. How is that for efficiency??

We’re a bit late, but Kay and I are throwing a party this week to celebrate my citizenship. We don’t have parties that often, but this definitely seems worth celebrating!

Missed something?

Food, Travel

Gluten-free Beijing

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Surprisingly (thankfully!), I did not get sick in Beijing. I was pretty scared that I would accidentally ingest some gluten due to the language barrier, but the Chinese note I had was SUCH A help!

We stopped at our first restaurant on the way to Forbidden City on the first day. It was a small, relatively local, if not dirty, restaurant where locals smoked inside seated at sticky tables. I ordered a simple stir fry and after handing my note to the waitress, she motioned if she could show it to the chef. They prepared my stir fry and rice with cooking oil instead of soy sauce and left the salt off, because often salt or MSG could contain traces of wheat in China  and it’s better to be safe than sorry. It was a little bland, but I was fine afterward.

Every morning we at breakfast in the French hotel chain Novotel where we stayed. The breakfast was relatively expensive, but expansive, with many gluten-free options from fresh fruit, yogurt, dried fruit, deli meat and tapas to fresh omelettes.

Since we couldn’t really find any gluten-free restaurants, we had to wing it with my note. We decided that hot pot would be a pretty easy meal to eat gluten-free, so we went for that the first evening.

The waitress did a double take when I handed her my note that basically said my insides will bleed if they feed me ANYTHING with gluten. She also wanted to take the note to the chef. It was so helpful that I had it printed on a piece of paper that people could take into kitchens.

When our hot pot arrived, it was basically just water. No bouillon or broth because everything they had would have been unsafe for me. It was a little bland at first, but as the meat cooked in the water, the flavors started tasting better. Still, it was a very low-sodium meal.

I was really intrigued by hot pot. The Swiss have adapted something really similar called Fondue Chinoise, which is basically “Chinese Fondue” and it’s boiling broth in a fondue-type pot where you can cook little pieces of meat and eat them with different sauces.

It’s a typical Swiss meal at Christmas, so it was funny to have it in China, the source of the idea! Below were the different items we put in ours: Green onions, onions, greens and meat!

The second and last night in Beijing, Kay wanted to try to get Korean BBQ because he had had it in Seoul and thought it was great.  When we arrived, they seated us and placed scores of little dishes at the table with various foods like kimchi, greens, onions, breads and sauces. Kay explained that you cook the meat on this hot grill and then eat it with all the little dishes.

The problem was that once we gave my note to the waitress and they discussed it with the kitchen, they came back and took away ALL of the little dishes. They brought back two bowls with romaine lettuce and plain salt.

No one at the Korean restaurant could speak any English, so we couldn’t really explain ourselves. They didn’t even trust us to cook our own meat, so a waitress stood there and grilled our meat for us while we ate it with the lettuce and salt. We left a little hungry.

I wanted to get bubble tea to make up for it, but our waitress was outside the restaurant at the bubble tea stand and I wasn’t sure if she was warning the bubble tea worker, but the stand was mysteriously closed for us, even though we’d gotten bubble tea from the same stand the night before.

Our flight from Beijing to Sydney with Air China was relatively uneventful, but they did manage to lose my gluten-free order so I had my first experience on a long-haul flight without a meal option.

Luckily I could still eat the salad without sauce and the fruit and my gluten-free snacks that I have brought with me for this very reason. Kay also gave me his fruit to have a little more food and I was all right without anything for breakfast besides my snacks.