A Day in the Life ... the Coyles dine out in Zürich

This past week was a busy one, and I'm excited to finally have some time to catch up on blogging. More to come on many items...

One of the biggest questions we usually get about our experiences in Zürich is, "How are the costs of things?" Well, I decided to post the details of our food experiences today to give you all an idea of things:

Breakfast:

In the States, we always liked to go out for breakfast on Sunday mornings. We usually went out for bagels at Pennington Bagel, or would get some other breakfast treats at Panera Bread. Nothing extravagant, but good nonetheless.

In our neighborhood in Zürich, everything on Sunday is totally closed. So, imagine how excited I was earlier this week when I saw a new bread place had opened in our square that would be open on Sundays. We figured this would be our version of Panera in Zürich.

We walked over this morning and both Bill and I had a continental breakfast. Mine consisted of orange juice, hot tea, and a basket of assorted breads with butter/jelly. Bill's breakfast had coffee, a soft-boiled egg, and a basket of assorted breads. Although very good and filling, our breakfast grand total came to 35 CHF (which is roughly $31).

Coffee Break:

We met up with a prospective babysitter today at the Starbucks in the center of town. While waiting to meet her, Bill and I both had coffees. Grand total 13 CHF (which is roughly $11).

Lunch:

After meeting the new babysitter (we are excited about our future date nights!), we walked over to the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) to grab some groceries. (Neighborhood grocery stores are also closed on Sundays here in Zürich, but the stores in the train stations stay open on Sundays.) After grabbing our groceries, we had a hankering for a good old-fashioned American hamburger...so we visited the Burger King in the train station. Here's the breakdown:

1 chicken nugget kid's meal, 1 double cheeseburger, 1 regular cheeseburger, 2 orders of onion rings, and 2 sodas: grand total 37 CHF (roughly $32).

Grand Total

So, grand total for 2 smallish meals and a coffee break in Zürich: $72

This doesn't even include dinner! From this breakdown, you can see why we don't eat out too often. We've gotten good at making our own picnic lunches for when we go sightseeing, so we don't have to buy lunch out.

Brady's Expanding Vocabulary

Brady still is not walking (and hasn't seemed very adventurous over the last few days as I've tried to get him to take those first few steps on his own.) However, his growing vocabulary has just amazed me. Here is the list of the latest and greatest:

Real Word - Brady's Version
Cat - Maw (his version of Meow)
Bubble - Bubble
Baba - Bottle (or cup or anything holding a drink)
Keys - Key
Hi - Hi (all purpose greeting)
Uh-oh - Uh-oh (used when things drop or move out of eyesight)
Mimi - Anything with buttons (elevator buttons, light switches, etc.)
Cereal - Ereal
Banana - Nana
Blueberry - Boobear
Dog - Woof Woof
No - No-no-no (yes...he repeats it several times...don't know where he got that.)
Cookies - Cookee

Pirate noises and lion roars also make the list of oft repeated "words". We are both a bit depressed that "Mama" and "Dada" don't make it to the list. He has said them before, but I don't think he uses them repeatedly and with context. Boooooo!

More updates as we have them!

Sunday Picnic at Zürich Uetliberg

After having survived a week of chilly/rainy Zürich weather since our return from the States, we decided on a short outing this weekend. We travelled by train 20 minutes from Zürich's main train station to Uetliberg, Switzerland.

Brady enjoys making fish-faces while on the train.

This is a mountain just on the border of Zürich, from which you have amazing views of the city and lake. Although today was a bit overcast, we still had beautiful views once we reached the top of the mountain after about a 20 minute hike.

From this photo, you can see where Lake Zürich starts (in the middle-left of the photo). This is where the Limmat River joins the lake. We live in the general-vicinity just east of the start of the lake. This photo was taking facing east, so look just a little bit over the top of the lake in the photo - and that's our "neighborhood".

Even with the overcast weather, the top was still relatively crowded. And there were even a couple of para-gliders enjoying the day. I cannot believe how close these guys got to us on the top of the mountain. My question is this: how do you get down when you're done?

After surveying the views, we walked a few feet from the top of the mountain and ate a picnic lunch we brought. For those foodies out there, we had salami, two types of cheese (Manchengo and Rahmkӓse), homemade hummus (yes - homemade...how awesome is that!!!), toasted pita bread, and olives. It was spectacular. Below is a picture of the view from our picnic table.

Lastly, after walking back down to the train station, we had about 20 minutes to kill before the next train was due. They had a cute little playground right next to the train station. We enjoyed some teeter-tottering before catching the train back home.





The afternoon was tons of fun...and while I write this, my two boys (Bill and Brady) are taking mid-afternoon naps!

