Madame Fromage

One of the first people I met in Switzerland, who I was thoroughly entertained by, was a shop owner who I would like to call Madame Fromage. Tall with a Parisienne swan-long neck, she tossed around her arms as she chatted away faster than a TGV train racing between Paris and Zurich. Eine Schauspielerin (an actress) by nature, her shop named Pain et Fromage (Bread and Cheese) was not a place where you could duck-in and out of to purchase last minute ingredients.

Luckily, I was not in a rush. Having just landed in Zurich, I had all the time in the world, or at least four hours, to wonder the streets near my temporary home. I walked into her shop wanting to sniff out her wares, and was granted much more than olfactory experience. Her sales face was like a theatrical mask; she wore bright red lipstick, 100-strokes of mascara and had breasts perked up to her chin. With these she flirted and charmed -or at least tried to- both her male and female customers. However, there is only so much Rose Syrup that you can smell and sample before you realise once again that the queue has not moved; you look up and there she is, languorously draped across the counter poetically espousing the creaminess of Sheep-milk cheese. She is a French version of the domestic goddess Nigella Lawson, minus the curves. And like the majority of French women, it looks like she has never eaten anything other than celerey.

After promising to give the customer a special tour of the shop in her afterhours, suddenly the eyes, lips, boobs and cheese-stroking fingers of Madame Fromage are focused on me. She is physically striking with an accent as thick as bricks and her cheese selection is delectable partly because it is native solely to France. Proud and patriotic,the innocent question of whether the cheese is a product from the Swiss Jura is met with an indignant galluf! Of course it is not!

France, however, is not completely perfect in her mind either and she describes the Côte d'Azur as touristy and kitsch, whilst wearing sequin-pocked skyscraper heels at ten am in the morning.

Shanghai Surprises

After a twelve-hour flight from Sydney to Shanghai (on route to Zurich), I ignorantly shuffled into a line of other foreigners. My place in this queue turned out to be lucky because standing right next to me was a tap dancer, a French tap dancer. Now I do have a weakness for musicals and for men with accents and rhythm so, naturally we started talking, and before I knew it, we had our baggage in lockers and were off on a local bus (No. 5) to the outskirts of the city centre.

In search of ‘authentic’ Chinese food, we strolled the streets, waddling through the bath-dense air. Of course neither of us had come prepared for our little adventure – so instead of a phrase book we flayed our limbs about and mimed slurping soup – which produced even more intense stares from two men bedecked in bling, straddling bikes. No answer or even understanding from them, we took matters into our own hands and chose a direction. Accio food! A lane magically appeared, packed with packed with DVD shops, a corner shop, a fresh fruit stall with giant watermelon and a noodle bar.

With tastebuds craving more than the in-flight rubbery fish and fluoro Singapore-style noodles, I would like write that we dived into the shop with gung-ho courage, yet instead we timidly approached it. Looking at the shop with wrappers scattered on the floor, scarcely filled with spindly plastic chairs and tables, my mind lurched with Delhi Belly horrors. The last thing I wanted was to start my trip on a bad-belly note, yet adventure was my credo. This trip is meant to take me out of my comfort zone.

Slurping our hot pot that was an oily, salty broth punctuated by bobbing chicken bits– it was real in that it still resembled a chicken with fleshy goosebumps – we became the entertainment for our fellow diners. The fact that I can hardly hold a pen properly guarantees that my chop-stick holding etiquette is a source of amusement; at times a bent old woman with a perm snuck over and stood next to us at our table blatantly watching, commentating back to her table of children. In charade-style we mimed that we were going – I skipped out the door waving goodbye- paid and then actually left. What an unexpected treat.

What happened next, I predict, will be one of the highlights of my trip. Mr Tap Dancer and I walked a few blocks and paused in a concrete square dwarfed by skyscraper towers and bordered by fluoro-lime-green trees. This became the set for our Salsa performance with random rickety bikeriders and swerving taxis as our only audience. The thick sticky air seemed to hold me to its chest as I tipped from foot to foot, as if I was swirling in the hot pot I had not long before finished slurping.