We got frozen yogurt one evening in Hong Kong. In an effort to expand my culinary horizons, I chose the most exotic sounding topping: Ice Gem Biscuits. Doesn’t that sound intriguing? What could this mystery topping be?

Oyster crackers. Like the ones you throw in soup. Each with its own tiny swirl of frosting.

Thank you Hong Kong for opening my mind to a whole new world, topped with oyster crackers.

When we told our Russian friends that we flew Aeroflot Russian Airlines to Hong Kong, they cackled and asked,

“Was the pilot drunk?”

or exclaimed,

“Wow, and you didn’t crash!”

No, we didn’t crash. I can’t say whether the pilot was drunk, because most of the time he was speaking Russian, and all foreign languages kind of sound like a wasted friend drunk-dialing you at 3am.

But on the flight back we did witness a lively exchange between a flight attendant and three Russian men. The argument was in Russian, but the guys eventually handed over an empty one-liter bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label whiskey. So I deduced that they’d bought the whiskey at the duty-free shop and drunk the whole bottle out of Hong Kong-themed espresso mugs they’d picked up at the airport Starbucks. And I guess it’s illegal to open liquor from the duty free shop? Anyway, the flight attendant confiscated the empty bottle and made the guys fill out a form on Aeroflot letterhead. Some kind of incident report I assume.

That twenty minutes of excitement made up for the fact that neither Home Alone, Home Alone 2, nor any of the other in-flight movies had an English audio track. On a nearly eleven-hour flight. Though that was a step up from our ten-hour flight to Hong Kong with no movies at all because the monitors weren’t working.

Mealtimes proved entertaining as well. The flight attendants had a habit of not pausing while listing, so our meal options were presented as, “Chickenfish?” “Fishmeat?”

And the fun didn’t stop there! Once our food arrived we found we’d received two kinds of bread. One was a pre-packaged 1/3 slice of brown bread.

Accompanied by the tiniest loaf of bread ever.

I was fascinated to see that tomato juice was, by a ratio of at least four to one, the most popular in-flight beverage. I don’t even know what else to say about it, but it’s a bit of cultural geekery too interesting to leave out.

The Moscow airport was an experience in itself. At the transfer area for passengers with connecting flights, we and fifty or so passengers were just standing around in this holding pen-type area while airport staff screamed “Barcelona!” “Milan!” and whisked away passengers whose flights were leaving even sooner than ours. From the holding pen we were herded into a security area the size and tidiness of an adolescent male’s bedroom. A ‘security officer’ was alternately yelling for people to remove their shoes and walking away from the metal detector entirely, and no one noticed and/or cared about the full bottle of water in my bag.

Smoking is still allowed in the Moscow airport, though it’s restricted to designated smoking areas. However, the designated smoking areas are unbounded, unenclosed spaces just outside the bathrooms, where smokers stand in reasonable proximity to a Winston-brand bar-height kiosk that may or may not filter smoke out of the air.

If things seem too foreign for our American sensibilities right about now, don’t worry, there’s ice cream.

Or, if you prefer, corn.

It may seem from the last 500 words of this blog that I’m whining or complaining about my first-world problems (oh the horrors encountered by the world traveler!) On the contrary! It’s like Aeroflot downloaded from my brain the very things I find most amusing and then orchestrated an elaborate, 23-hour play in two parts just for me. I think I’ll fly only on obscure foreign airlines from now on.

Wow have we had a busy year! Just making the list of events to include in this post made me exhausted. So you might want to grab a cup of coffee or an energy drink before diving in. Here we go:

2011 kicked off with the end of our eye-opening, challenging trip to Marrakesh, Morocco (photos of Wojtek’s bout with food poisoning not included).

Fun was on hold in January while Wojtek finished work on papers for the big computer graphics conference, Siggraph. But in February we squeezed in a few sledding day trips…

…before we made a quick decision to move apartments in Zürich, and packing/cleaning/moving took over our lives for a few weeks.