"And go get yourself some cheap sunglasses"

This ZZ Top classic song came to mind after we took this photo during our summer vacation in the US. We bought these baby sunglasses for Brady at Target and although he loved them, he always tried to take them off after only having them on for about 5 seconds. This was actually one moment we caught on camera before he ripped them off again. Mom's sunglasses are relatively "cheap" too, having been purchased at TJ Maxx. :)

We're back!

Hello again everyone! We are now back in Zurich - coming back yesterday to a very rainy/very chilly town. It was a good flight, Brady slept really well and so far the jet lag hasn't been horrible. Knock on wood...Brady should be back on schedule tomorrow.

Our summer was very eventful. We attended 2 weddings and 1 vow renewal ceremony. We went to Nag's Head (our yearly beach event) and we did lots of shopping. It was also a very eventful summer for Brady - full of milestones. He is just about to walk (he stands independently and can walk behind toys), but has yet to make his own steps without the aid of toy or parent. He had his first haircut. And he is now saying a few words and actually knows what they means. (He pointed at a bottle of bubbles today and said, "bubba".) He can say bottle, blueberry, uh-0h consistently and has definitely gotten the knack of "hi". He is really cute. He is also pointing at things and exclaiming when he likes it. (birds, planes and thermostats - actually anything with buttons usually get this treatment) He had a great summer, spending time with his grandparents and other relatives. He is just so cute when he is learning something new. He gets so excited and has such a joy for life and learning.

We will post some photos and new posts soon. But for now, just wanted to let everyone know we were back!!!! Hope you all had a great summer too!

Coyle Connection on Hiatus

Most of the Coyle clan has been on summer vacation in the US for the last few weeks and won't be back in Zurich until Sept. 14th. We will "blog" more upon our return! :)

Hope your summer is going well!

Our First London Trip

Buckingham Palace

Bill and Brady on a Double Decker Bus

Trafalgar Square

Half-way through July, Bill had to visit his company's London office for some training. The training was to be held on a Friday, so we decided to make a weekend of it. Brady and I flew out with Bill early on Friday morning and we stayed through Sunday afternoon.

It was a very quick trip and we will be going back again. All in all, after living in Zurich for 4 months, it was crazy to be in such a HUGE city. We actually agreed that you tend to hear more English spoken in Zurich than we heard in London. But we enjoyed the hustle and bustle during our short trip. We seemed to like the food most of all. When we entered Paddington Station after taking the Heathrow Express from the airport, the first thing we saw was a Krispy Kreme!! Bill and I aren't really donut crazy, but after not having had donuts in a long time (and you can't find decent donuts in Zurich), we loved them! We had Mexican food on Friday night - soooooo good. Saturday we had an English pub lunch which was excellent and was followed by dinner out with our old neighbors from NJ who now live in London. It was great catching up with them and meeting their new son (well, new to us at least.)



We basically did the cheesy touristy thing all day Saturday, but had fun walking around London and taking in the sites.

Watching Good Old Fashioned American TV via Slingbox

Well, after a few months of only have like 5 English speaking TV channels (how much of Donald Trump True Hollywood Story and The Kardashians on "E" can one person take?), we decided we needed some major TV overhauls. Plus, although it's only August, our minds have already started thinking about FOOTBALL season. We would definitely not be getting any games on our Swiss cable. So, after some researching, we decided to go the Slingbox route.

Now, if you were like me and have no idea what a Slingbox is, let me give you a little background. Basically, we re-subscribed to our Direct TV service that we had in NJ. We get a Direct TV box complete with a DVR and it gets installed in some server room somewhere in California. (At the company we bought a Slingbox from.) The Slingbox is a piece of equipment that allows us to "sling"what we want to watch (via a slingbox) to the internet. We access our account and can change the channels (like we would with a remote) and can record things like we would have done with our previous Direct TV box. The company that hosts our box is on the west coast, so the local channels (like NBC, etc.) are on CA time. So, if I wanted to watch an 8pm NBC show live…I would have to watch in on my computer at 5Am our time. Instead…we would just “record” the show and watch it the next day on our computer. This slingbox thing lets us watch whatever we want to watch on our Direct TV box on any computer. We usually take our laptop and project this onto our TV so we can see it bigger. It’s pretty neat. It’s just letting us watch our Direct TV on our computer. Eventually, they are developing a “Sling catcher” that we can then plug right into our wireless router and then we can watch directly on our TV. That’s apparently a few months off. It’s pretty amazing stuff. Here’s a website that explains it further and probably better than I’ve attempted to. http://www.a2btv.com/what_how.php

So, we are definitely technologically advanced, but for Football season and the fall TV season, we are all set. I'm very excited, especially since you can't watch TV shows in Switzerland on NBC.com, etc. They disable the shows on their websites for non-US locations.

All in all, though, we definitely watch a lot less TV than we did in the States and I think that is definitely a good thing. :)