Perhaps a fitting title for the time of year?

Peace!
Standing in the Swiss meadow, I take in the tinkling of the sheep's bells, the rhythmic 'dong, dong, dong' of the cowbells as they munch the grass, the twittering of the birds as they go about their business.
The sky is blue and the snow-capped mountains look crisp and beautiful in the morning sun.
Allaa eea eea eeahh!

The serenity of my surroundings is suddenly disturbed by the tinny call of the Mullah as he calls people to prayer from his minaret!



The SVP began one of their usual discriminating campaigns this autumn and called people to vote against the building of minarets in Switzerland. As usual the posters were defaced or ripped from the walls but, surprisingly, the Swiss people went to vote and decided that minarets shouldn't be built here in Switzerland.

Tit for tat you might say, after all, Christians aren't allowed to build their churches in Muslim or Islamic communities, so why should Muslims be allowed to build their houses of worship in Europe?
Well, European constitution stipulates freedom of religion, for one thing!
I'm not quite sure what it was that moved the Swiss to vote as they did. Although I respect the fact that it is [usually] the people that decide what may or may not come to pass in Switzerland, I think the SVP successfully created a vision of minarets being built in Swiss areas of beauty.
That is rather short-sighted. I would expect any Minaret to be built close to a Muslim or Islam community, and I can't see any such community being situated outside the main cities.
Any building erected in Switzerland is, just like anywhere else in Europe, subject to rules and regulations. This means it would not be possible to build a minaret anywhere close to open landscape or living areas where the rules stipulate that no building may be erected that is higher than two stories. This poses quite a restriction, I would say.

I recently visited a Buddhist temple. A marvelous building in bright red and yellow, with a roof of gold.
It sat right next to the Aldi car-park in the middle of Gretzenbach's industrial area.
It is visited by Buddhist from all over Switzerland — it is, after all, the only one in Switzerland.
Why is it the only one? Not, I think, because Swiss Buddhist enjoy traveling between two and four hours to worship, but because building any house-of-worship devours enormous sums of money — almost impossible for small communities.
The Buddhist temple wouldn't be in Switzerland if the King-of-Thailand's-Mom hadn't paid for it to be built.
The same applies, I think to minarets — 4% of the Swiss community is Muslim. Without help from abroad, not too many more mosques (there are 90 already, with and without minarets) are going to jump up in the Swiss mountains.

This time, I think, the Swiss were ill informed before they went to vote and didn't take the time to inform themselves of the present situation ...

The leaves are changing colour again and up here in the mountains, this always goes hand-in-hand with some of the most amazing morning views.



Here is one I photographed on Wednesday morning. Click to see the larger version.

They actually finished renovating the north side of the house a few weeks ago!
Watching them at work, it really is no wonder that it took them so long ...
... they nailed up the shingles one at a time!



Really, the guy doing the work nailed a piece of metal to the wall, aligned a shingle to the metal and shot two staples into it. Took the next shingle, aligned it to the metal and shot two staples into it. Took the next shingle ...
Amazing!
After doing this sort of work for over two hundred years, now, you'd think they'd have discovered a swifter way to work. Well, not here.

They say that the Swiss are slow (the Swiss say it's only the people from Basel that are slow, but I beg to differ!). Watching them work makes me fall asleep!
If anybody from the Swiss-Wall-Cladding-Industry wants a tip on how to speed things up - just give me a call ...



At least the shingles are wood, though, before work was started, I was afraid they were going to use the cheaper, asbestos version that some newer houses are clad in.

My Landlady, it would seem, never had the pleasure of living in an Appenzeller farmhouse.
If she had, she would understand why they were built the way they were ...

Remember those romantic pictures you saw, of those Swiss chalets with their shutters?
The Appenzeller were very clever, when they designed their houses – the shutters were designed to be retractable.
They can be lowered or raised, as needed.
The solid wooden blinds can be pulled up to keep out the heat or the cold and can be set to just a slit, to let in fresh air while keeping burglars at bay. They protect the windows against the numerous hail storms we have and, for housewives, there is the interesting fact, that they prevent them from getting dirty when it rains.



As I mentioned, the north side of this house is being renovated. When the old window frames were ripped out, the blinds disappeared with them. I asked why this was the case and was informed that the new windows supply enough insulation to hold the heat during winter ...
When I asked about the fresh air during the summer, I could actually hear the blank stare on the other end of the telephone line!
So now I have windows that keep in the heat, all the year round!



I don't know, but I thought you'd give some thought to a properties construction before starting to renovate, I know I would ...

I've mentioned before that the house I live in was built in seventeen-something.
Obviously it doesn't conform to any ISO Standards regarding insulation.
The northern side of the house was last insulated in 1924.
The insulation in those days consisted of sheets of tar-paper and a coat of shingles.
How do I know it was 1924?
Speculation really. I found a newspaper from that year that had been used to fill in a gap between two beams.

Last November, a chap knocked on the door, saying he'd been sent along to check the insulation.
He looked at the windows, tapped on walls, hmm'd and hah'd, took some notes and some infra-red photographs – both from inside and out.

Eight weeks ago scaffolding appeared on the north side of the house and next day, at six in the morning, I was rudely awoken by banging and tearing sounds and the smell of cigar smoke. There was a guy outside my bathroom window ripping the shingles off the outside wall. He came along at the same time every day for a fortnight and, regardless of the time, hacked away at the wall.
Surprisingly — when he noticed that I had guests staying — he found some quieter pastime until around 09:00. Each time he finished a floor, it was clad in pastic sheeting and, by the end of the fortnight, the whole of the house-front was coated in plastic.

It just so happened that it was the warmest time of this year, so far. The stench of the plastic was terrible and, of course, no air could get in to, or out of the house. It was suffocating!
It took a fortnight for the next team of workers to arrive. They put up a wooden framework and, when they were finished, obviously took measurements for the new window encasements. That was just over six weeks ago. The house has been clad in plastic again ever since.

On Friday the new windows arrived and I had proof of the fact that some form of co-ordination must secretly be taking place. Workers from two different companies climbed the house – one from the inside, one from outside. Those outside ripped out the old window encasements. The one inside ripped out the windows, sawed away at the walls around the windows and began fitting new windows.
I got the shock of my life when I arrived at the scene. Everything within three meters of the window frames was coated in sawdust and wood chippings.



After seeing me, open-mouthed, studying the chaos, the carpenter put down his circular saw and, realising what my problem was, explained — the guys outside had ripped out the window frames without bothering to cover anything up and, seeing the mess, he'd decided it was no longer worth going to the trouble either ...

Pine sawdust is slightly oily. I now have pine sawdust all over the crockery that was stored on shelves next to the windows, in the sugar bowl, the bread bin, in and all over my coffee machine — just everywhere.
When I got up yesterday, even more sawdust had settled and I was at a loss where to start cleaning.
I eventually started with the ceilings and slowly worked my way down. I'm almost finished in the kitchen now; only another six windows to go ...

I told you about our Apprentices practical examination?
Well, she went on to do a couple of days of theoretical exams and all the hard work she put in over the last five years payed off — she passed.
I was proud to accompany her to her Diploma Celebration and more than willing to arrange the traditional initiation ceremony for her.
Since very early years, Printers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland have been initiated after becoming a journeyman. The initiation may be carried through in other countries too – in German the ceremony is called 'Gautschen'. Over the years, the ceremony has been extended to take in not just printers but most pre-press apprentices too. We had our Gautschfest last Friday.

There were two young ladies to be initiated, this time round. One because she just passed her exams, the other because she passed her exams twelve months ago, but was not initiated by the company she did her apprenticeship at. Now we can't have that, can we?

So what happens at a Gautschfest?
At a prearranged time both ladies were supposed to be bound, hands and feet and carried or frog-marched downstairs, where two barrows were waiting to cart them off to the village fountain.
Two of our men were clever enough to creep up on their (almost) unsuspecting victim and close her office door to prevent her escape, before successfully overpowering her.
The other two weren't so lucky they were spotted and the young lady defended herself with a water pistol, of all things, before taking off .
I chased her down two flights of stairs before loosing my footing – luckily without serious injury.
The other guys caught up with her on the car-park. She put up a fight and I was forced to stop photographing and take hold of her so that the ceremony could commence!

Both ladies were bundled into carts and transported to the village fountain a kilometer away. There the ceremony master was waiting for them. His speech called for them to be sat upon wet sponges until their nether regions were well and truly wet. He then called for their christening – with buckets of water.
After the christening the ladies were freed from their bonds (well, they were supposed to be) and dropped into the fountain. As the fountain had specially been cleaned and refilled just the day before, the water was freezing – I can assure you.

The delinquents then had to pull their carts back to work, where a barbeque had been prepared in their absence.

They were lucky they only got wet.
Until two-hundred years ago the fresh journeyman was set under the influence for a week. During this period, a tooth was extracted, his hair was shorn (as badly as possible) and his colleagues all got as drunk as possible too. The initiation was banned after getting out of hand.
Not to be done out of a celebration, this modern form of initiation soon reappeared soon after the ban.
I quite enjoyed it.
I hope you enjoy the pictures ...

I just cut some buns open and popped them under the grill ...
The Hamburgers should be done any minute now.
Who told cows they should stand under trees during a thunderstorm anyway?

We've had a number of thunderstorms, these last few weeks.
During one of them, my friends daughter's dad rang. After they had conversed fo a few minutes, the box on the wall went 'Zzzztt!!' and the phone went dead. I couldn't believe the phone was dead — the internet connection was still working.
However, no amount of button pushing would revive the phone and in the end I called Swisscom on my mobile to ask for assistance.

The woman on the other end was very sympathetic.
"W'rum hänse telefonieret, wenn's gwittret?!" She demanded to know.
Why were you using the phone during a thunderstorm?!
Apparently, when the phone rang, I was expected to jump up and yell
"Stand back! Don't touch it!"

She was so kind.
She offered to send a technician within the next three days.
Well, that's nice of you, I'll just take the next few days off work, then, so I'm sure to be here when the guy arrives ...
Any chance of something a little more precise?
Friday morning between 07:00 and 10:00 was her answer.
For the two days in between, she would have all my calls diverted to my mobile.

I do, so like Switzerland's Customer Services.

Oh, there you are — a flash of lightning — I'll have to take a look and see, if my cows are done yet ...

A friend recently came over for dinner.
During dinner she repeatedly stopped chewing and cocked her head to one side,
After a while, she informed me:
"I could never live here!"

I suppose it's a good thing I hadn't invited her to come and live here!

Yesterday, the rain would have made things easier for her.
The cows were huddled tightly together under the trees and somehow managed not to move at all.
The sound of cow bells was gone!

I'm sometimes amazed at the things that disturb people.
Friends who spent the night here once, got up in the middle of the night to put planks of wood under the flow of the spring outside because the sound of the water was preventing them from sleeping.
Strangely the water will very occasionally stop flowing for a few minutes —
that's when I wake up!

The ultimate torture for some, obviously, would be the nights when a couple of cows come and lie down next to the spring to chew the cud. And then, at five in the morning, the cockerel down the road begins to crow.
I think it's idyllic.
Some, for some reason, don't ...

I have lived close to St.Gallen, now, for nearly ten years.
Before that, I worked in St.Gallen for six years.
In those 15 years I have noticed that they have a strange custom ...
... the St.Galler Open Air Festival is always held at the worst possible time of the year.

Do you remember Woodstock?
Remember the weather on the third day of the event — the Sunday?
Right — it teemed down with rain and gusts of wind threatened to topple the lighting masts.
Well, that is what the weather at the St.Galler Open Air Festival is usually like!

I worked in a building situated at one of the festival entrances for ten years and I stood at the window many a year to watch hunched up figures, carrying rucksacks and tents, shuffle through the mud towards a weekend of music, alcohol, marihuana and muck.

Yesterday was only slightly different.
After two weeks of constant rain, the tight valley which hosts the event was waterlogged.
At midday, yesterday, the weather suddenly brightened and hordes of people clothed in t-shirts and rucksacks emerged from St.Gallen main station happily puffing away at joints and lifting their smiling faces to the skies.
They made their way by bus to the soggy meadows of Sittertal, to pitch their tents and, as the first performances were already on Thursday evening, I don't really want to try to imagine the results, but I'm sure that by the time Cypress Hill appeared on stage at around 23:00, people were, in places, already ankle deep in the mire.
Just to put the icing on the cake, while The Niceguys and The Flaming Lips and The Cold War Kids were on stage (there are four different stages to get wet at), entertainment began in earnest; it rained in buckets full for two hours!

Luckily, by 05:00 this morning it stopped raining for about four hours, so anyone already awake might have breakfasted in relative dryness, from the knees up, at least.
There is more rain to come during today and the forecast is for rain until next Friday.
I bet they'll have fun clearing the mess up afterwards!



The images above are from previous years, courtesy of Stadt St.Gallen (St.Gallen can do it.) and Flickr.
The image below is from today, courtesy of the organisers . The make-shift sign says
"Warning – Damp areas & Danger of splashing"

If you are wondering what you are missing, here is the programme.
Although there is some great music being presented, I can assure you, I shan't be there. Again.

Have you ever had someone tell you that you live in a world of your own?
Well, with my new lens, I can prove that I do.



Click to see the larger version.

Sandra commented on my last post that Schwiizerdüütsch (Swiss German) is a spoken and not a written language.
Strange, I was under a very different impression. In the past nine years, I seldom received anything in writing from a Swiss colleague or acquaintance that wasn't written in Swiss German. I have post cards, e-mails, text messages and chat messages to prove it — all of them unintelligible.

I'll explain what Sandra meant.*
Because the official language in northern Switzerland is German, some rules have to exist governing orthography and grammar. The Germans have been working on the rules for many years now and supply them in the shape of a Duden — the official reference books for the German language. The Duden even contains a number of words that are only used in Switzerland, just to make sure the Swiss know how to spell them. **
Because The Rules only govern High German and the Swiss never bothered to jot down the rules for Swiss German, we have a free-for-all when anyone wishes to write in their everyday language. The result is chaotic.

One of the things people here lament when they acquire a new mobile telephone, is the fact that the text programmes are set to T9.
"You can't write an SMS", they moan [Short Message Service].
T9, for the uninformed, tries to guess what you intend to write and, as soon as you have typed two characters, will begin to suggest words for auto-completion.
It can't speak Schwiizerdüütsch!

Here are two examples of written chaos:
At work there is a group of between eight and ten colleagues that cook for each other every Friday. I sent a chat to one of them asking who was due to cook, the coming Friday. The answer:
"Hemmo nonig abgmacht, luägemo denn vorzuä amel."
The translation, or thereabout:
"Wir haben's noch nicht abgemacht, wir schauen [entscheiden] dann laufend [immer]."
We haven't reached an agreement yet, we decide as the occasion arises."
If you study the two different versions of German, I'm sure you'll notice the similarities.

I sometimes ask for a translation but this particular young lady is incapable of writing High German — and I'm not joking.
A gem that she was unable to supply a written translation for and I don't understand even now:
I asked if she had produced a specific design ...
"Nei, abo übonoo so wjä sie's mer gshickt ka hend..."
I gathered she was trying to tell me that someone had sent it to her. Bele, one of my readers, sent me the translation:
"Nein, aber so übernommen wie Sie es mir zugeschickt haben ..."
No, I used it as it was sent to me - so easy, when you see the correct solution.

