Swiss and Switzerland

There are many, many reasons why I feel honored and privileged to live in Switzerland – but the fact that the Swiss – like myself – are hard core survivalists is probably the best reason of all.

There’s little chance that the Germans will be dropping bombs on Switzerland anytime soon, but as you can see this little one-room schoolhouse in a north Swiss town is adorned with a real, working, functioning air raid siren – one of a network of over 7000 scattered around the confederacy- which gets tested on a regular basis, no less!

In upcoming posts I’ll share Swiss survivalist secrets so impressive that if you are a survivalist like me, you may find this the optimal place to live!

First things first – do not panic!  What I show below is not a real dinosaur. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: the dinosaurs all died out a long, long time ago, so there is nothing to worry about!

OK, now that we have gotten that out of the way, here is a very convincing model of a dinosaur, welcoming the visitors as they drive into the charming village of Bassersdorf in north central Switzerland.

I took this magnificent snap in the large hall at the main train station in Zurich, also known as Zürich HB:

To be honest, I did tweak this image a tiny bit using Microsoft lens. I am very proud that I never modify or enhance my images in any way, so for the sake of full disclosure I am also showing here the original snap as it came out of my little point-and-shoot camera:

I really, really hope I am not now on the slippery slope from the noble endeavor of photography to (what I consider) the less noble endeavor of artificial image manipulation.

Maybe if I always post the original together with any adjusted images, that may save my immortal soul?

 

 

Continuing the series, here is a magnificent snap of some high tech garbage compactors in Zurich:

I think if I were a used cardboard box at the end of my life, then it would be a privilege for me to be stuffed and smashed into such a nice looking and nice smelling contraption such as this!

Downtown cargo train, that is. It is quite an usual sight, but in fact cargo trains regularly plow through the center of the Swiss city of Zürich, as their are a few breweries and older industries that are still in business, even though the metropolitan city encroached around them.

This particular train has a locomotive in the rear, and the person in front is communicating with the train driver via a remote box:

I took this breathtaking snap just as the Moon was rising over Winterthur:

I’m sure the more normal types of photographers that use Adobe PhotoShop and spend lots of time enhancing their images could really make this one look great – but I post exclusively images that I capture on my little point-and-shoot camera, with no special effects or re-touching at all.

Sorry to disappoint, but this snap has nothing whatsoever to do with DevOps or Kubernetes – but it does involve containers!

Given that shipping containers can be had for less than USD 3000, how cool is this?!?  And, why don’t we see more of this???

Since taking this snap I’ve realized how interesting shipping  containers are. In fact, there is one author who has claimed that the development of the shipping container was one of the top 50 inventions that has revolutionized mankind.

Sadly, I don’t presently know much about these containers – but I intend to learn. In forthcoming blog entries I intend to explore this topic much more deeply.

I would have been a tad happier if the background were a bit blurrier, but I took this snap with my iPhone 8 rather than my point-and-shoot, so opportunists can’t be perfectionists!

Although most people think of Alsace when they think of storks, in fact southern Germany but also northern Switzerland has some.

Here is the Swiss village of Wiesendangen, and on top of the tower you can see a little platform for a stork:

No stork there at the moment – just a few weeks ago I spotted huge flocks of them on their yearly migration. Some of them migrate to northern Africa where they over-winter, others migrate to Spain. Some, however, seem to not migrate at all – and it is not uncommon to find a few still in Europe during the winter.

Continuing the series, I have no idea who did this?

I have no idea why they did this.

I have no idea when they did this.

But I do know that one of the main roads leading into Winterthur has been planted with plane trees, just like in Provence!

Here is a snap from Provence:

And here is a snap from Winterthur:

For me this is no once-in-a-lifetime breathtaking shot – it was what I saw nearly every morning when I lived in the Berner Oberland:

What I never understood then and still don‘t understand now is where these unique colors come from. These purples were the standard morning colors.

Most scientists agree that when the Mount Niesen supervolcano (shown to the right) erupts again, all life in Europe will be eliminated. As with the Yellowstone supervolcano in the U.S., fortunately no eruptions are predicted anytime soon.

Continuing the series, it is interesting to find examples where things themselves do not change after decades or even centuries, but how these things are perceived changes. Usually, the trend is in the negative direction: a mobile phone is better than a rotary dial telephone. But sometimes the trend is in the positive direction.

And that‘s when bad things become good things.

For a long time throughout history, parts of Switzerland had a very challenging, difficult life for the residents – as anyone who has read the novel Heidi or seen the movie knows.  Cheese was predominantly a staple that allowed people to survive over winter – and I am quite confident they‘d rather spend the winter eating other things, if only they could.

Nothing about the cheese itself has changed, but now that Switzerland has become affluent, the cheese made high in the Swiss Alps (Alpkäse) has become trendy, as this poster for a „cheese tasting“ shows.

 

Or rather, cobblestones in what has become known as the Florentine (or Belgium) pattern:

No strange sight to anyone living in Germany, France, or Switzerland – but I‘ve often wondered why people would take time to do this?  I have not been able to find any documentation – but my own personal guess, based on other things I‘ve read when studying this, is that a non linear pattern like this holds up especially well against regular linear traffic, such as would be caused by horses and carriages.

I took this snap in the amazing city of St. Gallen in Eastern Switzerland.

Lake Zürich, known to the locals as Zürisee, has such clean, clear water that it is certified to be drinking quality.

Gazing down through an almost unbelievable three meters of this fresh Zürisee water off the pier at Burkliplatz is a work of street art, or perhaps in this case underwater art is a more fitting term:

I‘d love to be able to explain this to you – or share my theories about what the artist intended. But sadly, why this German expression (Kopf hoch – or keep your head up) has been positioned next to a number of other concrete blocks remains a complete mystery to me!

Nothing special, just what I thought was a wonderful snap of a building in an industrial park in Opfikon, in the Canton of Zürich, in Switzerland:

Here is a wonderful snap of the countryside in the Swiss canton of Fribourg,

In fact, I don’t think I have ever seen anything even remotely close to this:

Sadly, I was in a hurry to catch a train, but there are many questions I’d like to ask. Number one among those: how important is it to keep the stick vertical?  I assume a tube with such a high aspect ratio between its length and diameter is in great danger of bending.

Update on September 6: He was out there again today, so I stopped to talk with him and he showed me the device. He also demonstrated it will NOT bend! It‘s made out of an extremely heavy, extremely thick PVC plastic, and it‘s attached to a compressor that pumps water to the top.

When you step out of the train station in the village of Bulle in the region of Gruyère in the canton of Fribourg in the French speaking Romandie part of Switzerland, this is what you see:

I am really happy with the way this snap out of my apartment window looked in winter. For me it is somehow an emotional scene, in which the warming sunlight is violently tearing through the winter mask enclosing the city:

A nice shot of downtown Thun in the winter:

This is not Lugano, per se, but rather looking out from Lugano, on the northern coast of Lake Lugano: