Signau

So after leaving Bern, we had a lovely train ride to Signau. Signau was the most rural place we visited in our trip, and we went there to visit our friend Lydie and her husband Christof. Lydie and Christof were expecting their firstborn right around the date of our arrival...in spite of this, Lydie insisted that we should come. From Bern we had called to let them know when we were coming in, and discovered that they had had a daughter, Kezia just three days earlier. Lydie was still recovering from surgery in the hospital, but Christof would come and pick us up. So we met Christof at the train station around 8:15 pm. He had been an IVEPer in the States at the same time Lydie was in Stouffville, but we had never met him before. He took us out to their dairy farm, climbing winding hilly roads to get there. The house is three stories, with his parents living on the top floor, a tenant in the middle floor, and Christof and Lydie on the ground floor. There is also a barn for the pigs attached at the back of the house, and a larger barn for the cows behind the house. So we had a good evening of getting to know Christof and seeing their home. We also discovered that Lydie had left chocolate, a Swiss pencil and some literature about the area and about Alsace Lorraine (where she's from) for each of us on our beds. A very gracious hostess indeed!

The next morning, Karen got up at 5 to help with the milking. (She also saw two pigs being bred.) After breakfast, Christof took us to the factory where his milk is turned into cheese. Apparently they have a cooperative of about 20 farmers who own this cheese factory and contribute milk to it daily...all of the milk in this community goes into cheese. We saw the huge vat into which they pour 4600 L of milk to begin the process, and then the smaller tanks into which the heated milk is fed via overhead pipes where they eliminate some of the excess fluid (don't ask me how). Then these same tanks were turned upside down and press to get more liquid out. We were told that the next morning, they would be taken out of these smaller tanks and wrapped in wax to sit for 6 months before they are taken to the stores. 1000 L of milk makes one large round of cheese. They had one smaller container as well holding less and a softer kind of cheese. I watched one of the employees take the cheese out of the tank, cut it in half (two shallower rounds, not two semi-circles) with a wire and then press it back into the frame.

After this, we had some time to relax at the house before lunch...Karen napped, and I did some blogging. Once lunch was finished, we headed into the hospital to visit Lydie and Kezia. Lydie had had an emergency C-section the previous Friday (a week overdue) because they couldn't find the baby's heartbeat. However, mom and baby were doing well, if a bit sore yet for Lydie. She was expecting to be in the hospital for another two or three days yet.

Karen and Christof went out to milk cows again at 5, while I took a brief walk outside, trying to capture some of the gorgeous scenery and chalets. For dinner back at the house, we had a simple dinner of bread, salad and Emmental cheese...yes, the same kind of cheese we had watched being made that morning with Christof's milk. Christof made a fire in the wood stove in both the morning and evening that day to take the chill out of the air and help dry our clothes (we had done laundry there)--definitely our coldest weather for the entire trip. It was nice to stand by a wood fire again after being away from it for a year.