I'm a day late writing this. You'll have to excuse me, but I wasn't home yesterday.

Winter arrived at last - I already said it would, I read it in the news and saw the satellite images.
The Swiss didn't.
As usual Swiss drivers were taken by surprise.
"Oh!! What's that white stuff on the roads?!"
Drive carefully, don't do more than 30 kmh, it might be dangerous!
It is exactly the same every winter!
I could understand it in the Midlands of GB, where snow is rare and no-one has winter tires, but hey! Hello! We have a meter of snow in this corner of the world every year!

It took me 45 minutes to get down to the motorway as opposed to the usual 15.
On the motorway the inside lane was free of traffic, they were all playing 'traffic jam' in the outside lane.
I hope no-one was offended that I used the vacant lane - it was much quicker and I never heard of a law that prohibits use of both lanes in snow?

After weeks of warm, spring weather, the temperatures have dropped to around zero. All of a sudden it feels chill, I'll have to put my t-shirts back in the wardrobe for a few days until I acclimatise.

Uuhm - if anyone Swiss reads this blog ...
... there may be just a little snow tomorrow, but there will be snow on Saturday. Please don't play traffic jams, I'd like to get some shopping done!

You can ask anyone in St. Gallen - no-one owns a car, they all cycle or walk.

A place of work that can not be reached on foot, by bike at the very most, is almost in-acceptable for Swiss citizens.
One of the first questions presented to me, when I was interviewed for the job I have at the moment was:
"Are you sure it won't be too much for you to drive 40 kmh to work every day?"
I replied, that I had regularly commuted backwards and forwards between Stuttgart and St. Gallen (250 km) previously - that seemed to stump them.

The question is, though, if no-one in St. Gallen owns a car (or Zurich/Bern/Lucerne etc. for that matter - they all say the same) why is it, that there is never ever a parking space available when you need one?

I used to have a lady-friend in SG. I was never once on time when I visited her, because I always spent an hour driving around looking for a parking slot!
Hardly any of the houses in SG have garages and the roads are packed tight with parked cars. The parking spaces I found, more often than not entailed either a twenty-minute-walk or a steep fine.
I gave up in the end, it was just too nerve wracking, I exchanged her for a lady in the countryside!

Worse still, though, are the multi story car parks in towns and shopping centres. There are enough of those, but the Swiss engineer that worked out how wide a parking space needs to be, probably owned an Austin 7, a Citroen 2CV or some other post-war model. The standard width of a Swiss paring slot is 190 cm. The result:
You can hardly open your door wide enough to squeeze out of, or in to the car. With inconsiderate drivers left and right, it is impossible to leave your vehicle!
[Please read carefully - nowhere on this page, does it state that the Swiss are inconsiderate drivers, the Swiss don't have cars - they say.]

On Saturday I drove into a supermarket Parkhaus. I turned round to get my shopping bag off the rear seat and while I was doing so, someone drove into the slot next to me, jumped out of his car - beep-beep - and walked off leaving me stranded in my car! I sounded my horn irately, but he just ignored the noise and disappeared into the crowds! In the end I had to reverse back out of the slot and find another one!
Bu**er the ba***rd!

It is interesting, by the way, in this tiny country where no-one owns a car, how many American vehicles you see around - and not a single one of them fits into a Swiss parking slot!

12 °C

Looking out of the window I can see blue skies and green meadows, at the same time it is trying to snow.
Yesterday I went for a stroll along the shore of the Lake of Constance.
I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans and wondering why on earth I hadn't used the motorbike to get there.

The weather gods have either taken a holiday, or they have gone entirely mad!
We are used to storms passing over Europe and over the years ferries have been sunk (North Sea 1953), Coasts have been flooded (Eastern England and Holland 1962) and there have been regular storms in Northern Scotland, the Hebrides and Scandinavia. It does, however, look as if the global climate changes (be they man made or natural) are slowly moving south.
Christmas 1999 the twin Cyclones Lothar and Martin passed over Central Europe, killing over 100 people in France, Germany and Switzerland.
This year Hurricane Kyrill dropped in on Europe killing more than 40 and creating general havoc. Both Lothar and Kyrill reached top speeds of 200 kmh, Kyrill blew for two days and one night.

On my way home on Thursday evening, I passed a car that had been blown off the road, across some railway tracks and into the concrete embankment. The police came along and fined the driver for loosing control of his vehicle!
The driver was lucky that train services had been discontinued - A short while earlier, just six miles away, a 20-ton-train was lifted off the rails by the wind. I wonder if they fined the train driver too?

Meteorologists are now promising, that winter will begin next week in earnest. Temperatures will drop dramatically, they say: Snow by Tuesday and -10 °C by Thursday. Who knows - perhaps the skiing resorts will be able to switch their lifts on this season after all and prevent some businesses from going bottom-up.

Which reminds me - I'll have to check my winter tires. I've been driving around on dry roads now for four months, in the meantime they are very nearly as smooth as my summer tires!
Image courtesy of tagesanzeiger.ch

Oh! Hi! Remember me?
I used to have a blog here!

Today I had the chance of driving to Basel to meet some fellow expat-bloggers.
Because I already had other plans, I was unable to.
This morning my plans were abruptly cancelled, but I just couldn't be bothered to get in the car and drive the 2.5 hours to Basel.

Instead I went out and took some pics around the house.
We have blue skies. We have marigolds and catkins in flower and green, green, green
almost as far as the eye can see!
And my kittens have started catching mice, which wasn't supposed to happen until April, when the snow usually melts.
One of the nicest spring-days I can remember! Especially for mid January!
Some people call the climate change global warming - I wonder what they called it the last time the ice that covered Europe receded. Anyone remember?

If you want to see what it looks like here at the moment you may look at a panorama here, or a Quicktime VR (24 Mb) of the same scene here my first attempt at a QTVR, so don't be too critical!