Thursday, December 10, 2009

Swiss Beauty


When I re-signed with SAM Massagno this year, one of the things that I knew I had to do was to take Liz to Zurich during Christmas. Last year I had the opportunity to go with Brody (one of my teammates from last year) and his friend. Zurich might be the coolest Christmas city in the world and I wanted to show Liz how cool it was. One thing I did not anticipate though was the beauty of Switzerland on the ride to Zurich.

Our trusty little TomTom took us on a route that we do not normally take on the way to our games. We had a beautiful day of driving and when we got the opportunity to pull over we snapped these gorgeous pictures. It is sights like these that just take my breath away.

The picture at the top is our trusty Citroen C3. We don't leave home without it and maybe my Dad will stop complaining about how he hasn't seen my car yet and yes, it really has my name on the side so everyone knows where I am. Pretty sweet huh?

Hardly home but always reppin. Liz snapped this picture and it looks pretty gangsta.
Liz has a pretty big camera and it was hard for us to try and get a good picture. This was the best we could get.
Nothing really to say. Just amazing!


Thanksgiving Pics

SAMerica eating dinner. Wish Liz was in this picture but someone had to take it. We need to learn how to use the timer on the camera.

All the food. It still looks so good.
The carved bird.
Un cooked bird. It's tiny!

Monday, December 7, 2009

Thanksgiving

The holidays are upon us and it is a very exciting time to be in Europe. Everywhere you go you can see Christmas lights and trees and it is all so beautiful especially in the town squares. As Americans we rely on Thanksgiving to officially start up the holiday season in the US but unfortunately they do not have that over here in Switzerland. Liz and I took it upon ourselves to host a Thanksgiving dinner for the Americans playing for Massagno.

This was a pretty cool thing for us to do. Unfortunately, for the past 7 years I have been unable to celebrate Thanksgiving with my own family. The past two years I did not even do anything. Liz and I wanted to do a dinner so my teammates would feel more at home and have a right holiday.

We were very fortunate this year. We went to the local Migros and found a turkey. I have been in Switzerland for the past four years and have been unable to find a turkey. Needless to say, I was very excited about it. There was only one little (pun intended) problem with our turkey. It only weight 6 pounds. When I called home to tell my family about the turkey I was immediately shot down and told that it wasn't a turkey and to check the label again to make sure it was not a cornish hen. It wasn't. Our little turkey was pretty expensive so we decided to buy a bunch of chicken legs to round out the meat portion of our dinner.

Thanks to Barb Schuelke we had a delicious recipe for stuffing. We kind of had to scrounge up some ingredients but we did it. We even had home made mashed potatoes. I know this because I peeled them and mashed them! Green beans and salad rounded out our Thanksgiving meal. The only thing missing was pumpkin pie and that was pretty sad because that is my favorite thing to eat on Thanksgiving.

The meal was a hit though and Ross even said he was surprised at the "real ass Thanksgiving." It was also pretty cool to do it too because it was our (Liz and I) first holiday together. It definitely had a different feel to it. A great feeling. I am looking forward to many more holidays and to having Thanksgiving dinner with the fam and in the States soon.