I sometimes can't make up my mind which is worse – written Schwiizerdüütsch or the spoken Appenzeller dialect.

*Some people say that Swiss German is dialect. I'm not quite sure that a language that develops at different speeds in different regions doesn't become several languages ...
Take Gaelic, for instance. Both the Scots and the Irish speak Gaelic (which developed from Celtic) but they don't understand each other or the Welsh (Celtic).

**Old High German, today, only used in Switzerland, it often states.

I had visitors from Germany last week.
An old friend 'C' and her daughter.
They stayed all week and I took them out sightseeing a couple of times.
Being German, C's German is pretty good — she even gets all her prepositions and tenses right, which I don't.

The Swiss around this area also speak German — at least, they think they do.
I've got used to the local Appenzeller and can make out 95% of what they are saying. In St.Gallen, I even understand 100%!
But please don't ask me to try to talk Swiss German — I couldn't, not in any of its many varieties.

We stood in St.Gallen watching a painter from a distance. She turned, saw us watching and said something like
"chaasch goluaga cho, wannst wötsch"
At the sound of those hair-balls being hacked up, C looked at me with a question mark planted in the middle of her face.
I translated:
"Du kannst näher kommen und schauen, wenn du möchtest." (You may come and take a closer look, if you wish).
Did you notice the similarities?

German and Swiss German started to evolve in different directions during the middle ages. To be honest with you I can't shake off the feeling that Swiss German remained standing, while German-German developed to todays standards.
By comparison Swiss German is grammatically much simpler than High German and has a much smaller vocabulary.

The Swiss think that the Germans are arrogant. The truth is, though, the further north a German comes from, the more precisely he or she will speak. This, combined with the fact that they have a more diversified vocabulary, easily gives the impression of arrogance. In actual fact he or she is not 'speaking down at you' its just the way they learned to speak the language.

On Wednesday we drove into Appenzell itself. You've heard of Appenzeller Cheese. Of course you have, you've probably even bought some, after all, it is exported all over the world.
C decided to buy some real Appenzeller cheese from a real Appenzeller dairy. Each of the different cheeses were labeled to state their degree of ripeness. Classic, Surchoix and Rääs amongst others.
Pointing at the cheese labeled Surchoix, C asked "Was ist das genau?"
"What is that exactly?"
She was rewarded with a string of guttural, hacking and nasal sounds.
Looking at me wide-eyed she asked "What language was that?"
"It was Appenzellerdüütsch," I replied "but don't ask me what he said, I haven't a clue!"

As I said, I can understand my local neighbours when they speak their version of Appenzeller German (Appenzell Outer Rhode), but five miles down the road is the Border to Appenzell Inner Rhode, the smallest of the Swiss Cantons.
When you cross the border, there should be a sign to say "Warning, you are leaving the German Sector!"
Crickey! I understand more Welsh ...

So here's the second picture, taken with the new lens ...
... not quite in focus, I'm afraid – still working on that!



To see the larger version, you will need to have QuickTime installed.
You will also need a little patience, it is quite large.

Why is it the second picture?
Because the first was taken in St.Gallen – here it is:


Focal length: 12 mm; Apperture: 8; Exposure: 250

There is no larger version of this one online yet, but I'm sure a new gallery will be published soon ...

For four years now, my apprentice has been training to be a Typograph/Media-Producer.
This week she had to take her practical examination.

It is interesting that in Germany they sent the exams along to the instructor with the request to make sure they were carried out correctly. In Switzerland, an 'expert' comes along to supervise.

The lady responsible for supervising our examinations first explained the exercises that were to be carried out and, when she was sure the instructions were clear, she pressed the button on her stop-watch.
She was a little put out that she couldn't sit next to the examinee, but the poor girl was nervous enough, without having a stranger breathing down her neck for two-and-a-half days.

Instead I seated our expert in the office opposite where she could see who went in and out, but couldn't actually see the apprentice without taking a few steps first. I certainly wasn't making life easy for her.
I gave her a coffee and watched her twiddle her thumbs and flip through her diary for a few minutes before I settled down to watch my protégé's screen from the comfort of my own computer, sending her the odd tip via chat now and again ...
You don't want someone to ruin four years hard work, just because they are nervous.

The Pre-Press exam is fairly straight-forward — unless, of course, you are a bundle of nerves:
• Colour-correction and exact cropping of three digital images; a picture composition put together from two images and a cut-out with some retouching work – 2 hours.
• Reproduction of a two-sided order-card to exact design 'drawings' – 4 hours.
• Design and production of a sixteen-page brochure, from initial scribbles (to be submitted) to finished print-data and presentation mock-up – 12 hours.
• Correct colour-profiles embedded in all files and everything saved to a CD after a specific file-structure.
After 19 hours points are deducted every 15 minutes taken, after 20 hours the exercise is broken off. Failure.

Every now and then, a colleague would distract the expert while a few tips were given or corrections suggested and during the midday break everything was checked and double checked. Another colleague made sure that the meal was drawn out a little ...

I heard of one young lady, who returned to her desk on Thursday evening after 'her' expert had left and spent half the night correcting and completing her work. We didn't have to resort to such drastic measures, we just spent a lot of time coaching and becalming ...

The mock-up presented a few problems because it had to be larger than A3 [420 mm x 297 mm]. The examination committee presumes that everybody has an A2 printer that wil print, bind and trim all in one go. Our A3 printer doesn't and is too small anyway!
I asked the expert to turn a blind-eye, while I helped produce the mock-up.
She did.

I got the thumbs up yesterday when I asked for the experts opinion on the results (I knew so anyway, but I wanted my protégé to see it).

Now we have to endure two days of theoretical exams. We can't help there, I'm afraid, those have to be taken at school ...

I'm sure you've read numerous reports about [lack of] Swiss hospitality and Customer Service and I'm sure you can remember that some sort of football championships were held here last year.
I told you what the results would be ...
... no, not the football results, but the result that Swiss courtesy would have on tourism – bookings have dropped by twenty percent.
Can that be coincidence?

Yesterday I asked a computer-supermarket-assistant where I might find a USB adapter set.
She shrugged her shoulders and told me she had no idea. Did she call a colleague and ask for help?
No.
I found what I wanted in the end after walking up and down endless rows of computer accessories.
This is just typical of what to expect when you visit Switzerland. Not just in shops but in hotels and restaurants too.
And does it end there?

I ordered three tubes of toothpaste in England. They were sent to me via Royal Mail and cost £14 including postage.
A week later a bill arrived from Swiss cutoms – CHF 60, an equivalent of £35!
I immediately phoned to complain and was informed that customs taxes are calculated by the size of the parcel.
I mentioned the fact that I had a receipt for CHF 20 which already included astronomically high VAT and was informed, in not so many words, that that was my bad luck!
I ordered a screw in the USA. Because it was custom made, it cost $60. Postage also came to $60.
Customs taxes? $60!
$120 for a single (albeit specialised) screw.

I am agog to know the result of my latest strife with Swiss customs.
Three weeks ago I bought a camera lens in an auction on ebay.
After a week, I contacted the guy I purchased from to ask if he'd actually posted the thing off. He assured me he'd sent it off with Royal Mail the same day.
I phoned Swiss Postal services - sorry, without a tracking number, we can't trace a parcel.
Last week I phoned again. No results.
The day before yesterday a letter flattered through my letter box. Swiss Post Customs Services.
A notice that they have a parcel for me which has been declared correctly to be a camera lens.

So my parcel has been sitting on a shelf in Zürich while someone has been trying to decide how to tax it. Due to the size of the parcel, it will probably cost me what – CHF 40? But on the customs label it states camera lens – surely a lens is worth a lot of money?

The letter invited me to state honestly (they are kidding, surely) the value of the contents and to provide proof in form of a receipt.
If I am unable to provide proof within five days, the parcel will be returned to sender.
I posted off the PayPal receipt the same day underlining the words 'USED LENS'.
I wonder how long I shall have to wait, when I might receive my parcel and which costs might be added for the unexpected act of actually having to handle a parcel.

Keep this up you wonderful Swiss and you won't just be losing tourists, you'll be losing tax-payers too ...

... not with the sound of music but, after a long and enjoyable winter, they are very slowly growing colourful.





Down in the valley, spring is about a fortnight further advanced than up here, but the wait is still worth it ...

An ex-pat blog about life in Switzerland that I read regularly, posed the question this week 'What is Quark?'.
I was surprised to see that no-one had bothered to answer the question, so I thought perhaps a belated Aprilscherz (April Fools Joke) had been suspected.
Not the case — I wrote a reply explaining exactly what Quark is but my reply was rejected. The reason? "Bad Spam Word"!

I have no idea which word is supposed to be a spam word — perhaps it was 'Tuffet'?

Before moving to Switzerland, I lived in the south of Germany for almost thirty years. There, Quark is regularly served (most especially on a Friday) with potatoes and Schnittlauch — chives.

So what is Quark exactly?
This was, of course, my first question as a plate full of the stuff was placed before me.
The answer was provided by the Schöffler-Weis German and English dictionary — these were pre-www-days!
Curds!

O.K. so what are curds? Well I knew that Miss Muffet ate them together with whey, but although they were apparently everyday ingredients for a staple diet in Britain 200 years ago, no-one had deemed them fit to be served, in our family at least, during the 20th century.

Curds, I eventually found out, sadly without the assistance of Wikipedia 'in those days', are a form of fresh cheese. Lactic acid is added to milk which separates into curds and whey. If you leave it to stand, long enough, the curds will harden and turn into cheese.
The Germans, Austrians, Swiss and the Alsatians stir the whey back into the Quark to prevent it from hardening — presumably, this too is what Miss Muffet was enjoying before her meal was so rudely disturbed.

The fat content is, amazingly, 0.2% so, to make it unhealthier, cream is usually added.
I have to admit, spiced with a little salt and chopped cloves, served with boiled potatoes, it really is delicious.

Some but not all of the whey is stirred into the Quark, so what happens to the rest?
As you can read on the blog mentioned above, it is all shipped off to a factory in Rothrist, Switzerland, where it is turned into fizzy pop!
Fizzy pop, produced from sour milk?!
Sounds terrible — tastes great!
Really.

Now, what's a tuffet ...

When talking to friends and relatives on the phone, the most common question is 'What's the weather doing?'.
The question, although so very British, is not confined to the people I talk to in Britain — my German friends ask it just as often.

At the moment the question has been refined to 'Have you still got snow?'
The answer is 'No — it's gone.'

To prove it, here are two pictures, taken just ten minutes ago:





You see — no snow, it's gone, almost.

By comparison, here is a picture taken a fortnight ago:



See the difference?
Correct — we have bare patches now, we didn't last week ...

In Zürich recently, I saw sign in a restaurant advertising, if I remember rightly, "Kuddla" which I recognised to be Kutteln – tripe ...

I know that offal is not to everyones taste, but I've eaten tripe in a couple of different countries – and always enjoyed it.

Callos - Spanish tripe (meaning it is probably pork and not that of a Spaniard) with chick-peas, red peppers and pork suasage-meat similar to black-pudding.
Pakal-Pörkölt - A spicy Hungarian stew with tripe and red peppers.
Iskembe - A Turkish tripe dish similar to Swabian kutteln, but with garlic.
Saure Kutteln - A Swabian (Southern Germany) tripe dish soured with vinegar and/or lemon juice.
Trippa alla livornese - An Italian version of tripe with tomato sauce (what else?!) garlic and parmesan cheese.
Trippa alla Romana - Italian again, with – wait for it – tomato sauce, white wine and (who'd have guessed?) permesan.
Tripes - The French version of tripe and onions
'our' own, British version of tripe and onions, of course. And not forgetting:
Haggis which is a Scottish pudding with oatmeal, suet, all sorts of offal, wrapped up in a sheep's stomach and served with turnip and potatoes. (And best washed down with a wee dram!)

I'd never eaten tripe in Switzerland before, so I decided to give it a go.
However, not wanting any surprises, I asked the waiter, who was also the bartender and presumably the owner,
'Wie werden Kutteln ind dieser Gegend zubereitet?'
'How do you prepare tripe in this part of the world?'

He gave me an angry stare at the audacity of my question, and replied:
'So wie Chuddla eben gemacht wäret!' (He almost choked on the 'ch')
'Exactly the way Kutteln are prepared!'

I couldn't quite make up my mind whether to get up and leave or order, so he immediately prompted me
'Wönt ör jetzt öppis, oder nit?'
Do you want to order something or not.

This is the point where I should have got up and left, but, knowing that Swiss hospitality is the same just about everywhere and given that I was hungry, I ordered a beer and Kuddla.

For anyone unsure how tripe is cooked in Zürich – I would say it is somewhere between between livornese and Romana but without the white wine, garlic or parmesan cheese.
To be honest with you I found it rather bland; rather like Swiss hospitality.*

*Disclaimer: I refer here, not to the Swiss in general (although there are unfriendly people all over the world) but to the Swiss gastronomy and hotel business.

Have I talked about the Winter yet this year, about the snow?
I don't think I have, have I?



It was a little warmer, yesterday, than usual so the snow lost a little of its volume.
This picture was taken this morning.
When the thermometer in the car displayed this:



Take my word for it — that is slightly chilly!

Obviously you'll now be asking what the roads look like.
Well, I assure you, there is no need for concern — today they have been cleared
and look more or less like this for most of the way down to St.Gallen:



Two inches of packed snow.
In St.Gallen it is much warmer [-13°] and there is more traffic so a lot of the snow had disappeared from the roads by 07:00. Instead it was piled up on the pavements, where pedestrians had to fight to pass each other.



I do like the winter – don't you?

… Just as the sun was ri-ising …

I was lucky on Thursday.
We were not woken by the sound of the snow plough and there was no eerie silence after switching the alarm clock off.
A glance outside showed that no fresh snow had fallen –
life could commence as usual.

They have promised us a hard winter this time round. I don't know what that is supposed to mean, but I might have an inkling:
When I went to climb into the car to go to work, it was covered with a thick screen of ice. The temperature was minus ten degrees!

Not a great deal by Siberian standards, but we are in Switzerland and it is only November. The cold months don't arrive until February!

Luckily I'd thought to put one of those Aluminium blankets over my windscreen so that, at least, was free of ice.
I was, however unable to see out of the side windows.
Well, I sprayed the side windows and rear screen with ice remover (I don't even want to know what's in those bottles) and went back inside for a cup of coffee.

A few minutes later, I removed the sludge from the side windows with a squeegee and set off for work.
I arrived at work just ten minutes later than I had intended.
When I went to lift the hatch to get something out of the boot, it wouldn't lift on its own – there was a centimetre thick sheet of ice across the whole of it, except for the deep hole, where the wiper had been working.

Quite cold, I'd say …

We had snow last weekend, the first real snow this season.
Yes, we had an inch or two mid-October that lasted for a week, but that doesn't really count.
This weekend we awoke to a foot of fresh snow …



This part of the world is called Switzerland. We get snow here every year without fail. Lots of it.
You can always expect the first snow around mid-October – just a smattering to remind you what you are in for – but the same thing happens every year: You always get a number of drivers on the road that have never, ever seen the stuff before in their lives.
And that's just how they drive.

Some still have summer tyres on their cars, because, well, who would have expected snow at this time of year? (They've only been telling us ten-times-a-day-for-a-week, just what we are in for.)
They creep along the roads at a snails' pace. And you can guarantee to find one crawling along in front of you exactly on that stretch of road that you won't be able to overtake on for the next three kilometers.

Luckily the Swiss are well equipped to deal with snow.
If the snow fall is less than a meter overnight, you will be awoken at five in the morning by the sound of a snow plough. More snow, and your 'wake-up-call' will be earlier.
This means two things:
a) You should rise a little earlier than usual, so you don't get into a rush clearing the snow off your vehicle.
b) The roads will be clear of snow (unless you are still in the middle of a snow storm) and you will be able to drive to work in safety.
If you happen to wake up to a total, eerie silence, panic!
This means there is a meter or more of snow and the snow-ploughs are still trying to cope with the snow down in the village – you are going to be late for work. Occasionally even a day or two!

Of course, you still get the odd patch of ice here and there, once the roads have been cleared, so you do have to drive carefully, but the worst of it will be gone.

Imagine my surprise then, when I climbed into the car to drive home from a party on Saturday night – the motorway was encased in three inches of solidly packed snow!
I had always envisaged snow ploughs racing up and down the motorway, 24 hours a day. They don't !
Enquiries have revealed that the drivers of said snow ploughs get tired at some point and finish work at around midnight. After that you're on your own.

Now I presume that the Swiss are aware of such facts. So why then, do so many of those still using summer tyres wait until after midnight to use the motorways?
They block the middle lane, stationary, with their wheels turning on the spot and looking utterly helpless behind their steering wheels. If you could hear them, I'm sure they bleat like sheep.

If you wish to get home, you have to weave in and out of them in an elegant slalom through the snow, secure in the knowledge that the rescue services will be along with blankets and hefty fines before too long …

Americanisms removed 30.11.2008

Did I mention that I like this time of the year?
I think I did.
Did I mention that I live on a hill 1000m high?
That's three quarters of the way up Snowdon, for those of you that can't imagine how high that is...

Apart from being extremely quiet, living here has other advantages too. I can, for instance, usually see what the weather is doing down below me.

I took this picture this morning:



Go on – click it!

Something I really enjoy is Asian food.
Japanese sushi;
Chinese stir-fries;
Vietnamese Pho (noodle soup);
Philippine chicken;
Indian lentils.
But best of all is Thai Cuisine because it is the spiciest...



I really enjoy spicy food, so why is it that so many restaurants refuse to serve it?
There is/was an Indian restaurant in Ludwigsburg that offered three choices of meal:
Mild, Hot or Normal.
Mild is, well, mild.
Hot is spicy – German spicy.
Normal is spicy – Indian style!
Why can't they all do it like that?

I went for a Thai meal the other day.
You could choose meals with zero, one, two or three chilli peppers from the menu.
I ordered a meal with three.

When my meal arrived, I was certain they had brought the wrong plate to our table. I'm quite sure even the most coddled Swiss person would'nt have found it spicy.
I called the waitress and complained. "Oh, but that is the spicy one", she assured me.
"In that case, I need chilli", I said.
"We no have Chilli,“ she said "only fish sauce"
"Then I need the fish sauce", I replied.
(Fish sauce is fish extract with raw chilli peppers)
She called something into the kitchen and I recognised the word 'Farang' which means 'Long-Nose' denoting a European/American.
The fish sauce arrived but there was hardly any chilli in it. By the time a portion of the food was anywhere near 'hot', it was too salty to eat.
I gave up and ate my meal as it was.

This happens to me all the time – even if I visit a restaurant with Thai friends who will tell the waiter/waitress "He can eat as 'hot' as we can!"
The waiter invariably scoffs and I get a watered-down version of what I ordered.

Good to have Thai friends – I get invited to dinner every now and then and am served the normal version.
Yummy!

How silly of me…
… I just logged on to see if there were any new entries on this blog.
Of course, no one else works here…

You'll have to excuse – I've still got my right leg in 'plaster' and don't spend so many hours at the computer as I used to.
I don't get round to doing as much photography as I might, either.

However – a fortnight ago, I travelled with friends from the Fotoclub St.Gallen to Kaufdorf in Gürbethal (near Bern) because there is an Automobile Cemetery there.
Quite photogenic.



Sadly the cemetery will have to close in March next year, so any one wanting to see this spectacular display of automobile history will have to hurry!

In 1975 the authorities in Bern gave the owner of the scrap yard permission to create the auto cemetery, but insisted he would have to hide it by planting a few hundred trees.
The trees were planted and both cars and trees have coexisted ever since. Nature, however, is slowly gaining the upper hand.
In places it is hard to decide if a car is part of a tree or if a tree is part of a car.

Now the authorities have decided that the cemetery has to disappear – the trees do not blend into the landscape and the cars (not one of them a day under 30 years old) are polluting the environment!
Quite paradox.

I shan't go into all of the arguments that have ignited around the topic. Let it suffice to say that they are heated, with the authorities refusing to see that the scrap yard might be of any cultural value…

…look at the pictures and judge for yourself.

I threatened to give you more...

The sand sculptures in Rorschach have been finished for a fortnight now. I went there the evening the winner was decided (I spy...) but there were so many people there that I didn’t venture close!

This weekend after two days of catastrophic rainfall having fallen since the prize giving, I actually managed to take some pictures.
'What do they do if it rains?' Global Librarian asked. Well, you didn't actually mean torrential rainfall, or did you?
If we are talking normal summer rainfall — the surface of the sculptures can get a little rough.
If we are talking medium catastrophe rainfall — the surface gets a little rough and the elements that weren't packed as solid as they might have been collapse...

But here — judge for yourself:



Parts of my two favourite sculptures have collapsed and the base of the sculptures are very rough, but I find it makes them interesting.

BTW – if you want to see what the sculptures looked like before the rain, you can view them here!

Yesterday I made my first excursion on crutches...

In Rorschach, on Lake Constance, a competition is held every year to see who can create the best sand sculpture.
250 tons of sand are dumped on the lake shore, stamped into rectangular wooden forms and then sculpted. Some of the results are amazing!
I took some pictures of the finished entries last year and forgot to show them to you.
The one I liked best was called Daydreams and just happened to win the first prize:


Daydreams, Front


Daydreams, Rear

Ten teams of two people from all over the world compete every year.
Each team has a week to finish their work. This years theme is 'Dream and Reality'.
The first three years saw Swiss sculptors among the winners. Because foreign teams won for the past few years, no Swiss are partaking this year...

I wanted to photograph the work-in-progress this time round and then the finished results.
A lot harder to do, on crutches, than I had envisaged, but here is the work-in-progress (4th day).
I hope to find a chauffeur on Saturday, so I can photograph the finished results...



It is impossible to guess, yet, which team might win this year - we shall know more on Saturday.
If you would like to see the sculptures live, they will be on view until September 14th.

To be continued...

Lazy, as I am, I’ve done nothing this week, except sit around with my feet up...
Yesterday, I discovered my camera again:





We had some wonderful clouds!

Lynx recently talked about the smoking bans that are slowly creeping accross Sitzerland.
Some enjoy cigarettes, I enjoy a cigarillo or two while sitting with a beer and chatting with friends in a bar...
In my opinion smoking should be prohibited anywhere that people gather to eat or where people are forced to spend time in confined spaces e.g. public transport, theatres etc. (as is already the case in most European countries!).

Trying to break a 500-year-old-habit (and the rising prices of alcoholic beverages in public houses) is leading to economical and sociological problems in both Germany and Britain.
Germany reports less business volume since smoking bans were introduced in 2007, with bars, discotheques and restaurants doing less trade.
In Britain 17 pubs are reported to be closing every week - that is over 850 closures a year. Figures released by the British Beer and Pub Association reveal that the current pub closure rate is seven times faster than in 2006 and 14 times faster than in 2005.


Granted, it will be another 65 years before the last pub will be forced to close at the present rate, but a unique heritage that attracts visitors from all over the world, seems to be slowly coming to an end.
The unique thing about British pubs is the fact that, traditionally, everyone visits them. In the coutryside it is not unusual to find the local squire standing next to and socialising with Joe Bloggs.

Britain's problem with public houses disappearing is due to the fact that, over the years, thousands of pubs were bought by investors. Enterprise Inns, for instance owned over 9,000 Public Houses in Britain until recently.
Due to a combination of cheap alcoholic beverages being sold in supermarkets and a smoking ban for all enclosed public spaces, all of a sudden profits have dropped and the investors are making a loss. To cut their losses, they are ‘disposing of pubs with profits less than the group [Enterprise] average’.
It is more profitable sell the buildings and have them converted into office space.

The Swiss Restaurants and bars, that I know, are similar to British pubs - the mayor will drink there along with everyone else and discuss local gossip - they are a central meeting place for the local comunity. A ban on smoking is going to unbalance this social environment.
Before we reach the point that Swiss bars start to close down at a rate similar to that of British public houses, I would hope that Switzerland will take a look at what is happening to its neighbours. There may be a solution other than prohibiting smoking in ALL enclosed spaces. Better ventilation and/or smokers/non-smokers-rooms should certainly be looked at more closely...

Sitting at my dining table, I have a view of green meadows sloping up to a quaint, old Appenzeller farmhouse.
More often than not, in the summer months, there are cows on the meadow...

Last night at, dinner, a single cow was grazing in my line of vision - its bell ringing to the rhythm of it chewing grass. I got up to get some pepper and when I returned to my seat - really, just a matter of seconds, I found there were two cows - we had a new arrival. The first was still munching away at the grass, apparently unaware that she had company.

Now, I know where cows come from - I’ve seen it on the telly dozens of times. You have this cow either tethered in a barn or lying in a meadow - in either case it makes terrible noises until a guy with a Land Rover turns up to comfort it. The guy then puts his arm into a crevice somewhere around the rear of the cow, disappears into his Land Rover and returns with a rope. One end of the rope disappears into the rear end of the cow and when it is pulled out, there is a calf attached to it!

But that’s not how it happens!
I know because I’ve seen what happens twice in real life.
There is a cow grazing on the meadow, you blink and all of a sudden there is a calf lying next to it, the cow is still munching away at the grass, unaware that she has company - why? Because the calves just drop out of the sky!
The following pictures were taken just a minute after the birth:


As you can see, mum is still unaware of the fact that she has company.


Even when company tries to make itself noticed.


The other cows, having watched the calf fall from the sky, immediately come to investigate...


... which makes mom realise that she has new responsibilities.

While I was taking pictures, my bell rang. My neighbour from downstairs was standing there breathless.
"Did you see what happened?“ she said.
"Yes,“ I said "a calf dropped out of the sky.“
"Do you know who’s cows they are?“
"Well, yes."
"You have to phone him then!" (I would have anyway)

So, I phoned the farmer to inform him of the phenomenon, he arrived ten minutes later to assure himself that all was well and life in Appenzell continued as if nothing much had happened...

I'm sorry Mr. Bear, but I did say so!

The brown bear known as JJ3 (what a sweet name for a bear) became a problem-bear and was shot on Monday in the canton of Grisons (Graubünden).
While foraging for food, he got too close to humans. Not that he was ever aggressive, mind you, just not afraid enough of mankind.

They did try to scare the bear off by firing rubber bullets at him but apparently he just moved on to the next village. So, instead of trying to find a more appropriate solution, the local government had the animal shot.

The problem now, though, is that the bear had an Italian passport. The Italians are up in arms, threatening to put a boycot on Swiss goods and on travel to Switzerland.

Anyway, the authorities in Grisons are just in the process of distributing bear-proof bins?!
So if any other bears wish to try their luck, they are welcome.
They just need to mind their manners.

Just because we shoot bad-mannered bears, doesn't mean that Switzerland can't provide a habitat for them...

On the advent of the European Football Championships the SVP (Swiss Peoples Party) seem determined to present Switzerland to our 600,00 foreign guests in poor light.
If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you'll remember the black sheep of last August...
Well now the SVP has revived a four-year-old campaign to show our guests just how discriminating the Swiss are - racially discriminating, that is.
'Go home, foreigners!'

The campaign is aimed at the prevention of mass-nationalisation.
Now mass-nationalisation really does sound bad - I agree with you!
Just envisage those millions and millions of criminal Africans and Asians* lining up to pick up a free, red passport.
That, however, is not what it's all about! It is about people who were born here in Switzerland.

There are a few foreign families here that stuck it out long enough to have produced a third generation.
What does that mean?
... well, it means that Grandma and Grandad originally came from Italy or Germany, their kids were born here and, in the meantime, produced kids of their own.
What nationality are those new arrivals (some of them now in their 20s and 30s)?
Italian or German, of course!

'Hang on', a couple of liberal thinkers have said, 'that can't be right, the parents were born and raised in Switzerland as were their children - they are Swiss, right?'
Nope!

The third generation children are as alien as their grandparents.
No matter that they were born in Switzerland, have never visited the country their grandparents came from, let alone speak their language - they are aliens and, as such, are unwanted!
Oh, no - they aren't discriminated in any other way, they are allowed to pay their taxes just the same as anyone else. They can't vote, of course - we can't have foreigners voting, now can we. That would just go to prove that they are even taking an interest in the country they were born in and are an integral part of society.
Tut, tut, tut...

Now of course - if they care to pay for the privilege of being accepted as Swiss citizens - that is a different matter entirely. We'll take their money gladly. I mean, let's face it, they're probably more Swiss than their Swiss neighbours!

The placards, which are being hung up everywhere just in time for the arrival of our guests, depict brown and yellow hands grasping for Swiss passports out of a box. Clearly immoral! Criminal, you could even say.

Just that the SVP has their own version of the facts again...

* Sorry if you happen to be African or Asian - this is just meant to serve as an example.

I recently bought a new Camera.
Obviously, the first thing I did was work out the nodal point - the point of rotation on the barrel of the lens to cancel parallax distortion when rotating the camera for panorama photography. Once I'd worked that out, I went out and took my first panorama.

Remember me publishing this image recently?



This was the second version of the scene. With the first version, I misjudged the exposure. Well, you know - new equipment, snow, photographing into the sun ...
Anyway - this was what happened:



Obviously, I didn't think it was worth stitching the images together, so I just left it.
Until today, that is. The snow plough didn't come through this morning (did I mention that?) so I started playing around. Here is the result:



You can send the plough in now, I'm ready to take some more pics!

At first I presumed they were fox tracks.
We have a den of foxes just 500 meters away.
Sometimes, at night, it sounds as if a child is being butchered in my front garden.
I've checked more than once.
You harden with time and now they could butcher a child in my front garden and I wouldn't give it a moments notice.

Just as you hear in tales, the foxes move from hen-coop to hen-coop stealing hens.
You can often watch them, heads held high, carrying off their prizes.
That is why I presumed these to be fox-tracks.



I was mistaken.
We have a lone deer moving backwards and forwards across 'my' valley.
It will stop every now and then at the edge of the woods and scrape the snow off the ground with its hoof, to get at the grass below I presume.



The sound of my shutter, in the silence of the morning, was enough to make him (I'm presuming he's male) dash for the trees...

The snow plough hasn't been through for two days now.
It looks as if we're supposed to be more interested in looking for Easter eggs than in going out.
I've not seen any bunny-tracks, so could you get the snow plough out please!

... have obviously gone on holiday.
I have no idea where they are or what they are doing, but they have most certainly forgotten what they are supposed to be doing.

If you take a look at the entry below, you will see that it was written a month ago.
The picture included depicts a sunny landscape.
Here are two new pictures for you. They were taken here in the village I live in and they were photographed yesterday.
The weather hasn't altered during the whole four weeks except, that is, to get warmer.





