Travel

Hong Kong and Premium Economy

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Part of me feels like I have not stopped traveling since October, which you might have noticed if you wonder why things are a little quiet around here.

When Kay and I arrived back to Zurich from Lima, I repacked my bags and spent one night sleeping at home before I headed to the airport on Monday morning to go to Hong Kong  for business. Traveling across three continents overnight put my head in a bit of a spin and I don’t think I’ve fully recovered since then.

Traveling to HK in Premium Economy with Cathay Airlines also sparked a frequent flyer urge. PE almost seems worth the double price tag of economy flights. Almost.In addition to the extra leg room, premium economy enjoys perks of business travelers like newspapers during boarding, hot towels to wash hands, complementary drinks like prosecco during boarding (Yes, please!) and an upgrade in food with real utensils.My gluten free meal was pretty impressive. Having flown Iberian business in January, I can now say that Cathay’s food in premium economy was BETTER. That steak, I mean, there’s no contest!After flying 30+ hours in 48h, I looked and felt surprisingly fit when I arrived to Hong Kong that Tuesday morning. I didn’t really know what day it was at all, but that’s beside the point.Hong Kong is a glittery city and after the cold weather in Peru, I was welcoming some warmth.Like Singapore, I liked this city immediately.The view from my hotel below. 🙂I also ate really well on this trip, with everything from fried mussels to truffle infused french fries.The Sheraton Kowloon really knows how to make food!The view of the construction site behind my room was not quite as pleasing, especially when it started up at 7am every day, but I guess I am used to construction workers ruining my sleep in Switzerland. 😉Although I was a little nervous about finding gluten free food to eat at a convention hall with 60,000 visitors, I was able to stop by a restaurant for lunch that could manage a simple gluten free pasta. Back across the harbor, palm trees swayed in the breeze. Can’t we just move the office here??Every day, we woke early to get to the convention hall and then in the evening we would go back to the hotel and change before heading out for dinner. It was a pretty exhausting week!I was still marveling that right before getting on the plane to Lima, I was roughing it in the Peruvian wilderness to Machu Picchu, and now after the weekend, here I was at a cosmetics and beauty expo in cosmopolitan Hong Kong. Going from eating potatoes and local   corn to lobster and oysters was nuts. The difference in culture on the two trips was staggering.I did have again a little food card with me, writing what I could eat in traditional and simplified Chinese. Sometimes eating gluten free makes food pretty bland in Asia without soy sauce or salt. :/Shrimp and broccoli stir fried in plain oil is not quite the same.But in general, eating was not a problem, and I didn’t need almost any of the snacks I had brought along with me.The view from the restaurant was pretty amazing though!I was also proud that every morning, I managed to wake up, shove contacts in my eyes, and even put on fake eyelashes for the fair.By the end of the trip, I was quite spoiled with all the fine dining.HK is a city I could see myself living in. I cannot picture living in all the cities I visit, but this seems like a nice place. 🙂Maybe it also had to do with how much nice food there was…The lobster at the end of the trip was the cherry on top. Look at that happy employee!I loved the craze of the expo, the long days, tearing the stand up and down, talking to clients, all of it. Sometimes work trips are a refreshing break to the monotony of daily life. They inspire and motivate.

What do you think of business trips?

Food, Travel

Gluten Free Cusco and Lima, Peru

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After our long bus ride into Cusco with a crack-of-dawn arrival, we slept for a couple hours and then landed at Don Cafeone for lunch, where I had quinoa and mushroom beef.For dinner the first night, after hiking to see Saksaywaman during the day, we celebrated with more pisco sours at Nuna Raymi. For appetizers, we ordered the crispy homemade chips made from white potato, sweet potato, arracacha and yellow potato, tossed with olive oil, garlic, rocoto (red chili), pisco, parsley, jungle’s hot sauce, spices and tomato.Pretty sure I ordered tenderloin pork with piña colada chutney and garlic mashed potatoes for the main, but it’s been a few months and my memory is getting rusty. It tasted good and I didn’t get sick after, so I was happy!The second day when I was feeling so crappy the night before our trek, we ended up somewhere near the plaza de armas after our tour briefing and I had stuffed peppers and potatoes.After the whole trek was over, we needed to get a quick lunch in Aguas Calientes before taking the train back to Cusco, so I grabbed a deconstructed taco dish. And by grabbed, I mean, we waited quite awhile and almost missed our train because the service was so slow. 😉We did not realize we had purchased special train tickets. Most of our group was heading back later on a train together, but Kay had upgraded us to the “scenic route” that ran along the river on the way back to town. It was a very pretty train ride.Peru Rail also served us a little lunch, which surprised me.I was scared to eat the bread, so I gave it to Kay, but I happily munched on the rest. They served us coffee and tea too, which was welcome after five days without the morning cuppa.The train ride also had a very special service with a terrifying clown who made the creepiest noises, and later on a fashion show was put on by the steward and stewardess. It was definitely different than the Swiss train!Back in Cusco, we met another prospective student from INSEAD at Nuna Raymi for dinner again, since it was good before. The colleague just joined us for drinks, pisco sours, which unfortunately gave all three of us terrible food poisoning the next day.We were flying to Lima for our flight back to Zurich and the food poisoning hit just in time for security check-in. Again unfortunately, the water only worked outside security, so after we got through security, some poor soul had to deal with my repeated trips to the bathroom, and I spent some glorious time half-passed out in front of the bathroom, writhing in pain before we started boarding.

