Day 60 continued…Rorbas.. 61kangaroo for lunch.

 ….so, I turned back, but I had only been walking about 2 minutes when I spotted some objects lined up in a garage which would solve some of the puzzle. They were new headstones ready to go out to the cemetery. Quite unbelievable. I went over and had a bit of a look at them, and then I saw an older man inside the garage. I started chatting, he didn’t know any English and I didn’t know any German! But we chatted, with me asking "where is the cemetery" and doing actions of digging, dying and lying down in the grave. Not sure if he interpreted me correctly, he may have thought I wanted to order a headstone. And then he took me across the road and I thought he was going to point the way to the cemetery, but he knocked on someone’s door and a lady came out who spoke English. Great, she was most helpful. She said the burial system here is different from other countries in that they do not retain headstones more than a generation or 2. So there’s no point going to the new cemetery to look for old headstones because there aren’t any, and this is a very new cemetery, so the old one in Rorbas, which I’d already seen and eliminated from my search, would be better. Ok, I thanked them both for this information, and went on my way, realising that I would not be finding any Rietiker history from cemeteries. But I did now know that the local spelling was Riediker.

i caught the train back to Zurich knowing that I wouldn’t need to return to Rorbas the next day. Langstrasse was humming because it was Saturday night. The first 2 races of the Americas Cup started at 10 15 pm so I was glued to the live blog and we won both races in SF. 2 nil to Team New Zealand, and Oracle are stuck on minus 2. I’ll be there Monday. 

61 so I had a bit of a lie in this morning, as its a sort of free unplanned day. I set off to explore about 1030, and it was drizzly rain but still quite warm. A nice walk down to the lake, and found an Aussie restaurant where I had kangaroo sausages and mashed potato, my only prior contact with kangaroos have been in zoos. Not bad, but nothing to write home about, but interesting enough to write in OD. I didn’t think the taste was much different from beef, to be honest. 

And I met another Kiwi! A young guy stopped me and asked about good restaurants, he may have spotted my badges on my jacket. He was from Rotorua, and I sent him on his way to the Aussie restaurant!

Ok, packing up in the morning for San Fran flight. Only 9 days left, panic panic…. Better head out for food again, but a lot of places are closed as its Sunday……