If you look carefully, you will notice that the people depicted in both pictures above are not wearing jackets - in fact most people were in short sleeves yesterday - getting their first sunburn of the year.

Now, I don't like to complain, but we are supposedly in the middle of winter.
We are supposed to have a meter of snow.
And I know darned well that if the weather gods keep mucking around like this, they are going to throw a meter-and-a-half of snow at us at the end of April - when we're supposed to have started spring!

I'm not sure I'm too keen on the idea ...

Did you ever wonder how to find out if those electric fences are actually
switched on or not?
Actually it's quite easy - you just touch them!

If you aren't one of those people who enjoy an electro shock every once in a while, use a blade of grass to touch the wire - the longer the better.
The closer your hand gets to the wire the stronger you feel the current.
At 35 cm the chances are, you won't feel a thing. At 5 cm you will - if the fence is on, that is.

So how do you cross an electric fence that is switched on without grilling your private bits?
Easy! You wear your most robust bovver boots and kick one of the fence posts - hard.
Two kicks should do the trick. Just make sure the farmer doesn't see you!

This fence post was taken down by a car ...



... so I had no problems crossing it and no guilty conscience!

If you read my post this time last year, you may be able to guess what this is:



I caught it outside my front door at five-thirty yesterday morning, singing a ditty with five of its friends. They all looked equally as scary!
When they were done yodelling they wished me all the best for the coming new year and were on their way with a great hullabaloo* - to scare off any evil spirits.

When I finally woke, I went down into the village and took a few pictures.

*The German word is almost as nice: 'Tohuwabohu'

Winter began here on December 22nd at 07:18.
According to the calendar.
Meteorologically it began on December 1st so it snowed.
It snowed again on the 7th - only about 30 centimeters.
It has been quite cold since, with temperatures averaging around 0°Centigrade. We haven't had had any fresh snow but what we got stayed with us.

It is still a little strange somehow.
I remember winters in Birmingham when it snowed. We had 2 inches of snow during the night; it was turned grey by the buses by 7 in the morning and had most likely disappeared by evening.
Here the snow plow comes through at 5 in the morning and clears the roads.
If it's a sunny day the remains of the snow on the roads will melt and dry. If the temperatures don't rise above somewhere round 10°C the rest of the snow won't be affected.

I had visitors over Christmas. Their children were thrilled to be able to get the sledges and toboggans out of the barn, drag them up the hill and hurtle back down again. Every day for a week - for hours on end.
They ruined my virgin snow, of course, but they certainly had fun!

My Dad built me a sledge when I was a child. While I very much appreciated it, I never got as much fun out of it as he would have liked me to.
There was just never enough snow.
I've got the snow now - does anyone remember where the sledge got to?

Just a month ago, I looked out of my window and was impressed by the colours that a brilliant autumn day presented me.
I tried to capture the vibrance of the scene but was unhappy with the results.
A camera does not always see what the human eye can observe. While a digital picture can be quite striking it is just not alive.

Today, looking out of my window, I spotted a slight difference in the scene I was presented.
I wonder if you can spot it too?

Yes, you are right of course ...
... the fence posts have been removed!

This is just to prove that I'm still alive ...

I've been playing around with my camera this week.
Adjusting a new panoramic head to compensate for parallax distortion.
Of course once I think I have the settings, the weather turns to rain.
There was a short break this afternoon.



I think I might have the settings!

I'm still playing around with the compositing on this one, but you can take a look anyway, if you care to ...

There is no such thing as an accident in Switzerland.
A car 'accident' is a criminal offence!

For this reason - after a round of hydroplaning on the motorway - I am spending the month of September without a driving license.

I can highly recommend hydroplaning or aquaplaning, as it is called here. It is fun! It is an amazing feeling to feel the wheels of the car lift off the ground and to have the vehicle float around as if it were weightless ...
... just don't try it in three lanes of heavy traffic - do so at an abandoned airfield or a race track.
Luckily no-one was hurt!

So now I'm spending the month at home and getting used to public transport.
I've still not quite got used to the fact that I can't go out when I want to, but that it makes more sense to go out when a train is due.
And staying out late at night is expensive; a taxi-kilometer cost CHF 2.50.
That makes CHF 45 for the ride home!
Either that - or hitch hike.

The closest railway station is two kilometers away. It's downhill all the way and I can do it in ten minutes, thanks two a public path across one of the meadows en route.

Yesterday evening, just after dark, I decided to take a ride to St.Gallen and meet some friends. I left a little late and was worried I wouldn't make the train. I trotted down the hill in the dark and was relieved when I found the gap in the fence and the steps leading down into the meadow with a few minutes to spare.

Stumbling down the uneven steps, something brought me to a dead halt.
Out of the corner of my eye, I had caught a glimpse of something in the dark.
I strained my eyes and stared into the darkness to see what it was I had seen.
The farmer had obviously moved his cows. He had strung up an electric fence!

What should I do?
Turn back up the steps, go the long way round, miss my train?
This was a public footpath, you can't just rig up an electric fence across it ...
I followed the fence cautiously. Staring at it directly was of no use, in the dark I could only see it out of the corner of my eye.
After what seemed an age, I found what I was looking for. A plastic grip, allowing you to unhook a section of the fence and pass through it without electrocuting yourself!
Hard to do in the dark, even though I've done it numerous times in daylight.

With the fence hooked up again, I stumbled down and across the meadow, trying to imagine where the other half of the fence would be.
My calculations were correct . I found the other plastic grip with surprisingly little trouble, passed through the fence and was just in time to board my train - my hair standing on end!

An electrifying experience!

I'm on holiday at the moment, which means I don't get up before seven in the morning ...

With the weather as nice as it is, at the moment, I'm beginning to wonder what I am missing!
When I got up yesterday, I looked out of my office window to see my very own clouds passing through the trees.
Of course, I just had to photograph the scene ...

You may view a larger version of the image here!

Strangely I was having problems with my computer yesterday (my backup software had decided to delete instead of preserve!), so I didn't look at yesterdays pictures until this morning.

Drop by tomorrow - I might even have todays pictures ready for you!

I went to a party on Friday evening.
After the party everyone landed at a dance-hall - that is to say, a discotheque for twenty-one-year-olds and over.
Just as I was getting into the swing of things, they shut down for the day ...
... well, it was getting on for breakfast time anyway, so I dropped into an all-night-restaurant for something to eat, before they closed too.

There was a group of six young people sat at the next table and they spoke a strange mixture of languages - three of them spoke in Italian and four of them in what I presumed to be Yugoslavian (yes, you counted correctly - one young lady was fluent in both languages!) and when everyone was supposed to understand everything, they used Swiss-German!
Yes - more of those bloody foreigners!

We finished eating at the same time and stood up to leave.
I just beat them to the door.
I went to cross the road, when a hand grabbed my arm. I was just about to scream 'Don't mug me, I'm a foreigner too!' when a female voice said:
"Shall I help you across the road?"
I looked at the tall blonde woman in surprise - it was the one that had been speaking Italian, Yugoslavian and German.
I hoped she was joking, but wasn't about to have her let go of my arm, so I said:
"Yes, that would be kind of you."
She walked me across the road, but when we got to the other side she did not let go of me.
It was obvious we were going in the same direction and I wasn't about to protest about having an attractive young lady on my arm ...
... even if she could easily be my daughter.

We started talking and I asked her where she was heading. She told me where and I mentioned that we had, more or less, the same destination. She mentioned that her car was just round the corner and asked if she could drop me off at mine.
When I told her I wasn't motorised at the moment, she offered to drive me home!

On our drive home, I learned that she was a 'second-generation-foreigner'. She was born in Switzerland, her mother being Italian and her father Yugoslavian. We had a very pleasant conversation and I was a little disappointed that we reached our destination so quickly.
It was nice to learn that she was one of those 'other' foreigners, who won't resort to crime or violence until a later date.
I hope I bump into her again before either of us does ...

... and Vandals

There is widespread vandalism across Switzerland at the moment.
For once this is positive because it is causing the SVP to reconsider their xenophobic campaign.

The brochure that landed in my letterbox at the end of July was accompanied by billboards plastered with the demand to establish 'Safety in Switzerland'.
The picture on the placards is the same one of the sheep that was used in the brochure.
I'm sure I don't have to reinterpret it for you?
The sheep are accompanied by a further two slogans:
"Swiss Quality" and
"My Home – Our Switzerland"


A placard hanging at our village station ...

I'm not sure what the 'Swiss Quality' refers to - the printing perhaps?
I can certainly relate to the 'My Home', though.
Switzerland has been my home for over six years now and the SVP is doing their damnedest to make me feel uncomfortable!

The placard itself doesn't carry any further explanations. It doesn't attempt to explain that most of Switzerland's crimes are carried out by foreign nationals. It is purely and simply hostile towards foreigners!
Of course, I've been informed on numerous occasions, that I'm not 'that sort' of foreigner and my worst crime to date has been that of unlawful parking – a crime nevertheless and I am sure that the Blick-readers of this country have long-since got the message, that all foreigners are criminal at heart.

I am happy to report that even here in Appenzell, one of Switzerland's most conservative cantons, the posters are being damaged, painted over or, where possible, ripped down completely!
This is causing the SVP to reconsider and to recall the posters, while at the same time they are taking court action over said vandalism.

Perhaps the people at the SVP should take a step backwards and take a sober look at what has been hanging in Switzerland's streets for the past month.

Just this once, I can only welcome this form of vandalism ...

Last Sunday, I was sitting in a pub garden and overheard a group of middle-aged Swiss discussing their holidays.

Austrians abroad, it seems, are quite nice, the Dutch are very annoying, the Germans are abominable, but the worst, the very worst of all, are the British!
I resisted getting up and punching someone on the nose. If they choose to visit mass-tourist-resorts, then that is their own fault.
I would guess that, wherever they had been on their holidays, the Swiss and Austrians were a minority, there had been a number of Dutch, a lot of Germans, but most of the tourists there had been young Brits.

The strength of numbers always seems to do something unpleasant to young people in holiday mood abroad. Alcohol flows copiously and people begin to behave over-conspicuously.
Things like that don't don't very often happen in Llandanwg or Gais, but they will in Bodrum or Agios Georgios.

On Monday a pamphlet landed in my letter box.

So that the Swiss may continue to celebrate the first of August (their national holiday) in 'peace and freedom', I was requested to sign a petition to banish foreign criminals from Switzerland. The news that Neo-Nazis had almost managed to have the official celebrations cancelled for fear of their violent protests, was seemingly forgotten!
I read on to find that Switzerland has the highest percentage of foreigners in the world. They forgot to mention that Berlin alone has over a third of the number of foreigners that the whole of Switzerland has - and that is just one German city.

Further, I was informed, 85% of Swiss imigrants are rapists, 66% are into blackmail, 55% go in for murder and the rest will resort to violence sooner or later.
I would hope that I have misinterpreted the statistics somewhere ...

When I asked my neighbour if he believed the statistics, he replied, that
'... of course he did!'.
I asked him if he locked his daughters up at night for fear that I might just get bored and decide to rape them?
'No, of course not, you're not a foreigner!'
I pointed to the Welsh flag flying above his head and he conceded
'Yes, but not that sort of foreigner!'

How many 'sorts' of foreigners are there then?

Just as a side note:
The pamphlet was distributed by the SVP (Swiss People's Party) the most powerful of the Swiss parties. This is the party that was not quite Nazi, but very sympathetic towards Mr. Hitler.

It has become fashionable, it seems, for young men to wear boxer shorts under their swimming trunks [Jul already commented on this].

I personally can't understand the fashion statement. I don't really want anyone to know that I wear underwear by Calvin Klein and Yve St.Laurent. But then, whoever has been able to understand the fashion statement of young people of any generation?
Hygienically speaking , however, the fact is that any amount of fabric worn in a swimming bath is unhygienic - the more you wear, the more dirt and bacteria is transported into the water. The 'problem' has become that serious, that Basel has already put up signs prohibiting underwear and Zurich and other cantons want to follow suit ...

Ed. The rest of this post has been removed.
Apparently it was causing trouble in other parts of the world.
Sadly no-one was prepared to tell me why, or how it may be altered so as not to cause offence.

This afternoon I discovered three neighbours - women - hanging in the lime tree in front of the house I live in ...

At first I wasn't sure how to react. I racked my brain to find any special dates that my mobile phone hadn't reminded me of - nothing.
I considered going back inside and consulting the Farmer's Calendar hanging in my kitchen, but I'd checked that at breakfast and wondered about the entry:
'Pharisee and Customs officer', it said. 'Sunrise 06:24. Sunset 20:15.'
I wasn't so good in Bible classes, so I have no idea, what the hypocrites had to do with with customs and excise ...
... but the scene in 'my' tree was something entirely different.

Then I noticed that my neighbours were armed to the teeth!
Two of them were waving knives at me, the third was wielding sécateurs.
It was the garden scissors that got me thinking along the right lines ...
... colds and influensa.

Dried Lime flowers, when infused in boiling water and sipped slowly, will make you sweat - supposedly a cure for a cold.
I learned that it takes a cold three days to build up, it will stay with you for three days and it takes a further three days for it to leave.
Over the years I have found this piece of wisdom to be true and no amount of pills, sprays or infusions will alter the fact.
While it is true that Linden 'tea' will make you sweat, I have never found a medicine that really alleviates the symptoms of a cold.

My neighbours, however are all farmers and believe in the old remedies (some of which are really effective - try a cushion filled with warmed cherry stones to alleviate back ache - nothing better.) they are convinced that lime flowers will cure a cold and so, there they are hanging in my tree!

When they are finished here, they will move on to the next tree just up the hill.

I suppose I wasn't quick enough - if I should decide, at some time in the year, that I need lime flowers, I shall have to visit the chemists ...

The weather, these last few weeks, was not really what you would call summer.

The unusual thing, however, has been that it rained during the week and was relatively pleasant at the weekends.
Last week, on two occasions, I awoke asking myself if it were, perhaps, November. Cold, grey, dark and dismal.

Thomas Hood's poem was especially appropriate.
No sun -- no moon!
No morn -- no noon!
No dawn -- no dusk -- no proper time of day --
No sky -- no earthly view --
No distance looking blue --

Imagine our surprise, then, when the weatherman forecast a weekend of soaring temperatures.
On Friday temperatures reached 14°C. Yesterday the thermometer displayed 30°.

The local farmers obviously believed the forecast because on Friday evening they were out mowing the meadows.
Yesterday they turned the cut grass twice and because the ground is still wet and colder than usual, for this time of year, they are out turning it again today.

My nearest neighbour is always a little faster than the others and while I write, he is raking his hay into windrows awaiting collection.
He obviously hasn't learned from experience ...
... last year he stacked his hay in the hay loft and soon afterwards the fire-briagde arrived to put out the ensuing fire - Hay produces internal heat due to bacterial fermentation. If hay is baled from moist grass, the heat produced can be enough to set the hay on fire.

Today is Sunday - the tractors are driving up and down the meadows and no-one seems to care about the noise. I'm sure, that if I put on music at the same volume, there would be complaints ...

I read a number of different blogs regularly and something that crops up on a regular basis on expatriate blogs is "Things I miss ..."