All for nothing too, as the power in the airport failed, so did my stomach, and I ended up losing my breakfast in front of all the passengers for our flight. The only thing classier than puking in a bag while running for the bathroom is having that bag break over the airport floor. Travel at its finest! 😉

Both Kay and I just needed to sleep and recover when we got to Lima. We had a day to explore, but rather spent the whole day and most of the night sleeping the food poisoning off. When we woke the next day with our flight back to Zurich, we had a little hotel breakfast, including broth soup to get our nutrients back up.After shopping and spending way too much, I chanced my stomach on some creamy shrimp risotto, but it was actually so rich that my weakened appetite wasn’t able to handle eating much of it. Tasty though!As were the BBQ chicken wings, which Kay helped me polish off.More from our trip to Peru:

Switzerland

How to Vote in Switzerland

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Voting is a pretty easy process for Swiss citizens because the government mails everyone a ballot, which acts as both a voting ID at the polling station or as the much preferred absentee ballot. Swiss either throw their completed ballot in a post box for free or if they’ve missed the deadline, they can vote in person over the weekend at their local Gemeindehaus (town hall). Some cities like Winterthur have even been offering online voting since 2008.

Compared to the US, the whole system seems quite advanced to me. No one ever has to worry about registering on time, requesting absentee ballots, or finding time to go to a polling station during work because the whole process is automated and everyone always receives their ballots at home.

However, despite all that, there is still often a very low voter turnout in the country due to the frequency of the elections and increasing voter apathy. I received my first envelope to vote some time early 2015 and wanted Kay to show me how it worked because the system is quite different than what I am used to in America and in addition to it being in German, the whole process seemed foreign and scary to me.

As a true Swiss, my first election passed with the envelope sitting on my desk, unopened. Throughout the year, we received more envelopes, and I kept asking Kay if we could go through it together some time on the weekend, but he was so busy applying to school and later preparing to leave, that a whole year passed and neither of us voted once.Now that he’s gone, several important issues came up on the ballot in February including an issue on marriage rights/equality as well as another anti-foreigner initiative launched by the SVP (Schweizerische Volkspartei or Swiss People’s Party), and I wanted to exercise my right to vote!

What do you receive in your Swiss voting envelope? Quite a lot, which is why I was so overwhelmed the first time I opened the envelope up!

  • Envelope itself, which is reused for mailing your ballot (clever!)
  • Envelope for the ballots
  • Voter ID Card, which also functions as an address card to both you and the polling place
  • Federal voting ballots (Stimmzettel)
  • Cantonal voting ballots
  • City/Town voting ballots
  • Voters guide for federal issues
  • Voters guide for cantonal issues

This is what the envelope looks like that comes in the mail. It is important to open it with the little tab across the back and DO NOT tear the envelope because you reuse this envelope to mail the whole ballot back to the town hall. Silly newbie, I didn’t read as I was opening the mail and opened my first packet with a letter opener. Below you can see that they’ve designed it so that after you open it, there is another sticky tab you can undo to seal it at the end.The most important thing to do after not-tearing your envelope is to sign your Stimmrechtsausweis, or Voter’s ID card. This is a card they give you which if you want to vote in person, you need to present this to your local Gemeindehaus (town hall) in order to vote if you’ve missed the mailing deadline.

The card not only acts as your ID for voting, but it doubles as the addressee  card. When it arrives, the card is inside the envelope facing towards the window with YOUR address. When you want to mail it, you sign it and then put it back in UPSIDE DOWN with the Gemeindehaus address showing through the window this time. It’s important to double check that you are not posting your ballot to yourself again!

Now, before you get to your ballots, what the heck is this election about? You don’t pay attention to politics either? Great. That’s why they have prepared guides for you for both federal and cantonal issues.Each brochure highlights the issues to be voted on with both quick and in depth explanations so you can do the “Let’s get it done” method or take your time and read more. Each initiative text is explained as well as the supporting and opposing views.

