I always dreamt of opening a cheese shop, selling the best cheeses (most prominently from France) and good wines to go with them.
If I'm ever going to fulfil my dream, I most certainly have to leave Appenzell first.

Whenever I visit a market here, there are always two or three locals selling their home made cheese.
You may go to any of the local supermarkets and find yards of cheese on display, most of it with signs that say 'Local Produce'.
Driving around the area or hiking the mountains, even, you will see signs that pronounce 'Chäs vom Buur/Farmhouse Cheese'.

I can spend hours at the various sales points, wondering whether to take the cheese from Village x, Cloister y or Alp z, whether I might prefer the raw milk, or the pasteurised and which of the goat's cheeses will be better.

There are cheeses with caraway, bear's garlic, mountain herbs, peppercorns, olives, and you may choose between young, medium, mature or very mature - some of them even look as if they could move of their own accord.

The strange thing though, is that between April and October (that is another story, but I still have to do some maths), I seldom see people buying cheese here. There can be queues three deep at the meat and cooked meat counters, but I get served without delay, when I buy cheese. The locals, trying to sell their ware at market, always look a little cheesed off and the paths leading to the farmhouse cheese are deserted.

The meadows around my house are flooded with the sound of cow bells. The milk from those cows goes to the local dairy where 120 loaves of cheese are produced every day - you know, those big, round loaves. The cows produce milk on Sundays too and they don't have holidays, so that means 43,800 loaves of cheese a year - just the one dairy.
There is a dairy in the next village too, and the next but one!

If the people of Appenzell don't eat all that cheese, who eats it then?
There must be mountains of the stuff somewhere,
Hang on ...
I wonder if that's why the mountains here are so high?