Americans expatriates, for instance, miss Book Shops, Mexican Restaurants, Road Trips, SF-Bay-Weather, Californian Weather, Peanut Butter, Jell-O, Dr. Peppers, Peaberry Coffee Shops ...

While I can understand some of the above, there are things beyond my comprehension:
What is Jell-O; what's wrong with European Peanut Butter; there is a Starbucks round the corner - why isn't that an alternative for Peaberries; Road Trip?

I only went to one Mexican Restaurant in the States: I hated it. I rather like those here in St.Gallen - that probably makes me a philistine!

On the other hand - there are book stores, even large book stores here in Switzerland. They even have reading tables. But they come nowhere close to a Book Store in the U.S. - No sofas, no armchairs to sit in, no free coffee ...
... just not cosy!

Anyway, after reading another of those blogs today, I started wondering what I missed about England. My conclusion:
I don't!

I know I used to - I missed Marmite, Custard, Xmas Pudding, Malt Vinegar, Fish and Chips, Trifle and Tea.
For some reason, I've grown so used to living in Europe that I don't miss those things any more.

I do buy tea whenever I'm in England and wouldn't ever drink any of the concoctions they call 'Tea' here. If I don't have any tea left, I don't miss it, I just drink coffee!
Same goes for vinegar - When I run out, I use italian vinegar.

I enjoy Custard, Fish and Chips and Xmas Pudding - when I'm on the Isle - but I don't miss having them here.

Things have altered over the years. The thing I miss now is German Bread.
The Swiss have more different varieties of bread than any other country in the world, I read recently.
They even have something called wholemeal bread. You have to be very, very lucky though, if it comes even close to German wholemeal ...
... it is more often a very dry affair that conforms to the laws defining wholemeal.

(The ash-value is important - after burning flour, the ash is weighed. It has to reach a specific weight to be defined as wholemeal.
The Germans reach the ash-value by using whole ground wheat, rye or whatever.
The Swiss do what the Germans used to do thirty years ago - they add bran to filtered and degerminated flour.)

Other than missing bread, I find it annoying that France is a three-hour-drive, so purchasing pickled gherkins is slightly inconvenient, Spain is even further, so I seldom get Spanish coffee-beans and I have to travel to Germany or Italy to purchase decent Italian wines ...
... I'm definitely European - even if I retain my British eccentricity!

What do you miss as an expat?

A bear 'strolled' across the border from northern Italy this week and into Switzerland.

The Swiss authorities, efficient as ever, decided that - seeing as how they had neglected to check the bears papers at the border - they would issue guidelines for the conduct of bears!

The problem is, you see, just recently a bear wandered into the Bavarian Alps and just happened to pass in front of someone's rifle. Of course, the rifle went off and the bear never got a chance to read the rules of conduct for German bears.
The Swiss would like to prevent the same fate befalling 'our' bear.
First, bears have been classified in three categories:
unobtrusive; problematic and high-risk.
I'm not sure you'll find these categories in any zoological encyclopedia, that is just how Swiss minds work.
High-risk-bears may be shot - no questions asked.

Our bear was sighted carrying a white flag, so he's been classified as unobtrusive.

Dear Mr/Mrs Bear,
If you are reading this, please take a look at the guidelines for the conduct of bears in Switzerland. Don't wave at the photographers as this may be misinterpreted as a threatening gesture. And when you climb on your unicycle, please remember that we drive on the right here in Switzerland - we wouldn't want you to have an accident!

Take care.

All this talk about Swiss punctuality is codswallop!
They have leeway!

Take public transport for instance.
A train that enters a station two minutes late is still considered punctual!
However, a train that enters the station on time will leave on time - on the dot.
So if you yourself are a little late, don't bother running - it's not worth it.
Go and drink a coffee instead.

When visiting you are still considered to be punctual if you arrive up to a minute early or up to two minutes late!
So don't rush - you still have plenty of time.

Talking about visiting ...
... you may consider yourself very lucky if you get invited to someone's home in Switzerland. It probably means you haven't practised your sarcastic British humour on them (irony is totally lost on the Swiss) and you haven't asked them what they earn. You've known them for more than two years and during that time you haven't said anything provocative to begin a discussion!

So you arrive on time to discover you have been invited to a party with fifteen other guests ...
How long does it take to say 'Cheers' to seventeen people?
In England 'Cheers everybody', two seconds and then you get to drink?
In Germany it is similar: 'Zum Wohl allerseits' just a second longer.

In Switzerland names are very important.
"Zum Wohl," pause while you wait for eye contact and savour the name you are about to pronounce ...
"Ruedi" (Pronounce the letter 'e' separately)

"Zum Wohl," ...
"Hans-Ueli" (Don't forget the 'e')

"Zum Wohl," ...
"Päddy" (I thought Patrick was an Irish name!)

"Zum Wohl," ...
"Sabine" (Never, never pronounce the 'e'!!)

"Zum Wohl," ...
"Hampi" (Who would ever have guessed that that is Hans-Peter?)

"Zum Wohl," ...
"Chüde" (Kurt-Dieter!! Practice coughing up a hairball 'ch' and don't forget to pronounce the 'e'!)

After half an hour of eighteen individuals saying 'Zum Wohl' to seventeen individuals and if your drink hasn't evaporated in the meantime, you may now sip your drink.
It is best to concentrate hard when being introduced to people - they will always remember your name long after you have forgotten theirs.
If you are like me and forget names immediately, then you have to concentrate on the names the person next to you is saying and toast the same individual immediately afterwards ...

By the way - when visiting in Switzerland, it is usual to bring a present along with you.
I wouldn't recommend the 750g. bar of Toblerone.
Toblerone is now owned by Kraft, an American company and is, somehow, not quite as Swiss as it used to be!

At the moment we are experiencing a marvellous Spring.

How do I know?
Easy - it is warm, every tree, flower and plant is trying to outdo its neighbour - flowers and young green everywhere.
The birds are singing in the trees and there is a bloody cuckoo out there with them, cuckooing its head off !!

This morning it started at 06:00. Obviously I wasn't in bed for very long after it started cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, every five seconds.
When I got up, I decided to shoot it (with the camera, of course) but it was just out of range to make a decent picture.
I was rather surprised at the size of the thing - about the size of a crow.
Whoever has to raise one of those chicks is in for a problem.

I wonder if I can somehow convince my cats to devour the thing chase the bird off, before it starts again tomorrow morning?

It is Frühling (Spring) we are surrounded by various shades of fresh green and the apple- and cherry-trees are in blossom!
And the cows are back in the meadows.

In Spring, the cows in the meadow behind my house are those, that are considered useless, i.e. those that don't give milk yet because they haven't calved.
They will spend the next two months here and will then be presented to the bull.
If the farmer is lucky, the cows will, nine months later, give birth to a calf.
If not the bull will return.

The cows aren't allowed to keep their calves. The calves are raised in separate pens.
Instead the cows are now allowed to join their co-workers in the meadows. Calving behind them, they now produce milk which will be subventioned by the Swiss government. They have a purpose in life.
They are woken at six-in-the-morning so that the farmer-down-the-road can have milk in his coffee and they get milked a second time at six-in-the-evening.
The milk is taken down into the valley and turned into cheese.

The calves have a fifty-fifty chance of being turned into veal within a few short weeks.
Male calves are unwanted on a dairy farm.

This makes my f-d-t-r sound like a pretty heartless person, but actually he's a nice guy who is just doing the job he learned to do.
We often have a beer together.




Useless cow (for the moment). It will spend the next two months, day and night, rain or shine, grazing 'my' meadow.

The air is full of the smell of conifers.

Yesterday machines arrived and de-barked the trees.
Now their scent is almost overwhelming.



On the drive up to the house, the house is hidden for a few seconds
as you drive past the trees.
There are two large piles of 15-meter logs and one smaller pile of large logs.
They were too thick to go through the machines.



There are also two large piles of bark.
The larger of the two is almost 2 meters high.

I now have access to my bike again.

They have started to clear up the mess that my coppice has now become.

When I came home this evening, I was presented with this:



They hardly made a mess at all, getting them there, they just dragged
them through my back garden:



I'm sure it won't take longer than six months to look decent again
and they didn't drag anything over their own land,
so at least their grazing won't be affected!



So the only problem I have now is - how do I get at my Motorbike,
which just happens to be enclosed behind those logs?!



Well, I shouldn't have to wait for long - last time I had logs lying in my
back garden, they were only there for four months ...

The snow vanished this last week.
In its place flowers have appeared:


Something tiny in a delicate blue ...


... cyclamen (Alpenveilchen - Alpine Violets) ...


... something in yellow and then some in white, but that picture was un-sharp!

I can't say I really mind, I think I've had enough snow for this season.

... or Swiss German

Swiss German is basically Middle-High-German, but whereas the language in Germany has transformed and progressed, Swiss German has stood still for some centuries.

I understand Eastern Swiss German quite well (there are different dialects across the country just like anywhere else) but whenever I open my mouth to talk to someone, they immediately switch from Swiss German to [what they think is] High German!

Of course, I can tell them 'Sie chönnt Tüütsch rede - you may speak Swiss' but as soon as a single word crops up, that I didn't understand and I ask for it to be repeated, they immediately switch back to German! It can be very frustrating.

I thought perhaps I might be able to solve the problem by learning to speak Schwiizertüütsch myself, after all I picked up Brummy English and Swabian German quite easily!

'To qualify to learn Swiss German one has to be fluent in German'
it says in the brochure.
Well, no problem there - the Swiss assume that I'm German when I open my mouth to speak ...
... so I enrolled - there was no test beforehand.
Now, I do not wish to be racially discriminating, after all, I'm foreign myself – wherever I go! But the other five people in my course were: two Thai ladies (who insisted in talking Thai throughout lessons), one Indian Lady (whose Saris I liked very much), a Russian girl and an Albanian gentleman.
None of these people were able to build a correct German sentence; the Thai and the Indian ladies pronounced the text in the textbook as if it were English.
We [I] got nowhere at all with our lessons!
After five lessons, I was so frustrated at having learned zilch, that I gave up and stopped visiting classes!

Perhaps I shall never learn to speak Swiss German after all - perhaps I don't need to imitate the Swiss? But how can I stop them from trying to wrap their tongues around High German when they talk to me?

Here are some interesting Swiss German words for you:

Bireweich – As soft as a pear – silly, stupid
Chäuzgi – Chewing gum
Chlüpperli – Clothes pegs
Drufabe – Afterwards
Nòòdisnòò – Bit by bit
Goofe – Children
Liismele – Knit
Vertschudlet – tousled

One of my favourite sentences: Chasch mr es teleofo geh. – You can give me a Telephone – You can call me. (If the first word is raised in tone, it is a question)
I brought one of my colleagues a telephone once when he 'asked for one' and he gave me a blank look!
One of my all time favorites: Chan ii e [Zigarett] - Can I a [cigarette] (please insert an object of your choice)
Sorry?! What happened to the verb - what exactly would you like to do with that cigarette?

Overheard ...

American Tourist - It must be confusing, living in a country where three languages are spoken, all the towns have to have three names.

Swiss Guy - ??

AT - Well, for instance, Lucerne is also called Locarno and Lausanne.

SG - Really - I hadn't realised!

@Esther and anyone else that may dislike plastic tulips - I do too.

The tulips in my window are the real thing and at the moment they are the only flowers around here, that haven't been smothered by 70 cm of snow!

Remember the pictures I posted yesterday evening?

These are the same windows, but the view was a little altered by the time I got up this morning ...



My coppice hasn't been tidied up yet, but the felled trees on both slopes are now nicely camouflaged with snow.
I would like to point out once more - they could be in the saw mill by now!



I hope my tulips will be warm enough!

The best chocolate, the Swiss say, comes from Switzerland.
Nothing else in the world can compare to it!

The best chocolate in the world is made by Lindt.
So they say.
How strange then that the Germans will tell you, that the best chocolate in the world is the German Ritter Sport.
And the Belgians? The whole world knows that the best chocolate is made in Belgium!

I wonder if the Swiss ever considered the fact, that the largest Lindt factory in the world is actually in Aachen - Germany!

Cadburys Fruit and Nut anyone?

It's been a month now.

We've had mixed weather, I'll give them that, but all in all we've had a lot of sun.
So why haven't they tidied my view up yet?



Now even the opposite slopes are covered with trees that have fallen prey to the chain saws.
You can just make them out in the picture - the view from my office window.
Yet they haven't moved the felled trees from my coppice yet, they are still lying there between the trees they left standing, waiting to be taken away to the saw mill!
You'd think they'd tidy up before they moved on ...

... I've taken to looking out of the dining room window instead. The view is less cluttered!

I wanted to go for a spin on the motorbike. You wouldn't believe it, from the pictures, but there is a gale force wind blowing right now. I'll leave the motorcycling to others for now ...

The Gods have gone mad.

Yesterday I went to work by motorbike.
Not because I am masochistic, but because the weather was so nice!

Today we have 20 cm of snow.

They have promised us 20 °C for Monday!

As far as I'm concerned, living in Switzerland has one distinct disadvantage.
Income tax.

When I first started working here, my boss was almost apologetic, when he informed me that I would have to pay Quellensteuer - source tax.
What he was trying to tell me is that, where taxes are concerned, foreigners are discriminated. Workers with a permit of residence class B or L are obliged to pay tax on a monthly basis!
Just imagine - your tax is deducted from your pay cheque every month!

How strange- isn't that how they do it in England, Germany, France, Hungary ...
... and everywhere else I've worked?

Not so in Switzerland. Swiss nationals and foreigners that can be trusted (residence permit C) pay their tax annually!

Our Head of Finances at work asked me last year, if I could please apply for a C permit - he was fed up of having to send my taxes to the taxman every month and, after all, it would mean that I could reside in Switzerland indefinitely!
So how should I pay my taxes? Set up a bank account and put money into it every month! Then every spring, when my tax bill arrives, give the money to the taxman.
What I discovered was - he got paid for taxing me directly!
The tax office paid him CHF 600 a year!
I also discovered that if I pay my taxes on a monthly basis I get to get the CHF 600!

I know a few people that get into financial difficulties every spring because the taxman holds out his hand and the taxes have already been spent.
Wouldn't it make more sense to tax people on a monthly basis and lower the taxes a little in the process?

Can someone please explain ...

When I first took a look at the room I'm sitting in now, my reaction was:
"That is going to be my office!"

The window, which is in front of me when I sit at my computer, looks onto a meadow that slopes down into a valley. The opposite slopes are covered in pine trees and there is the occasional clearing, where a farmhouse and meadows can be glimpsed.
Between my window and the valley 'my' meadow is flanked on the left by a coppice of trees ...
... it was, that is, until last week!

This tiny wood withstood two cyclones and a hurricane. It was unable to oppose the chain-saws.
To say that the coppice has been 'thinned out' would be an understatement.
All of the pine trees and a number of birch have been removed. Left standing are two dead pines, two larch and about 25 beech trees.
I can only imagine, that bad weather interrupted work and the dead pines will come down next.

I suppose I'm lacking the degree in forestry, that is needed to understand the mess that has been made of my view.

Switzerland is a neutral country. There is a quite simple reason why Switzerland has never been invaded ...

The day before yesterday at precisely 13:30 Alarms went off across the whole of Switzerland, just to remind us just what we would hear, if someone actually did press The Red Button.
By chance I heard about the tests on the morning news. Therefore, when the alarms went off, I was able - along with my Swiss colleagues - to pretend that nothing was happening. See Mind over matter.