For the federal issues, you also receive the voting recommendation from both the Bundesrat (Swiss Federal Council) and Parlament (Parliament) to help your decision. For the cantonal issues you receive the views from Regierungsrat (governing council of the canton) and the Kantonsrat (Cantonal Council), plus any information how parliament voted that effects the issue. So if you want to be lazy, you can just glance over the general idea of the issue and then vote based on what is recommended, kind of like voting party-line in the States.

By all means, you can also search for and read for information about the candidates and issues elsewhere, online, in articles, newspapers, from friends, etc. It seems that most issues are presented in a straight-forward manner out of context, but when you put them in context, the initiative and the changes are much more complicated or different than they would first appear.

Take the marriage rights issue for example… There is a known problem in Switzerland with married couples being taxed more than non-married cohabiting couples and also receiving only 1.5X a person’s pension instead of 2 full pensions upon retirement. At first I thought, “YES, I’ve been complaining about this for years! I will support this change!”

But, then I read the actual initiative and read more about it online and not only was it was more confusing what would actually change and if it would really help me, or if it would just promote the traditional sexist practice of women staying at home while the man works, but it had some very disturbing wording defining a marriage as “between a man and a woman and nothing else”. If anything, I thought that while I would like the tax situation to  be addressed, this is not the way to do it. I certainly did not want to hinder gay marriage for anyone in any way. There is no reason for that, other than the bill being proposed by the centrist Christian Democratic Party (CVP). No surprise there.

But this issue and the one against foreign criminals take a seemingly easy-to-answer question and twist it. Do I think foreign criminals have the right to come here and commit crimes and stay indefinitely? No, but as I posted before, it’s not a black and white matter, as the SVP would have you believe.Once you figure out how you want to vote, you write in “Ja” or “Nein” on your ballot. Then you fold them and put all the ballots in the envelope with holes below.I guess that not every election you are voting on the same things. Sometimes it’s just federal or cantonal and sometimes you have local town issues. For my town, there was a new candidate being elected and I had to do some more work to figure out information about the candidates because there wasn’t a handy pamphlet explaining their backgrounds in that case.

Once the envelope with the holes is filled with the ballots, you seal it and place it in the main envelope, making sure that your Voter ID card is still in there with the correct address facing outward. On the back of the envelope, it actually has the whole instructions printed what to do and what not to forget. Wichtige Hinweise = Important instructionsThere are also further instructions on the Voter ID card how to turn it around to reuse it as the address card, where to sign it, and instructions on the ballots how to handle them.

Everything is actually very clear in reality and while I read everything myself, I did feel more comfortable having a colleague quickly explain the process to me first to make sure I wouldn’t screw it up. That’s my Type A personality shining through. 😉

The final step is just to take the sticky off the main envelope and seal the envelope. It is already postmarked, so if you follow the last step of the list and make sure you post it on time, you are in the clear!

If you wait too long, you can just take the Voter ID card and the ballots to your Gemeindehaus on the weekend and vote in person. Basta finito.

Now you know how it works!

Switzerland

Swiss Black Sheep Campaign 2016

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Ironically, the SVP (Schweizerische Volkspartei or Swiss People’s Party)  first introduced their black sheep campaign in 2007, the same year I first came to Switzerland. The thinly veiled racist propaganda last showed up in 2014 when the country voted in favour of protecting its borders and cracking down on foreign criminals. Back then I was still a “dirty foreigner” but now I could do something about it.

I was pretty sad to see them in the train stations again, even knowing that I am safe now. With a slew of similar propaganda over the years, these kind of advertisements make you feel pretty unwanted as a foreigner, even as a white woman. I can only imagine how those with dark skin and a beard or a hijab feel looking at these posters.

The message is clear: we don’t want you.At first glance to the voters, it seems that SVP is only trying to rid the country of foreign murderers and rapists for the safety of our women and children, but they cross a line which would demote all foreigners, even ones born and raised in Switzerland, to second class citizens, liable for automatic deportation for something as small as traffic violations.
Simonetta Sommaruga, a member of the Swiss Federal Council from the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland (Sozialdemokratische Partei der Schweiz, SP) bid citizens to vote no against this dangerous initiative from February. So did my German neighbor, for obvious reasons!

Now as a Swiss, I do feel the need to protect our small country from those who would abuse the safety and welfare here, but foreigners also make up 25% of the country’s workforce. They are a vital part of our society, also accounting for second and third generation foreigners who were born in Switzerland and whose parents might have been born in Switzerland.