As soon as the last bag was in the new place (though very few had actually been unpacked), we started what ended up being six months of near-constant travel! First was a week with one of my favorite people, in Portugal (we left the guys behind).

A few days after returning from Portugal, Wojtek and I traveled to Llandudno, Wales, for the Eurographics conference.

Two weeks later, my writing buddies and I hosted the second Zurich Writers Workshop weekend. It was a great success for us and a lifesaver for my own work.

In June Wojtek traveled for three weeks to visit Disney business units in Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

I took the opportunity to visit my family in Chicago, and Wojtek joined us at the end of his trip for an engagement party for my brother and his fiance.

A week after returning from the US, we set off for a five-day trip to Prague, coinciding with the EGSR conference.

After Prague, we had about 30 hours to unpack, do laundry, and repack for two weeks in Poland with the whole Jarosz family. We spent time in Warsaw, Krakow, and Zakopane. But the high point of the trip (emotionally and altitudinally) was backpacking for three days in the Tatry mountains in the south of Poland.

We celebrated Swiss National Day (August 1) in typical Swiss fashion – hiking and eating brunch – during a three-day trip in the mountains of Kantons Nidwalden and Uri, close to where the Swiss Confederation was formed in 1291!

After returning from the mountains, we again had about 30 hours to regroup before heading west for a week and a half. First to Seattle to see a few friends, and then to Vancouver, where Wojtek presented a paper at the Siggraph conference.

September was the finale of our travel whirlwind when my parents visited for three weeks, two of which we spent in northern Italy.

By October we were ready to calm down and enjoy the fall. We had a great hike while our friend Chris was visiting.

And in November we hosted a Thanksgiving pot luck for a bunch of expat friends.

Soon after Thanksgiving we geared up for two final bursts of travel. First to Hong Kong, where Wojtek presented a paper at Siggraph Asia.

And then to Davos for Christmas weekend.

In the in-between times, Wojtek was working hard, publishing papers and securing patents for Disney on new computer graphics technology. I was working almost daily on my novel-in-progress and keeping our lives together. And we continued several hours of German lessons each week with our wonderful instructors. We celebrated friends getting married, welcomed three new babies into our group of expat friends, bid farewell to friends leaving Switzerland and met new ones.

With that, Internet friends, we bid you a very Happy New Year. Or, as our Swiss banker wished us yesterday, “Guten Rutsch!” Rutsch means ‘slide,’ so we hope you all slide well in 2012!

PS – Haven’t had enough of our photos yet? Wojtek’s been posting all year on his photoblog.

There will be more posts from Hong Kong I promise, but I’ll interrupt here to post a few photos from our Christmas weekend in Davos. We went with two other couples, also expats living in Zürich, and had a blast sledding, winter hiking, ping-ponging and eating!

A bit of advice if you plan to visit the Tian Tan Buddha on Lantau Island in Hong Kong: don’t go on the weekend. One of our group had visited previously, on a weekday, and said it was so empty he was afraid he was trespassing. So we had no idea that we were in for over two hours of waiting in line before boarding a cable car for a thirty minute ride to the peak (a little heads up would have been nice, guidebook).

However, if you must go when it’s super crowded, make the most of your time by:

1) Paying the extra six dollars for the ‘Crystal Cabin,’ a cable car with a glass bottom, because your wait in line will be somewhat shorter. We didn’t realize this advantage until after we’d snubbed the Crystal Cabin and seen the serpentine line for the regular cars.

2) Familiarizing yourself with the rules of the cable car system. Luckily, the rules are also presented in English. We were particularly amused by the prohibition against soiling other passengers or the cable car system.

Once at the top, it’s just a stroll and a staircase up to the buddha, which was finished in 1993. Below the statue is the Po Lin Buddhist monastery, which was busy with people making offerings of incense.

We finished the afternoon at a Cantonese restaurant in Ngong Ping village, where a brave member of our party ordered an entree with snake meat. I tried a few bites and described it as tasting “like shredded chicken, and also a little like how the zoo smells.” I think that’s enough snake meat for my lifetime.