Six in Switzerland: Schüpfheim Alpabzug!

It's time for the cows to come down from the mountains for the winter, which means dressing them up and parading them through town! It's all very noisy, which you know if your computer volume is on and you watched the video. We went to Schüpfheim for their Alpabzug.

We got there early to make sure that we had a good position. (I even went online to find a good video from last year and then scouted the position on google maps.) We were in front of a small hotel with a porch on the second level from which some elderly locals were watching. Sometimes if a friend went by or some other special thing happened they would let loose with a loud yodelling call. Kind of a Swiss "yee-haw!" We also had a couple of nuns and some local kids around us, so it must have been a prime spot

The parade wasn't just cows. There were also folk singers, kids groups, some other animals, and alphorn preformances. I've put an alphorn video at the end of this post.

Of course, there were lots of stands selling things: cowbells, woodcarvings, leather goods, and food. The food was interesting. We got some pastries from stand where they were frying fresh donuts. We also got ice cream, because for T the worst torture in the world is to see some other kid with a cone. Around the corner from our position was a grilled meat stand, so we smelled delicious smoke during the parade. E finally got himself their only offering: meat on a long skewer with a huge roll at the top. He thinks it was pork. L was crazy for it. A couple restaurants had long tables and chairs by the sidewalk where they were serving breakfast with coffee or beer. There were lots of sausage stands. Most popular though were the stands serving melted cheese on bread. We saw all sorts of machines for melting cheese, but this was the most interesting. The cheese slides under the broiler, the guy slides it out again, he scrapes the melted cheese off the top of the cheese block, and he spreads it on the bread.