In one of the previous years, I became upset when Kay wanted to vote in support. I cried, “You’re voting against ME.” and he said, “Noooo, not you, I’m voting against bad criminals! They wouldn’t send you away!” But under the conditions SVP proposes, a lot of the decisions for deportation are taken out of the judge’s hands and made automatic… and the conditions for what would count as a violation were very concerning. It starts the country on a dark and isolating road which is not unsimilar to Trump suggesting we Americans build a big fence for Mexicans and ban Muslims from entering the country. None of these things are positive or helpful ways to deal with the immigration problems.

The terms of this initiative really put me off, so I voted against it. In the future I would vote to make sure foreigners are working hard and integrating where they need to, but the terms have to be right. In any case, I don’t appreciate or condone the use of these extremely racist ads. They are very clear: black/foreign = bad

It’s 2016… and it’s time to stop using ads like this to put the hate and mistrust in one of our largest resources in the workforce. Thankfully, the initiative failed by a narrow percentage, but it is certainly not the last time we will vote on this!

Travel

Machu Picchu, Peru

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“You’re at Machu Picchu and you’re cryiiing!” announced Valentine when we arrived to a very foggy, desolate looking Machu Picchu. The man had a good sense of humor and he’d said exactly what I was feeling on the inside. It’s foggy… and it’s raining… and I can’t see anything. NOOooooooo. Don’t cry, don’t be disappointed, don’t cry!

We flew 10,000km and hiked 60km over four days up to 4600m to see the crown jewel looking like the scene from an ancient horror film.Maybe it will get better, I thought… and it would for a bit, but it also got worse and it did rain quite a bit. That’s life.Valentine took us on a tour around the grounds and explained more about Inca culture and traditions and how they think people lived in the compound.It’s an incredibly amazing place. You can only wonder how the Incas really lived here.Kay was pretty much unperturbed by the rain and cover. He was just really amazed by how monumental this place is.We took a few more photos with the group before it was time to hike our special package of the trip up to Huayna Picchu.
Below was part of the “condor” in the compound with the beak at the bottom center and the rock “wings” flying up to the side. Trying to figure out how they did what they did with the stone was mind boggling.Even though it was a little dreary, it actually added to the mystic surrounding the mystery of the Incas and what really happened to them and how they really lived. Nobody really knows.The sure knew how to pick a location for their holy site though!Group photo time and then Valentine and Filio bid us goodbye.From there, we actually didn’t have unlimited time to hike to Huayna Picchu, come back and take the classic tourist picture in Machu Picchu and then catch the bus down to Aguas Calientes so we could get the right train home. And we couldn’t miss any of it because we had a plane to catch the next day!The trail up and down from Huayna Picchu is listed as “dangerous” and they actually make you sign in and out of a guide book to let the park know if you made it back alive, no shit.

I thought it was a little over the top because the trail is not worse than a Swiss alpine pass next to steep drops and basically everything was stairs… so it really wasn’t that bad.After hiking up to 4600m, hiking up 2720m at Huayna Picchu was a piece of cake. While people beside us huffed and puffed and talked about going into cardiac arrest, we kept a brisk pace upwards.

From above, you really do get to see an incredible view of Machu Picchu and you can appreciate the shape of the condor much better.After waiting for the clouds to clear a little, it started raining on the way down. They actually do trick you a little, because the nice, big steps are on the way up, and the tiny narrow, your-foot-barely-fits-on-them steps were what we had with the rain on the way down.

To be fair, even without hiking sticks, which are banned, you can go down pretty fast with some sturdy hiking boots… but we were passing people obviously terrified of heights who could barely take a step downward.After trying to wait for the rain to pass for 20-30 minutes, we just gave up and headed to the classic postcard location.The rain and clouds were pretty badass.It wasn’t how I pictured seeing Machu Picchu and these photos have been edited quite a bit, but it was still impossible to deny the wonder and awe of such a sacred site even in the rain and fog.I got the “dark, moody Machu Picchu”, which I guess I deserve. 😛Kay and I didn’t want to go, but we had to get in line for the buses to take us back to town to catch the train, which would be an experience in itself.We snapped a few more photos, including some mandatory selfies, before heading back down.That’s it, Machu Picchu was in the books!With our biggest ticket crossed off our bucket list, it was time to start the journey home, if only so I could get on a plane to Hong Kong for work. 🙂

Alpaca Expeditions  was founded by a retired porter and Inca tour guide. Their fantastic, professional tours specialize in sustainable tourism both by supporting local farmers and by paying fair wages to local porters, employee health/life insurance, and respecting local labor laws. The company also has social projects for children’s needs and they even work to help porters and their families to visit Machu Picchu, something that many locals in the area are never able to do on their own. By supporting Alpaca Expeditions, you can help them give back to the community and support the local Andeans.

More from our trip to Peru: