Cave Dining

Being a CPA, I am required to attend various trainings to keep up to date with current issues, policies, etc. As such, I just attended the firm sponsored Audit Conference in Brunnen, Switzerland. While Brunnen is a cute Swiss town located on Lake Luzern, and the hotel we stayed at had lake front property, the actual conference was about as exciting as one might expect…180 auditors and accoutants discussing, what else, accounting, for two solid days…snore. I was painfully bored, and this is my job. The low point of the conference was when one of the presenters thought it would be more appropriate to present in German, rather than English. And did I mention his presentation was the first one of the day at 8:30, on Friday, after a night out.

The highlight of the conference was dinner the previous evening which happened to take place in a cave… in the side of a mountain…behind a waterfall. Yup, it was true life Disneyland. Who knew these places actually existed!? We took a cog-wheel train up the side of the mountain and then “hiked” about 10 minutes to a beautiful waterfall, behind which there was a large cave lit with white lights and candles. The food itself was traditional Swiss: raclette cheese and alpine macaroni, but the ambiance more than made up for the lack of decent desserts. The dinner concluded with Swiss Coffee; a combination of coffee and schnapps which has to be “clear enough” to see the date on a 5 franc coin when dropped in. If the date is undeterminable there is too much coffee in your “coffee”. I am not sure if it was the bad lighting or my bad eyesight, but by the time I could finally read the date, my drink was more schnapps with a coffee chaser than a coffee with schnapps.