1. Morning bathrobe, coffee, newspaper
2. Speaking English without guilt
3. Seedless grapes
4. Campy salesmen at Nordstroms
5. The smell of urine in the streets

It took a Frenchman used to the ways of French civil service to solve the problem. At 8:12am he simply opened the lines himself and walked in, presenting his passport and then whisked through security screening. They may or may not be open at 8:00, but they sure as hell aren't going to make any effort to let you know.

So now I'm stuck an extra day in the hideous Sofitel Airport where it's faster to get from downtown Paris to the airport than from the airport to the hotel on their shuttle. Ordinarily an extra day in Paris wouldn't seem like a hardship but I'm tired and I miss home and thanks to Air France managing to only check in one of us, I'm alone. Another reason to hate Air France.

While I'm hating, I'm grateful for Internet in the hotel but screw you Orange for your WiFi implementation. For €20/day I'm given a network connection that dies every six hours or when NetNewsWire tries to download a bunch of RSS feeds. And their router silently intercepts my outgoing SMTP to deliver (and record?) mail through their servers rather than my own. The Internet is a hostile place.

Luzern is a great tourist spot. It's the starting point for trips to Rigi and Pilatus, two famous mountain tops that you can reach by train. But we came to Luzern for the transportation museum, particularly for the trains. That was quite cool, definitely worth the trip.

Luzern also has a lot of nice tourist sites. The Kapellbrücke is an amazing covered bridge across the river with a series of series of secular 17th century historical paintings. I'm looking for a catalog of them; they were quite interesting. The Löwendenkmal is also quite beautiful, comemorating the Swiss Guards who died defending the Palais Royale during the French Revolution. There's even an old city wall you can walk, at least in the summer (grrr).

We had a nice stay at The Hotel, an aggressively decorated postmodern hotel that's quite nice. (Same group as the Hotel Healdsburg.) Dinner was uncommonly good Thai food at Thai Garden; we're just about done with Swiss German food, I think.

We're leaving Switzerland this Saturday (Nov 12). We've had a great time here. A bit homesick, but I suspect once we're back in daily San Francisco life we'll be missing Switzerland's beauty and easy travel.

Neuchâtel is a bit small, but it's a charming town with a Saturday market, talented buskers, and fountains with crazy decorations. And a lake rumoured to be down there below the autumn fog. The neatest site for us was the Collegiate Church, a funky building up on a hill next to an old fortress and the château. The church is a handsome building with interesting carvings, but what we liked best was the sense of quiet up there. Very peaceful.

On Sunday we went to La Chaux de Fonds in the Jura. It's an astonishingly ugly city, bad modern buildings. But the Hotel Fleur de Lys does a good lunch of snails and horse steak, so I got my French fix.

Our main goal was the famous watch museum. The collection was amazing but the presentation was not very good, hard to understand what we were seeing. The highlight of the museum was the Astrarium, a reproduction of a 14th century astronomical clock. This thing is a remarkable monument to getting good predictions from a bad theory. The main part of the clock is a set of seven dials showing the position of the moon and planets on the sky. Only the whole clock is built on the Ptolemaic theory with the earth in the middle and crazy epicyclic gearwork to try to match the motions of the heavenly bodies. There's a great video showing how the eccentric gears and angled rods allow the clock to mimic Mecury's retrograde motion. Amazing dead end technology.