the new situation

We've got the flat.  Everything went smoothly.  A week after applying, we got the yes.  I'm still not convinced it's the right flat for us, but it's ok, we're going to survive, and the school's really close to it, a short walk away.

Getting rid of the old flat was painless.  In Switzerland, leases are taken seriously.  You rent because you want to live somewhere.  You can make long-term plans based on this, as can the landlord.  When I lived in London, one month's notice sufficed.  Here you can move out only twice a year.  Choose any date beside the end of March and the end of September, and you're liable to pay for the remaining months.

We didn't want to wait until September.  Kindergarten starts in August, and it would be good to get the move done before we fly off on vacation in July.  We gave notice for the end of June, leaving us with three months' rent to be paid for nothing.

The way around wasting all this money is finding someone to take over the lease.  Given the tight rental market, which we experienced ourselves over the last year or two, this should be easy.  I had mostly been searching on homegate.ch, and I figured I'd advertise there as well.  This idea seemed less sensible when I found about the listing fees.  At around 180 Francs, I didn't even bother to find out how many photos were included.  There had to be a better way.

tutti.ch offers online classifieds that let you find anything but not search very specifically.  Size of the apartment, price tag and number of rooms, that's for you to glean from a long list of hits matching your town of interest.  The large majority of ads are probably obsolete, as are the two I put on (one in English, another in German), but after I'd listed them I got a call the same night and a viewing the next evening.  There was only ever this one call.  It was enough for a family very similar to ours to secure a flat for July.

We have since registered the girl for kindergarten and identified daycare options for the boy.  An after-school program for the girl is a bit more of a challenge.  Baden doesn't combine this with kindergarten, for whatever bizarre reason.  There's a central daycare for all children with working parents, in the old town, close to but not right next to some of the kindergartens.  Children will be walked between daycare and kindergarten, at least at the beginning.  But how much will they be taken care of?  When we visited the place today, it looked slightly abandoned, with most children out and about, out on their own, it seemed.

The apartment situation might be sorted out, but daycare is a bit unsettling.  I'm far from freaking out, though.  Other parents are facing similar challenges, and many more will have gone through and survived this situation over the years.  There will be an obvious way, and we will find out.

The 7 best chocolates

Earlier today in California, between two lectures on basic concepts of crystallography, I spoke to one of the other teachers of the workshop on the topic of chocolate.  Chocolate is a fine topic for a crystallographic lecture itself, but the different phases, how transitions change the texture, and how heating it too much causes it all to go to hell weren't on our minds.

There is, of course, plenty on the internet on the science of chocolate.  If you're crystallographically inclined, you might appreciate the talk by Elspeth Garman (fast forward to 15:15 min).  Coincidentally, she used to teach at the same workshop as my chocolate-loving friend and I.

Chocolate comes in many guises.  Switzerland is famous for milk chocolate, though they didn't invent it.  Thirty years before M. Nestlé and colleagues stirred cocoa powder into condensed milk in Vevey by Lake Geneva, gourmets at the court of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden had already been enjoying something very similar, concocted by the company of Jordan & Timaeus, and found it rather delicious.

I frequently get into trouble for this, but I don't like Swiss chocolate much because I don't like milk chocolate much.  Since that random discovery all these years ago, I much prefer darker varieties.  They have so much more to offer than the sugary sweetness of milk chocolate.  Somewhere between 60 and 75% of the right cocoa gives delicate flavors without being too tart.

Good chocolate can come with eye-watering price tags.  I remember a little shop in St-Rémy-de-Provence, full of tiny delicacies expensive enough to make you want to cut your ear off.  (If you're lost, use the Google to make the connection.  Better yet, visit this beautiful town.)  Some are advertised as luxury products, better flaunted than enjoyed.  Do not purchase chocolate by price!  Purchase it by this guide:

1. Valrhona Ampamakia 64% – This single-estate chocolate comes with a vintage, which always cracks me up a bit, but it tastes like heaven.
2. Madecasse 70% – A chocolate with a story to match the taste.  Two Peace Corp volunteers in Madegascar see the value in turning locally sourced cocoa into locally produced chocolate.
3. Grenada Chocolate Company 71% – Purchased at Rococo Chocolates' Kings' Road store in London mostly because I was working with a student from Grenada at the time.
4. meiji THE Chocolate 70% – A random purchase in one of the few proper grocery stores in Tokyo, this turned out to be a much better pick then the matcha milk mix I bought at the same time.
5. L'Amourette Grenada 75% – This bar and the next shouldn't be on this list, but I need to reach seven. I've bought this in Palo Alto just today to see whether Grenadian cocoa is a thing.
6. L'Amourette Nicaragua 80% – Another purchase from today.  This is a bit outside my comfort zone, but one needs to be adventurous to be rewarded.

If you read this far, do you still remember the title?  Internet wisdom has it that listicles sell best, that links with a number in them get the most hits.  It said 7, there's only six.  Two shouldn't be there.  I wonder how the views will compare.