On my way home yesterday evening, I encountered a large group of armed men dressed in jeans and anoraks and armed to the teeth with Assault rifles and submachine guns. After the initial shock, I realised, that they were members of the Swiss Army on their way to shooting practice.

Military service for Swiss males is obligatory. At the age of about 20, every Swiss male goes through 118 consecutive days of recruit training in the Rekrutenschule. By the Federal Constitution of 1874, military servicemen are given their first equipment, clothing and arms. After the first training period, conscripts must keep gun, ammunition and equipment an ihrem Wohnort ("in their homes") until the end of their term of service.
Enlisted men are issued a SIg 550 automatic assault rifle and officers a semi-automatic pistol, Each reservist is issued 50 rounds of ammunition in sealed packs for emergency use.
Crimes, committed with army guns and ammunition, are almost non-existent - after all, it is against the law to crack open the boxes of ammunition!

Over a soldier's career he also spends scattered days on mandatory equipment inspections and required target practice. Thus, in a 30-year mandatory military career, a Swiss man only spends about one year in direct military service. Following discharge from the regular army, men serve on reserve status until the age of 50 (55 for officers).
After discharge from service, the man is given an assault gun free from registration or obligation. Officers carry pistols rather than rifles and are given their pistols at the end of their service. When the government adopts a new infantry rifle, it sells the old ones to the public.

it might be noted that there are about 420,000 assault rifles stored at private homes, mostly SIG 550 types. Additionally, there are some 320,000 assault rifles and military pistols exempted from military service in private possession, all selective-fire weapons having been converted to semi-automatic operation only. In addition, there are several hundred thousand other semi-automatic small arms classified as carbines. The total number of firearms in private homes is estimated minimally at 1.2 million; more liberal estimates put the number at 3 million.

I have heard it said, that no army in the world can be mobilised as fast as the Swiss Army. I presume, that when the alarm goes off in earnest, they run down to the cellar, jump into their uniform, grab their assault gun and jump on the next bus for the front.

The Swiss do not have an army, they are the army, says one government publication. Fully deployed, the Swiss army has 15.2 men per square kilometre; in contrast, the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. have only .2 soldiers per square kilometre. Switzerland is 76 times denser with soldiers than either superpower. Indeed, only Israel has more army per square kilometre.

In 1847-48, liberals throughout Europe revolted against aristocratic rule. Only in Switzerland did they succeed, taking control of the whole nation following a brief conflict called the Sonderbrund War. (Total casualties were only 128.) Civil rights were firmly guaranteed, and all vestiges of feudalism were abolished.
Despite the hopes of German reformers, the Swiss did not send their people's army into Germany in 1848 to assist popular revolution there. When the German revolution failed, autocratic Prussia considered invading Switzerland, but decided the task was impossible.

During World War I, both France and Germany considered invading Switzerland to attack each other's flank. In World War II, Hitler wanted the Swiss gold reserves and needed free communications and transit through Switzerland to supply Axis forces in the Mediterranean. But when military planners looked at Switzerland's well-armed citizenry, mountainous terrain, and civil defence fortifications, Switzerland lost its appeal as an invasion target. While two World Wars raged, Switzerland enjoyed a secure peace.

Switzerland is also the only Western nation to provide shelters fully stocked with food and enough supplies to last a year for all its citizens in case of war. The banks and supermarkets subsidise much of the stockpiling. The banks also have plans to move their gold into the mountainous center of Switzerland in case of invasion.
Every new home that is built, is required to devote an extensive potion of its cellar to provision of shelter.
A number of Swiss citizens I know are not really happy about this 'waste of space'.
I recently looked into the shelter at the house of friends - it was full of bikes and the geraniums spend the winter there.
Uuhm ...
... this just happens to be against the law.
What will they do if someone really presses The Red Button?

Reference: The Swiss And Their Guns; David B. Kopel/Wikipedia.

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!

Here is another panorama. I photographed it on Thursday.



For anyone that is interested, the 180° panoramas I take are made up of between twelve and fourteen shots, which I photograph freehand using a Sony DCS F828 digital camera. I mount the shots in Adobe Photoshop®.
360° panoramas like this one at Fradley canal junction are more difficult and need to be shot with the aid of a tripod.

Exactly six years ago yesterday, I moved from Germany to Appenzell, Switzerland.

My first morning here, I woke to the sound of cow bells.
I looked at the clock, it was 05:30.
I looked at the snow on the trees outside and decided:
I had been dreaming - no cow bells.

But yes - there they were again!
And they were coming closer!

After a short while the cow bells were directly under my window, accompanied by yodelling.
I opened the window to find eight fir trees, covered in cow bells and yodelling.
They were still there when I went downstairs and opened the front door - it was not a dream.
When they had finished their Zeierli (a natural form of yodelling), they came and wished me a Happy New Year.
I gave them some money and went back to bed. After ten minutes they were back.
I thought perhaps I'd given them too much money. But no, it was another group.
By 07:00 I was broke!

The Silvester Chläus walk from farmhouse to farmhouse every new years eve or on the Saturday that precedes, if new years eve is a Sunday. They chase away any evil spirits and any troubles the farmer cares to tell them.
They'll also take any money that is given to them and/or drink any alcohol offered to them.
For one reason or another I missed them the last two years, but this morning I was up at five with Glühwein (mulled wine) on the stove and ready for their visit.
They didn't come!

Oh, I heard their bells and I heard them yodelling. They visited the neighbours on the next slope but never managed to climb the slope to our place. They must have found our doors locked the last two years and decided not to bother again.

What does one do with a bucket of mulled wine?

What do Heathrow and Appenzell have in common?

Remember that picture recently - the goldfish bowl full of milk?
Well the past few days have been just the same.

Yesterday I ventured out to find out if the fog was just local; it would seem that we have a halo around our house.
Up on the next hill the view is entirely different!



I think I might move until the fog has gone.

Looking out of the window today, I get the distinct impression of living in a goldfish bowl full of milk. This is the view from my dining room window:



It is difficult to discern whether the view is that of low clouds, or of fog that has risen from the valley. I would have to drive down to find out.

Fog in the valley often looks like this:



The picture was taken early one morning just as the sun was coming up over the hills.
Down there in the fog, somewhere, is St.Gallen and behind it is Zürich.

The views from up here can be quite spectacular. I was lucky to catch the scene below - it lasted all of 25 seconds - I just happened to have a camera lying at hand.



In fact I have been lucky a couple of times and have been able to capture a few scenes, that only lasted seconds:



These last three images were all taken from my dining room window,
during evening meals.



The pros and contras of living in the foothills of the Swiss Alps!

If you looked at the photographs in my previous post, you might have noticed, that the roads have posts running down the side of them ...

The posts are put in some time in October and enable us to find the roads, even when they have been obliterated by snow drifts.
Because ours is a private road, we are obliged to put up our own posts.
During the first couple of years that I lived here, my landlord put the posts in.
The last two years he didn't. Well, he's over 80 so perhaps he wasn't well enough, or he just forgot.

The year before last, when I realised that the post weren't going to appear, I put up some plastic bean canes I purchased at the local nursery. They were green and not very easy to see in semi darkness.

Last year I phoned the 'Bauamt' - the people that maintain our roads and public buildings - and asked if it were possible to purchase some of their red, wooden posts.

The guy from the Bauamt told me I could have some of his older posts, some that had been knocked down by cars and consequently shortened. They would be a lot cheaper than new ones. He even came along and put them in for me.
I paid CHF 50,- for them.

In May I took them out, cleaned them and stored them in the barn.
In October my landlord remembered, that he had to put in the posts.
The bottom half of the road (the steepest part) he marked with my bean canes.
The stretch between my house and his house was marked with some old fence posts.
His driveway was marked with my shiny red posts!

I couldn't be bothered to go and inform him, what I thought about him, but I did remove two of my red posts and put them in the most important positions on the steep part of the road!

I hope he misses the edge of his drive now and lands in the meadow!

There are some expats who chose to live in, or near, Zürich.
They are now complaining about the weather.

I chose to live elsewhere, at just under 1000 meters above sea level. I did so in the knowledge that in this area, we can have snow from October to April. That is seven months a year and I love it!
It was a lot warmer this year, than in previous years. We had an unusually long and hot summer and a wonderful autumn. Now, at last, winter has us in its grips and the weather prophets have promised us a meter of snow for Christmas!
I am thrilled!

For those of you who either chose the wrong part of Switzerland to live in, or chose to live somewhere entirely different - here are some photographs I took this morning.

A taste of things to come.

Der Föhn isch zämmegheit.

The foehn collapsed yesterday.
Last week was warm and, if you ignored the golden trees, you could have mistaken it for spring.
Yesterday I had a splitting headache and wasn't surprised, when the wispy clouds over the mountain tops, were blown away.
A strong wind came up and when I went outside the wind had turned cold and was lashing streaks of rain around.

This morning we awoke to 25 cm of snow.
It hasn't stopped snowing all day long.
For the first time in ages, I had to dig the car out again.
I wish there were some sort of spray to make snow disappear from cars.

I'll have to turn the central heating on now!

On my way home this afternoon, I found my path blocked by sheep.

It is not unusual to see sheep here, but we are not in Wales or Scotland - it is unusual to have them on the roads!
I carefully nudged my car through them and when I got home I phoned the farmer that owns the sheep and asked if it was o.k. for them to 'out on their own'?
"Oh yes," he said "that's fine."

Well, o.k. they are his sheep, not mine - he knows best.

The phone just rang.
Did I, by any chance, observe the direction the sheep took off in?

Grüß Gott, he said, when we were introduced. Greet God.

This is the typical formal greeting in the south of Germany and in Austria.
The guy I was being introduced to is Austrian, so he rrrolls his "r's" and spittts his "t's", the way only Austrians can.

Younger Swabians frown at this method of greeting nowadays - not in keeping with the Zeitgeist.
I find it a little strange too.

Due to habit, I replied "I shall when I see him!", the way lots of Swabians do.
If looks could kill, I would be unable to write this now!

Disclaimer: I am not religious, but neither do I frown on those who are.

Autumn arrived at last.

I like Autumn. I like the colours it presents us with.
Typical of the Autumn colours are pumpkins.
At the moment you can buy pumpkins of all sorts and sizes, at roadside stalls all over the countryside.
Some of them can be eaten, others are best used for decoration.
If you care to eat them, you can cut them into chunks and pickle them. You can cut them into chunks and boil them to be eaten as vegetables or - my favourite - you can chop them up small and make soup with them, spiced with ginger and garlic and blended with cream.

Warning! When removing the rind - keep your fingers out of the way!!

Perhaps I missed something somewhere ...

The OLMA closes today after eleven days.
No, not the Ontario Lumber Manufacturers' Association, but the Swiss exhibition of agriculture and nutrition in Sankt Gallen.
It would seem to be obligatory for anyone who lives in the area.

I wanted to visit the exhibition last year, but my logic wasn't functioning.
If visitors to the exhibition don't get home until three a.m. I presumed there was no point in getting there early.
I turned up at nine p.m. The doors were closed. Well, they would be, of course.

This year some friends took my hand and promised to show me what it was all about and why most visitors don't just go once a year, but once a day for the whole eleven days.
'You have to be there early to find room' they told me.
We got there at two - p.m. that is.
We rushed past Sewing Machines, Washing Machines, Ironing Machines, Coffee Machines and Snow Ploughs.
No-one really took any interest in them. Too nutritious? Too agricultural?

Oh look!
Hall 9 is devoted to cheese!
And the hall next to it is devoted to livestock.
But who wants to stand around looking at cows until three-in-the-morning?
We sampled some cheese and washed it down with a beer and then rushed along to find our places in Hall 4, before they were taken.

Halls 4 and 5 are devoted to nutrition - in fluid form.
Mounting the stairs to Hall 4 is a feat in itself. The stairs are packed and the noise from above is deafening.
Hieronymus Bosch never imagined anything like the scene that greeted us - even in his wildest nightmares.

People were standing shoulder to shoulder and nose to nose.
If someone moved to let you pass, you could observe how 200 and more people swayed with them.
And, apparently, it wasn't even near full yet.
We somehow reached our 'destination'. It looked pretty much the same as everywhere else to me. I took my position between the bodies and through some miracle, a beer found its way into my hand.
Trying to work out how to get the beer to my mouth, I watched the crowd and noticed that through mutual consent, it was my turn to drink. The people around me swayed away from me just long enough for me raise my glass and take a sip, then it was someone elses' turn.
Don't try to drink while your neighbour is drinking - one of you is bound to loose some teeth.

After drinking my beer, I decided it might be time for me to leave. In the meantime, however, I was packed in so tightly, it was impossible to move. I never learned to use my elbows and 'excuse me' just didn't work!
Another beer somehow found its way into my hand and I resigned to my fate.
After four beers, I was relieved to hear a loudspeaker announce:
'The OLMA is closing, would you please carefully drink whatever it is you are holding and make your way to the exit.'

We all shuffled toward The Exit and the scene from within, was repeated in the street behind the exhibition halls and in the surrounding pubs.

Perhaps I am anti-social, but it didn't take long for me to abandon my friends, wedged there in the crowds and to make my way to the station.
Perhaps it is my being British, but my idea of fun and socialising is somehow different.
Perhaps I missed something.

Invented by the Germans, it has been heavily refined by the Swiss.

I remember, years ago, when I first arrived in Germany, I turned up at the Landratsamt (district offices) one day, naive as I was, and said:
"Hi, I've just declared Germany to be my new home!".
They gave me a form to complete, telling them where I lived, my date of birth etc. and then they gave me a document which allowed me to live and work in Germany - no restrictions - for one year. I then went off to find a job.
After that year I went back to have the document extended and got a stamp which said 'five years'.
After the five years they wanted to extend it for another five years.
I politely said, that this was getting tedious - I intend to stay for longer ...
They looked in the computer, looked at my passport and then gave me a new document which had the magic word 'Unbegrenzt/Unrestricted'.
I took the document and put it in my wallet. It was in there for 26 years and I didn't need it once!

When I decided to move to Switzerland I was informed that, for immigration purposes, I needed to have a job beforehand, my future boss would have to apply to have me allowed to immigrate and while doing so, would have to submit proof, that he was unable to find a Swiss person capable of doing what I was coming to do!

Being unaware of the extremes of bureaucracy I phoned my new boss a week after he made the application and asked if he had heard anything yet.
He hadn't.
Did he have a phone number for me?
He did.

I phoned the office in Sankt Gallen and was connected to a polite gentleman.
I know now, that his name is Bünzli.
After a search that lasted several minutes he told me that, yes, the application was on his desk, but it was at the bottom of The Pile. I asked if, seeing as he had just pulled it out to look at it, it might just be at the top of The Pile now?
It wasn't.

Two days later I phoned Mr. Bünzli again, to ask if my application had moved up The Pile any further?
Apparently there were two or three applications, that had crept in below mine ...
I phoned next day.
My application hadn't made any progress, nor the next day.
The day after, Mr Bünzli sounded rather annoyed, as he informed me, 'applying for permission to immigrate into Switzerland, was not like purchasing an air-ticket!'
Well yes - I understood that, but surely it can't be any more complicated, than a move to Germany.
Well, actually it is - there are a great number of facts to take into consideration!

I can only presume, that he had to check all of the Swiss unemployment lists, to see if he might find someone who could be persuaded to do my job after all ...
Obviously he couldn't. I phoned a day later and he told me, he had passed my application on to the Fremdenpolizei/aliens' police. Ooops!
Had I paid all of my parking tickets? There was that one in France a few years back, that I had ignored. Was that going to jeopardise my chances now?

I asked Mr Bünzli, if he could give me the number of the person he had passed the forms on to?
There was relief in his voice, as he told me the number.

I phoned the guy from the aliens' police. And the next day and so on ...
After a week a provisory acceptance of my application fluttered through the letterbox and I moved to Switzerland.

Here the process was remarkably similar to that in Germany.
The difference is, that the slips of paper, allowing residence and employment are restricted to specific Cantons (counties) for the first twelve months and are marked with a large letter 'A', 'B' or 'C' for beginners, intermediates and professionals.

An 'A' allows you to cross the border into Switzerland to work, if you promise to return home in the evening.
A 'B' allows you to reside and work here for twelve months (**new** five years for EU members), after twelve months it can be extended to five years - if you were on your very best behaviour the whole time!
After being a resident for five years, you may apply for the magic 'C' - 'Unrestricted', after ten years it is granted automatically - if you were ...
see above.

Recently, being here the five years, I made my application for my 'C'.
it was granted after just six weeks!
Apparently I had been on my best behaviour. I haven't been arrested once, since being here and have never been fined for speeding!
I don't deal with drugs and they never caught me driving under the influence ...
I now have the magic words:
'Unrestricted until 28th December 2010'

You'll have to excuse me while I fetch my dictionary and look up the word 'unrestricted' ...

I have a date for Brunch this morning. But I don't know when!

My mobile rang yesterday, while I was in the car on my way home from shopping. My best friend, Esther, complained that we hadn't seen each other in weeks and would I like to go for Brunch ...
Well, of course I said yes.
Then she mentioned a time - half-something - and being in the car, I was unable to jot it down.

When the Swiss or Germans say half ten it is exactly an hour earlier, than when we Brits say half ten.
And that has been my problem since being on the continent ...
Someone will mention a time and I will promptly get it confused.
In my mind I immediately translate 'half ten' to 'nine thirty', but if I don't jot it down, I begin to ask myself 'did she say half ten or half nine?'
So now I have a time span from between 08:30 and 10:30 to go and meet Esther for brunch.
I can't phone her and ask, because she will sleep until the very last minute, jump under the shower and then into her car ...
... I'll either wake her or be too late anyway!

As I say - it has been like this for years. I was supposed to attend a very important dinner with customers once. My Boss said 'We have a table at half seven'.
I turned up at half seven. On the dot. I was proud of my punctuality.
Everyone was just finishing their meal!

It is just coming up to 09:00. I'm off now - wish me luck!

I still find the Swiss thing for informality a little ... well, informal.

Last night I went out for a drink with a colleague.
When we got to the pub there was standing room only, so we stood and drank our beer. While we were standing there, a group of musicians entered and plagued us for fifteen minutes with some Spanish (I think) music then a guy came in and tried to sell us some roses - pretty much a normal night at the pub ...

A table emptied except for one guy. We asked if it was o.k. to sit with him and he gestured his assent. We sat and after a few minutes, two young women came to the table and asked, if it was o.k. to sit down too. We nodded. They sat.

Then one of them proffered a hand and said
'Ich bin Martina'.
'Well, yes uuhm, I'm Rob.'
'Hi, I'm Simone.' (Pronounced almost like Simon - the way only the Swiss can).
'Uuhm - Pleased to meet you - Rob.'

So we spent the evening chatting and drinking ...

But if you call that informal ...
At some point after the third beer, I felt the call of nature.
I ascended the stairs and entered the men's toilets. I swear it was the men's - there was a guy standing in the corner, doing what men do, when they stand at that sort of receptacle. As it was the only one, I waited.
The door to the toilet cubicle opened and out came a woman. The woman called out to someone waiting in the corridor.
'It's vacant'.
Another woman entered the room and the cubicle was quickly re-engaged!

After I was finished, I double-checked.
(The cubicle had changed bums hands once again - another woman)
On the door was a picture of a male in bathing trunks, the door next to it had a female in a bathing suit. The cubicles in there looked vacant to me.

I could only shake my head at how informal the Swiss really can be.

I read somewhere, that it was National-Hug-Week/Day. But then, perhaps it was just wishful thinking from Heather or Kate.

Standing at the traffic-lights yesterday, I noticed a sign that said 'Fussgänger drücken / Hug a pedestrian'. I got out of my car and tried it - needles to say, she didn't like it!
When I pointed the sign out to her, she gave me the correct translation 'Pedestrians press', which I suppose is a lot shorter than ' Pedestrians, press this button if you wish to cross the road, it might help change the lights in your favour ...'

I prefer the other translation!

I should have known when I got up this morning.

This morning when I got up, even the tom-cat was ill and to prove it he ran into the bathroom twice, after I had cleaned up, to throw up on the bathroom floor again.
I admit that I was thankful for him using the lino in the bathroom and not the carpet in the living room (wonder where he learned that?) but I wasn't feeling too well myself.
In fact, I felt as if I had spent the night drinking, whereas I had, in fact, been a very good boy, drank only mineral water and went to bed early (by my standards anyway).

It was cold and windy when I opened the door to go to work. Then it started to rain while I was on the motorway. My headache got worse during the morning so, to be able to concentrate, I was forced to take a couple of paracetamol.

When I went for a sandwich at lunch time the sun was shining brightly, there were wispy clouds in the sky and the temperature had risen by at least 10°. The mountains looked, as if they were about to fall on top of me!
I should have known - Föhn!

When I lived in Stuttgart, I regularly heard my friends in Munich complaining about the Föhn - I always laughed, I'd never heard such rubbish! When I started training people in Switzerland I had trouble with one of my very first courses, due to a very bad headache. 'Of course,' my colleague said 'there is a Föhn'.

And he was right - I have the symptoms nearly every time.

Wikipedia tells us, that a foehn wind occurs when a deep layer of prevailing wind is forced over a mountain range (Orographic lifting). As the wind moves upslope, it expands and cools, causing water vapor to precipitate out. This dehydrated air then passes over the crest and begins to move downslope. As the wind descends to lower levels on the leeward side of the mountains, the air heats as it comes under greater atmospheric pressure creating strong, gusty, warm and dry winds. Föhn winds can raise temperatures as much as 30°C (54°F) in just a matter of hours. Winds of this type are called "snow-eaters" for their ability to make snow melt rapidly. This ability is based not only on high temperature, but also the low relative humidity of the air mass. Föhn winds are also associated with the rapid spread of wildfires, making some regions which experience these winds particularly fire-prone.

Whole villages along the northern foot of the mountains have been burned down during a Föhn. One village, I remember reading (I can't find the link) burned to the ground more than once.
As recently as February 2001, a fire that started in the centre of Balzers (just round the corner here, in Liechtenstein), burned down half the old town centre. This, even though the local fire brigade was out practising and reached the source of the fire within minutes.
They immediately alarmed the fire brigades of the two neighbouring towns but even so, a total of 9 Houses and 6 barns were destroyed completely and 3 houses were badly damaged.

After taking those facts into consideration, I suppose my headache is almost nothing!
I shall never laugh at anyone who complains about the Föhn again.

This weekend is Chilbi in our village - The Parish Fair.
The parish fair originated as an autumn fertility festival/harvest festival and was eagerly adapted to Christian purposes in the early middle ages for the church consecration.

Observing the festivities this morning at 4 a.m. it occurred to me, that even though the church has forgotten the origins of this festival, modern youth hasn't.
Watching the mating rituals of those inebriated bodies, writhing to the sound of Eric Clapton's 'You're Wonderful Tonight', it became obvious, that alcohol had made everyone oblivious to the buckets of apples, the pumpkins and the wheat-sheaves that had originally been a suitable decoration for a religious gathering.

Your place, or mine?
I wonder how many virgins were sacrificed last night ...

We awoke to the sound of gun-shots this morning.

In our peaceful alpine foothills we have, it would seem, a lone boar (that is boar - as in wild pig, not bore - as in blogger).
He is on the rampage in the fields and meadows, ripping up the ground on his forage for edibles. That alone, apparently, is reason enough for him to be shot. We can't have the tidy Swiss landscape being ripped up by a pig! That and the fact, that (in some parts of Europe) the hunting season has started.

Lots of restaurants now have signs hanging outside, advertising 'Wild Woche' - Wild Week means 'Game Week' and gives the restaurants an excuse to sell portions of Bambi and bits of Bambi's Dad at extortionate prices. This season will obviously give us wild boar too! I wonder if he was able to dig up any truffles before they shot him?

As today is the first day of Autumn (Heather your forecast was correct!) a lot of those restaurants are going to be able to advertise 'Metzgete' too - literally translated, Metzgete means Butchered. Autumn is the time of year, when the Swiss celebrate the blood sausage.
When I say blood sausage, please don't envisage anything like the English black-pudding - I am sorry to say, it has no similarity whatsoever.

The Alsatians (Elsaß, France) have blood sausage, as do the Germans and the Austrians. All are edible, most are good - if you enjoy that sort of thing - but I have yet to acquire a taste for the Swiss version.
The recipe? Quite simple:
Take 50 cm of pig's intestine and wash until clean. Tie a knot in one end and fill it with pig's blood. Tie a knot in the other end and twist it in the middle to make two sausages. Do not allow the blood to cool, but preferably, drop your sausages straight into boiling water. Not, however, for longer than two minutes, otherwise the blood will congeal.

I'll try anything once. The first time I tried Swiss Blutwurst was at a bar with standing-room only. When my sausage was placed in front of me along with Sauerkraut, potatoes and bread, I took my knife and fork and went to cut the sausage. The effect was astonishing! The two people to the left and the two to the right of me instantly jumped away from the bar!

"What did I do?" I asked.
"You've not eaten that before, have you?" the guy on my left asked.
"No." I admitted
"We cut them open along the bottom." he informed me, not proffering a solution for something that sounds impossible.

I turned my fork over and held the sausage down with it and slit the sausage open, as gently as I could. The people alongside me relaxed noticeably and I almost turned green! My plate was full of congealed blood!

I pushed the plate away from me and ordered a Schnapps to help me recover.

After a few minutes TGOML nudged me and said:
"You're not eating that then?"
"Definitely not!" I said emphatically.
"Mind if I have it then?" he asked.
"Be my guest," I said "but don't asked me to watch." and turned away.

Just in case you - like me - don't fancy the blood sausages, you may also order liver sausages.
Now please don't go confusing these with the German Leberwurst because, once again, there is no similarity!
The Swiss Leberwurst is similar to their Blutwurst - the only difference being, that the blood has been replaced by a revolting mass of minced liver and fat.

The weenies amongst you, may order a pigs tail or tongue in some places or, if those don't take your fancy, an ordinary piece of salted pork, all menus served with Sauerkraut, potatoes and bread. I wish you a guten Appetit.
I, myself, will give the Metzgete a miss again this year.

Anything that might make a noise is prohibited here on a Sunday - Jul has noted this too. "Not that I’m actually considering starting my own religion…"

Vacuuming is frowned upon, you may not wash your car and you most certainly may not take your empty bottles to the recycling containers!
Yet the churches openly break this strict law every Sunday, with bells clanging away for half an hour at a time as if they were trying to wake the dead!

There is another, more subtle way of breaking the law too. Cows!

Outside my window is a meadow full of cows, each one of them sporting a bell.
Surprising, the different sounds a cow-bell can make. First, there are different sized bells for the older and for the younger cows. Then there are the sounds of them cantering across the meadow, the more muffled sound of them eating and the slower sound of them chewing the cud.

My landlord lives in the next house 500 m away. He is 92 and has lived with the sound of cow-bells all his life.
He insists the local farmer remove the bells from the cows grazing in the meadow around his house - they disturb his mid-day nap!
I suppose you must get that way, as you grow older ...
... I, for one, find the sound of the cow-bells to be most calming - the world is in good order.

But no - now I come to think of it, it can't be age. Last month my neighbour had guests from Germany staying for a fortnight.
On their third morning, they asked, if there were any way to stop the cockerel from crowing every morning ...

... well, I thought that was one of the things about getting out of the city, at least they didn't need an alarm clock!

Last night, sitting in one of those 'Farmhouse-Restaurants', that I so like in Switzerland (a 'pub' in the middle of nowhere, where the locals congregate), someone sat himself next to me and greeted me with 'Hi Rob, haven't seen you for a long time, how are you ...'
Not recognising him, I looked at him more closely and wondered, once again, about how informal the Swiss can be. Then I recognised him as the 'Communications Engineer' that fitted my telephone, when I originally moved here.

He arrived at 8:30, spread out his tools and then said "It's almost 9:00; in Switzerland we have a break at 9:00" Then he disappeared for half an hour!

When he returned, I asked him his advice on a problem I had hit upon.
He gave me the best advice, a Handwerker could give ...

When I moved into this place, I decided, that it was not logical to have the bedroom opposite the kitchen/dining room and the (smaller) living room opposite the bathroom, but that was the way the flat had been laid out.

I decided to swap the two rooms around. This meant moving the TV/radio antennae and to do so, I had started to drill through the wall. After just a few seconds I hit metal and, not knowing what it might be, stopped immediately.

I asked my Engineer what, in his experience, the metal might be and he told me it was probably just a mortice and that he and his colleagues, in my situation, would just continue drilling - not a lot can really happen ...

Not being entirely satisfied with this answer, I made my original hole a little larger (he'd gone by then) and discovered that my metal was a water pipe for the central heating!
I suppose he was right - except for flooding the whole house and rendering the heating inoperative in January (with three feet of snow), not a lot would have happened ...

Are the Swiss more, or less formal than the Germans?
I read something in Sara's blog yesterday, that set me thinking.

When I first moved to Switzerland I was very surprised at how quickly the Swiss will offer you the informal form of address, Du.
Quite often, someone you just met informally will automatically address you with Du.
In Germany you can go for years, saying Sie to someone that you meet every day, just as you could address someone as Mr. or Mrs. for years on end in Britain.

The rule I learned, is to say Sie to anyone older than sixteen, until prompted to say Du. That is, of course, unless you are higher in rank or older than your opposite, in which case you may do the prompting.
I remember once, inadvertently addressing someone with Du. The response was
'I don't remember that we ever ate cherries together?'
Sorry, could you repeat that?

In German speaking Switzerland, people are rather less formal and I sometimes get the impression, that they even feel uncomfortable with Sie.
If they feel uncertain of the situation, they will often revert to the old third person, formal version Ihr.
It just so happens, that Ihr is also the plural form, so when someone asks
'seid Ihr ...', it can mean 'art thou ...' or 'are you [all] ...'
Some Germans call this the Ghost Form, because you always feel the need to glance over your shoulder - 'me - and who else?'

Children here present a completely different problem.
Children in small towns and villages are brought up to greet people they encounter.
If you pass a child in the street, it will most likely greet you. It takes time for children to learn discretion; when I visited Zurich with friends, they had to say 'no, child, you don't have to greet everyone you pass in the city ...'

So what do you answer a child, that greets you with 'Grüezi' when you pass it? (Grüss Sie - greetings to you) The normal reaction would be to repeat the greeting, but one does not say Sie to children. I personally find the personal Swiss greeting 'Hoi' too informal, when greeting a total stranger - no matter how old, so now I have started to use the German greeting 'Grüss Dich' which is formally informal but sometimes results in strange glances. At least I feel comfortable with it.

