Archive for chaï

Tea days

Posted in Mountains, pictures, Travel, Wines with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 23, 2025 by xi'an

And on the same day I came upon the announcement that Indian Railways was trying to revive a switch from plastic cups to the traditional kulhads (clay cups) in trains and train stations. Which is presumably another still-born attempt at greenwashing, given the logistical challenges of procuring clay to village potters, producing millions of kulhads every day, delivering and storing unstandardised cups, and figuring out how to recycle them. Not mentioning that firing and carrying these cups also has an ecological impact. Better start a campaign of bring-your-own-cup (which I tried to impose for a few conferences, mostly unsuccessfully!)

Zurück nach Zürich

Posted in Travel with tags , , , , , on February 4, 2011 by xi'an

After a rather hectic morning where I had to saw through my bike locker because the key broke into the lock—luckily #1 only the front wheel was locked to the frame and to nothing else and luckily #2 it happened only a few hundred meters from home so I could push the bike on the back wheel and quietly saw away from suspicious looks!—, I had a smooth flight to Zürich for the workshop on Bayesian Inference for Latent Gaussian Models (which started yesterday). Rather paradoxically, since I did not spend that much time there, except for a few summer vacations, I always find travelling to Switzerland, either to the mountains or to cities like Bern and Zürich, a peculiar pleasure, as if I was coming back to a familiar place [I can fathom Olivier starting to roll his eyes!]… Getting out of the train station, I easily found my bearings from a visit a few years ago and stopped by the local Coop to buy several boxes of Chaï Rooibos I only find here. Using one of those beautiful 100 franc bills dedicated to Giacometti (whose birthplace I once visited during one of those summer vacations). Incidentally, the urban designer Le Corbusier only gets the 10 franc bill and this is even too much an honour in my opinion!