Bats and frogs and fish, oh my

We went for a short walk last night - himself persuaded me to go out just as it was getting dark. I didn't need much persuading as I'd been indoors all day working. I was a little worried when I saw a flash of lightning while waiting for the train, but I'll get back to that...

It was spitting rain when we got to the station two up from ours that links to the lovely woodland/riverside trail. We crossed under the platform (where some police were talking to what looked like a group of travellers, but it didn't seem confrontational) and across the stream to walk under the trees - which were full of bats! They were wheeling and swinging between the trees and the water, and I'm sure they were having a feast as the air was full of midges. They looked quite small and there seemed to be quite a few (well, there could have been two of them following us too). We carried on as the rain wasn't so bad, and just as we were having second thoughts we found one of the created ponds fenced off at the side of the path. There had been frog spawn there before so we decided to look and see if there were any frogs now. Himself shone his bike light in... there must have been about 20 frogs. We don't know if the light set them off or what happened, but they started croaking in a huge range of tones and pitches and frequencies and we just stood there and laughed in the wind and rain.

We eventually decided to cut back across to the station one up from ours and get the train the rest of the way back. But it was well worth getting wet for.

In other news, I braved the fish counter today. Although I still have problems understanding Swiss German, it does seem to be true that if you speak standard/High/German German you will be understood. Not that it's that difficult to ask for 200g of wild salmon. When you can point for half of it. It was on sale and looks amazing. I'm going to have it for dinner tonight with some organic courgettes and (normal) mushrooms. Strawberries are in too! I got 500g of them for 1.90 CHF (down from 2.50) which was nice. Especially as I paid almost that much for a single red pepper last week.