You'll have to excuse me - there is a class of school children coming this way and I need to cross the road.

The monsoon season would seem to be over.
After six weeks of sunshine the temperatures dropped by almost 20°C and it rained almost none-stop for what seemed like the proverbial forty days and forty nights. Up in the hills where I live (950 m - as in '3/4 of the way up Snowdon's 1300 m') the rain is often accompanied by wind. And when I say wind I mean wind with a capital W!

The house I live in was built in 1788 to house a small farm with about twelve cows. The cow shed now houses bicycles and gardening tools.
The house is a typical Appenzeller house built entirely of wood. It was 'renovated' about twenty years ago, so now the floors in each room are level and most of the ceilings are too. Though the floors are all level, none of them are actually at the same level - this means my rooms are a series of steps running diagonally across the house - the highest in the front bedroom, the lowest I use as an office.
You would pay a fortune to rent most split-level flats. This one is quite reasonable.

The lowest door frame is 1.65 m and it took me almost a year to register the fact.
The scars are gone now!
The highest door frames just allow me to pass through without injury.

When the wind blows, the house starts to creak and groan all over. There are two rooms with their original beamed ceiling and walls and they make the loudest sounds. At the same time dust spills out from between the cracks in those ceilings and from the (treated) woodworm holes in the walls. At times the wind can howl eerily like a horror film, through one of the kitchen windows.

The other day, I had guests when the house started one of its more Oscar-worthy performances. My friends looked at each other in surprise. One of them jumped up in panic – at the noise, I presumed. He informed us he had to go home immediately, to prevent loss of some textiles, that were now airing too heftily.
He raised his wine glass in a final toast and smashed it's stem against the ceiling as he drank. I wasn't really too happy about that, even though it was amusing.
After apologising, my friend turned to leave and drove his forehead straight into the door frame with a resounding thud.

We just had to laugh! Some misdemeanours are punished immediately.
Mind your head!

You realise, of course, that this just will not do!
On Sunday I got sunburned while sitting in the shadows for an hour.

Today there are hundreds of Neo-Nazis getting soaked to the skin, while they wait to disrupt todays celebrations.
There are hundreds of thousands of sausages getting soggy, because the grills can't be ignited and there are millions of Franks worth of fireworks, that can't be ignited because both fuses and matches are soggy.

Sorry, could you move just a little further to the left, with that umbrella, I'm trying to light this rocket!

Tomorrow is Bonfire Night in Switzerland!
The Swiss National Holiday celebrates the founding of the Confederation Helvetica in 1291. A citizen of each of the states Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden climbed to the top of a small mountain called Rütli and swore "We will be a single nation of brothers"
It took them 524 years to complete their task, as it wasn't until 1815, that the last Cantons joined in the fun. And it wasn't until 1994, that it was considered important enough to be worth celebrating.

One of The Three, is often stated to have been the Swiss national hero William Tell, who supposedly had an active part in helping free those parts of Switzerland, that were under Austrian rule a the time.
A few years after the brotherhood was declared, Tell forgot to greet a hat hanging in the streets of Uri. The hat just happened to belong to the Austrian Protector of the area, Gessler, and he, somehow, wasn't too pleased about Tell's negligence and ...
... well, you know the story anyway, because you saw the television series in the 60s just after Robin Hood's third round of repeats!

The thing is, though, where as we have signed documents from our Guy Fawkes, declaring, that it's o.k. for us to set fire to the Houses of Parliament every fifth of November, there is no proof of William Tell's existence. There are no records of the family name Tell, Täll or Tello in Uri - officially he was never born, never got married and never died. In fact, if the German playwright Schiller, hadn't written a play about the whole affair, it would have been forgotten by today.

If Tell didn't exist, then the Confederation Helvetica couldn't have been formed, Switzerland never have been liberated from Austrian tyrants and we couldn't have fireworks tomorrow.
That being the case, I would like to thank Mr. Schiller, for giving us the day off work tomorrow, to let us celebrate his great play!

I drove through Grisons (Graubünden) with my parents once, so that they could see some more of those lovely Swiss mountains. At round about midday we were hungry and stopped off at a restaurant that looked quite inviting.

The waitress, confronted with a carload of Brits, didn't seem too friendly. She dropped a stack of menus on the table and asked us impatiently, what we wanted to drink. We ordered our drinks and set out to tackle the menu - quite a daunting task, as it was written in the local dialect.

My father found 'Chrütter' somewhere in the menu and wanted to know what it was.
When the waitress came to our table to serve our drinks, I asked in German if she could explain what 'Chrütter' is.
My reply was: 'Na, Chrütter san Chrütter, oder?!' she sounded the words as if she were hacking up hairballs - I haven't mastered the Swiss combination of ch to this day, but the Swiss like the sound so much, they write it on the backs of their cars!

Anyway, it took some time, for the fact to sink in, that I hadn't understood a word she had said, by which time she was gone anyway!

A while later she came back to the table with the soup my father had ordered - and, because she was looking elsewhere, proceeded to pour it into his lap! He wasn't too pleased, but before he could catch his breath enough to do more than groan, the woman was apologising profusely and mopping his trousers with a serviette.

All of a sudden, she was as friendly as a person could be and after clearing up the mess and serving the rest of the meal (without further mishap) she came to the table with a bottle, which she proffered for my inspection - on the bottle was written 'Chrütter' and there was a picture of some herbs.
The penny dropped and the translation in my mind was immediate:
'Well, herbs are herbs, aren't they?!'

Needless to say, we didn't tip and my parents drove back to England with fond memories of Swiss hospitality.

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?

There is a strange difference between renting a flat in Germany and renting a flat in Switzerland.

A Swiss flat always has a kitchen already built in (that is not necessarily the same as a built-in kitchen!) and a communal washing machine.

When you rent a flat in Germany you have the option of either putting in your own kitchen, or haggling with the previous tenant, over the price for the one he put in (or haggled over).

Of course - no one told me that before I moved to Switzerland, so I now have a complete kitchen in my cellar after moving here from Germany!
I also have a washing machine in the cellar and a dismantled Wardrobe that is 4 m wide and 2.4 m high.
I live in a 200 year old farmhouse - the highest ceiling here is 1.87 m!
(Just as a matter of interest, the lowest door frame is 1.65 m - ouch)

You'd think that Swiss hand-workers would be aware of such simple facts.
Not so. I recently ordered a double-bed, which was delivered and put together by a professional carpenter. He laid it out upside down on the bedroom floor and started securing the joints.
When I realised what he was doing, I said 'That's not going to work!'.
He gave me one of those looks that says 'Keep your nose out of this - I'm the professional here.'
After a few minutes though, his curiosity got the better of him and he asked 'Why don't you think it will work?'
I pointed out the fact to him, that as the bed's frame is 2.6 m square and the room only 1.84 m high (yes - all my rooms are different in height!), he wasn't going to be able to turn the finished bed over.
He had to contemplate that for some time, before he started to dismantle the frame again.

How do they do it?

It was spring. You know, the time of year when the meadows are strewn with yellow and blue flowers and the cherry trees are in blossom.
Everything was covered in snow - and had been since October, including the cherry blossom.

One of the locals:
Do you see that tree on the hill over there?
Yes.
Do you see the shape it has developed.
Yes.
That means it is going to be a very hot summer!

Two days later the snow was gone.
A week after that it was hot enough to mow the meadows.
We have had blistering temperatures for five weeks.

How do they do it?

It took me a while, but now I realised why ...

Everyone here moves around like snails at the moment - avoid as much exertion as possible - it is too warm.
10:30 a.m. - the temperature outside is already up to 34°C and more to come.
And it has been like this for the last five weeks!

I have taken to getting up an hour earlier to go to work, because being on a motorbike at 'that' time of day is almost cold.
My social life has changed too. Even though the windows of my flat have been open all day long (please don't tell any burglars where I live), it is just too hot in there to spend any length of time after arriving home from work.
There is a permanent draught and my orchids have long since passed away because of it, but the draught is hot - it is like standing in front of a hairdryer!

To get away from the heat I have developed a new tactic. I drive down to the local lido (open-air-swimming-pool for those with the same vocabulary as my spell-checker) where the terrace is planted with chestnut trees - it is a dark and cool place and almost empty because those dressed in swimming trunks and bikinis pass over it as quickly as possible to avoid the 'cold'.
It is the ideal place to drink a refreshing wheat-beer and read a book.

Sadly they close at 8:00 p.m. and I have to set out for the next place with somewhere cool enough to sit.

The local bar has tables outside and the seats along the wall have been in shadow long enough by now to be bearable.
To sit on one of these seats for longer than 60 seconds involves ordering something to drink - preferably something alcoholic.

After an hour I have been updated on all of the local gossip, know that Miss X has a bun in the oven for the third time and is only sixteen and I can consider making my way home.

On my drive home my neighbours can be seen sitting outside their homes enjoying the cool of the evening.
We have all taken to spending as much time outside as possible, preferably under a large tree, just to avoid having to enter one of those unbearable buildings called homes.

We sit around chatting and every now and then, someone will venture inside to retrieve another bottle of wine.
Then at some point someone will exclaim 'Oh, look, it is (insert a very late time of your preference) o'clock!'
This is the signal for us all to rise and to return to our own homes.
And we hope, that tonight at least, it will be cool enough to be able to sleep!

Everyone here moves around like snails at the moment - avoid as much exertion as possible - I'm too tired to think and I have a hangover.

I do wish the locals would pronounce names correctly.
During an introduction someone said to me: I am Liseli (Elizabeth), this is my Husband Hansi (reserved for budgerigars in Germany) (Johannnes) and this is our grandchild, Denis.
I shook the proffered hands and introduced myself, while thinking, that Denis looked a nice-enough lad.

Six months later, I happened to bump in to Denis at a local festival and was a little surprised at the slight swell under his shirt.
Now, though, even the most unobservant dimwit would realise, that Denis is really Denise!

I was reading the other day, about the Swiss Blog Awards and was a little surprised, to see that the winner was awarded her prize in Reka cheques. This reminded me of a strange fact - the Swiss officially have three currencies. (five?)

There is, of course hard cash in form of Swiss Franks - nothing to beat them, or so the Swiss think.
If that is so, then why on earth, did they also invent Reka cheques and WIR?

Reka checks are vouchers created by the Schweizerische Reisekasse (Swiss Travel Fund), sold at a discount by many companies and associations to employees or members for the purpose of promoting family tourism within Switzerland. They are accepted as payment medium by many Swiss railway and transport enterprises, hotels and other establishments in the tourist field. Thus said, one would think they were travellers cheques - one would be wrong! You can also use Reka cheques at the petrol station, at the Co-op and in many restaurants.

WIR is an abbreviation for Wirtschaftsring-Genossenschaft, a cooperative based in Basel that has been operating a cashless payment system on the basis of a closed circular flow of money since 1934. WIR cheques are not cheques as defined under Swiss law. WIR booking orders are never paid out in cash, but instead entitle the bearer to acquire goods and services offered by WIR participants by way of exchange. (UBS)
The idea behind both systems, is a closed economy - keep business in Switzerland. Neither currency is accepted outside Switzerland - they have to be spent here. Essentially a sound economic basis, keep imports down and the cash flowing.
How strange then, that when you actually try to use them in Switzerland, people look down their noses at you as if you were trying to pay with counterfeit Turkish Lira!

Reka cheques are held under ultra violet light and rubbed between thumbs, while at the same time you can sense a member of the staff edging towards the door, just in case you try to make a bolt for it.
If you try to pay with WIR, the vendor always starts to haggle 'well, I'll take 30% WIR, but you'll have to give me the rest in Franks' and you can bet your last Dollar, that if he will take 100% WIR, he is pulling the wool over your eyes - either the quality or the price stinks!

I just don't understand why then - if no-one wants the stuff - it is in circulation at all!
Strangely - if you pull out a wad of Euros, you can pay in most shops with them and in Tourist centres you can even pay with Dollars!

Just recently an 'Entertainment- Evening' was put on by the Yodel Club in our village.
Most of my neighbours belong to this club and so one day my doorbell rang - one of my neighbours wanted to sell me some tickets for the evening, just to make sure I shouldn't get turned away at the door ...
Well, because I do try to take part in at least some of the villages social life, I purchased a ticket and when the evening arrived, duly made my way to the village hall.

Upon entering, my path was efficiently blocked by my neighbour's wife who grumbled at me 'Hender reserviert?/Did you make a reservation?' I held my ticket under her nose and tried to make my way past her but still she blocked my path and grumbled 'Wie isch dr Gschlacht/What sex are you?'

I blinked uncomprehendingly and memories of segregated assemblies at school shot through my head - Boys on the right-, girls on the left-hand side of the hall. Then I glanced down at my legs, just to make sure that I hadn't put on a Kilt by mistake and that this was perhaps the reason for confusion.
I hadn't, so I blinked at her again, slowly beginning to feel a little silly and said 'Male - I think'.

With that, she burst out laughing - most unusual for these reserved mountain-folk - and spluttered "No, no, that means 'What is your surname' here!"
I told her my name, she consulted a list, grinned and said 'Row five, seat number twelve.'
Apparently every single visitor had a hand selected seat.
I was just a little disappointed though, to find that there was no sign on the seats, to inform other people who they were going to be sitting next to.

Well, what shall I say? We weren't segregated and if you like yodelling, it was quite a pleasant evening!

Saturday started off well enough - it was heavily overcast and there were no mountains to be seen anywhere.
There was, however, something that made me suspicious - when I got up, the farmer was driving up and down the meadow outside, mowing the grass. They don't do that if it is going to rain, they spread muck around instead!

My first thought, was that he had lost some of his marbles - it was cold and gloomy and was quite obviously going to rain any minute and yet there he was driving up and down as if the sun were out.

Well - he was right, of course. Within an hour the temperature had risen ten degrees and although it still looked as if it would rain any minute, it was almost unbearably hot. Then, just after Midday the curtains were ripped open so that the mountains were suddenly still there after all and then sun beat down upon us as if to make up for the mornings lost time.
And that is the way it stayed for the whole weekend.
Pass the shadow please.

Yesterday evening, looking for a place to have a quiet drink -
without the comforts of a television screaming World Cup results at me from a shelf in some corner, I saw a sign saying "Wild Woche" which translates to 'Wild Week'.
Great, I thought - it's probably Table-Dancing or something like that?
So I went in.

Looking around, I was relieved to see no signs of a TV.
But neither could I see any form of entertainment.

When I sat down, I was asked what I wanted to drink, while a menu was slid discreetly on to the table in front of me.

I ordered a beer, still hoping to catch a glimpse of the entertainment.
When I saw the title of the menu, my mistake dawned on me.

There - on the front of the menu was repeated "Wild Woche" with the picture of a boars head.
'Game Week'

A bit unusual for summer I thought - the game season doesn't start until much later in the year, but there in the menu were listed:
'Reh-Ragout' - Bits of Bambi!
'Hirsch-Ragout' - Bits of Bambi's Dad
In fact lots of various pieces of Bambi and his Dad, served with cranberries and Sauerkraut and things ...
... The Disney film flashed through my head and I wasn't sure, I was hungry any more!

I looked in vain, for the boiled boars head, but I'd decided I wasn't hungry anyway - I'd come in for the entertainment.

I drank my beer and left.