Twenty minutes ago the waiter at our favorite Interlaken bar, Des Alpes, brought over a complimentary bottle of house-made schnapps. It was to thank us for our patronage (i.e. ordering a few rounds of large local brew and a lot of food – August Gloop be damned, I would have swam in the chocolate fondue) and for the wonderful broken English conversation we had with him about how to pronounce my new favorite beer (bier), Rugenbrau (pronounced, Roogun-broy).
This is not your average American schnapps – this isn’t some wimpy-ass doctor mcgillicuddys Kappy brand schnapps you use as a mixer. This is the real thing. For those of you who’ve had grappa, it’s sort of like that – only Swiss, slightly herbal, possibly mint I couldn’t place it, and as impressively potent as the soaring Alps themselves. This is the stuff the St. Bernard delivers to you from that barrel around his neck when he finds you under three feet of avalanche snow. Today we did not get caught in an avalanche, thankfully (I’ll talk about that more in tomorrow’s blog post). But we did hike the Alps and right now, thanks to the un-labeled bottle of schnapps, I can’t feel the pain in my thighs, knees, calf muscles, ankles or feet that I should feel - that I did feel about twenty-one minutes ago. Thank you schnapps. And thank you Switzerland.
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