Montreux-Vevey: My life in the Riviera

The stories that I have so far shared with you are from 2003.That was the time when I was outside India for the first time.I had to rake my brain and really try hard to remember some of the details of those journeys.But I have lived for a long time in Switzerland and other European countries since then. And it is somewhat difficult for me to remember the cultural shocks that I experienced at that time.
Yet today, I intend to tell you about my everyday life as it was in Switzerland and the way I adopted with that life. I have lived in three different houses in the Swiss riviera in three different times.The place I lived first was Bonivard that I described in my older posts.From there,the nearest shops were quite far away.I had to take a bus and go to Montreux which was 5-6 stops away.The journey was,however, really beautiful.Imagine me, a girl from a suburb near Kolkata, the most crowded city in India, who was a daily passenger in the madly crowded trains that come to Kolkata from those suburbs, sitting in the beautiful trolley bus looking out of the enormous windows at the lake Geneve....

These buses are actually all windows.They have very small rails separating one window from another...so the feeling is never of being inside some closed carriage, rather of  moving through the town and by the side of the lake in an open carriage.These buses move like trums, but not on rails.They are linked with the electric lines on the top as trums in India are. This 1 Vevey Funi is the bus that I used to board whenever I needed to go to Montreux for my shopping. And the route of this bus is just by the lake.
Unlike in our country,here the cheaper option is always the shopping malls and supermarkets.In Kolkata, we still regard supermarkets as fancy new options where the quite well off families go to experience the flavour of life in the western world. And in 2003 there were very few supermarkets in Kolkata.
In Montreux,there is a big shopping mall called Forum.There are a variety of shops there including Migros,Vogle and a Mac too. The most popular supermarket chain in Switzerland is the Migros.That is where I used to buy my vegetables,chicken,prawns and lamb....Yes,lamb replaced our usual goat meat.And salmon or saumon as the French call it, was the fish we bought. I bought other groceries like wheat, milk, oil,etc. from another market chain called the Denner.Denner is the cheap option and it saved us a lot of francs.


Usefull links: The Riviera Bus-VMCV
                   Montreux-vevey Tourism