Swiss and Switzerland

OK, it is not a prairie but rather the center of Winterthur – but nevertheless quite a unique house!

There are a lot of cultures that have legends of “Big Bad People,” such as Paul Bunyan and Babe the Big Blue Ox.  Here’s another one, Saint Gall (550 AD – 646 AD):

According to legend a bear attacked from the woods, but once encountering the saint it became tame and followed him around thereafter.

Anyway, he is the namesake of a truly magnificent abbey, which in turn is the namesake of a truly magnificent city in northeast Switzerland, St. Gallen. I haven’t shown many pics of this city in my blog until now, but I think it’s time to start sharing them – but slowly, otherwise your brain could explode from the majesty of the architecture, as this snap shows:

And here’s a follow up that I captured during the winter in Solothurn,

Solothurn was founded by the Romans and is one of the very few city-states in Switzerland. I captured this magnificent shot showing the Jura mountains in the background:

For those of you who may be unaware, the Jura mountains are the namesake of the Jurassic Period in geology, since the rocks they expose date back to that era.

This is the famous Schilthorn nestled high in the Swiss Alps,

And at the cable car station just below this at 2677 m lies the peak called Birg, where they have installed a massive outdoor attraction called the Skyline Walk consisting of chainlink and glass walkways suspended almost three thousand meters above the ground.

You always ASSUME they design these things with huge safety factors in mind. But on a recent visit there part of the glass walkway was cordoned off, and this is the frightening image I saw:

I work in a building next to a creek – and just next to my building is a small natural spring out of which a stream of water runs into the creek. They’ve turned this into a natural biosphere:

At this time of year it’s filled with algae and water plants and frogs – probably well over a dozen big frogs. See if you can spot the frog:

He’s more or less in the middle:

I don’t know how common these things are outside of Switzerland, but at least in Switzerland they are becoming more and more common.

This is it – a weed shocker:

I think their official name is steam weeding machine. Sadly, I don’t know what these machines are called in German, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was something along the lines of Dampfunkrautvernichtungsanlage or Dampfunkrautbereinigungsmaschine.

The idea is to kill weeds dead by blasting them with extremely high temperature steam, rather than by the use of chemicals.  Presently, the Swiss Federal Railways use a carcinogenic weed killer to keep their rails clean and free of weeds – they plan to convert to 100% weed shockers in the next few years.

Just about two minutes before a massive downfall just outside the Zurich airport in Opfikon:

Next to the famous Kornhaus restaurant in Bern you’ll find a magnificent golden elephant:

It’s really a sad story. It’s there to commemorate a real circus elephant who, in the late 1800’s, went amok and killed people near Bern. It was finally captured and shot.

Even if when threatening to attack you, good cows make for good photographs:

I simply stopped to take a snap during my daily 15 km Nordic walk through the Winterthur hillside, when not only this cow but all of her sisters started running towards me. Since there was only a very thin single strand of electric fence, and since this cow looked easily more than 500 kg, I didn’t hang around long enough to see what would happen.

This is the view of Castle Kyburg (Schloss Kyburg) that I see every morning on my long 15 km Nordic trekking through the forests in Winterthur:

It’s over 1000 years old. You can’t really see WHY anyone would want a castle here, from this perspective, but in fact the castle sits above a river, and therefore it has a very strategic location – at least from a middle ages point-of-view.

Continuing the series, a familiar sight to anyone who visits the cheese factory in Gruyères – but probably not well known outside of that.  Cheese is produced in an ongoing process, in which the day’s shipment of milk is processed into “wheels.” The wheels are are stored very neatly in a climate controlled warehouse the size of a football field.

And a robot, shown here in the center, attends to their daily needs, flipping each wheel over on its face, dusting off the surface, and – unless I miss my guess – spraying it with a light saline solution.

This is a snap from arguably the most important of all passes through the Swiss Alps, the Gotthard Pass:

Again, since I never re-touch or edit my snaps in any way- what you see is what I got! – this has to be one of my favorites, with the intense green contrasting a very thin white band of atmosphere just above the horizon.

Although you can see it here, several hundred feet below the ground is an Autobahn tunnel, that I mentioned in a recent blog post.

If you are interested and get the chance, there is a fabulous historical movie that depicts the tunnel building efforts. It’s fascinating because it addresses things you might think about (the horse caravan industry that transported goods across the Gotthard Pass in the summer was threatened existentially) and things you might not (huge problems with disease, simply because the long tunnel and sanitary conditions at the time did not permit the transport of human waste out of the tunnel).

By no means an uncommon sight in Switzerland, and known as a purple heron, or Ardea purpurea. I spotted this one resting on a boat in Lake Zurich:

This is Ansel Adams, who everyone knows is the most famous photographic artist since the camera was first invented:

Interestingly, at least according to what I read, he never identified himself as a photographer, but rather as “an artist that used the medium of photography.”

And this is one of his masterpieces, the church at Bodega Bay:

Well, now it’s my turn!

Recently, at about the midpoint of my daily morning 15km Nordic walk, I captured what I thought was a magnificent snap of a church in Winterthur, basking in the early morning sunlight:

This snap has not been retouched or enhanced in any way.  It’s snaps like this – fresh out of my little point-and-shoot camera – that really keep me going!

This is a snap of some houses outside of the medieval village of Gruyères:

The “s” at the end always confused me, so I finally looked it up. The village is named Gruyères, with an “s.” But it is located in a district called La Gruyère, no “s” in the Swiss canton of Freibourg.

The snow covered peak in the background is La Moléson, sort of a mini version of the more famous Matterhorn, reaching just over 2000 meters in height.

It looks like I’ve climbed down between the railway tracks to take this stunning shot of the railway station at Olten, in Switzerland, meaning there would be mere seconds before a ultra high speed train crashed into me:

Allemanic is the more evolved form of High German spoken in Southern Germany and Switzerland, and many people consider Olten to lie on a language boundary that separates the Zürich form of Allemanic from the Bern form.

Funny story – but true: there is a train conductor for the Swiss Federal Railways that has the route from Zurich to Geneva. Between Zurich and Olten he greets the passengers with the Züridüütsch greeting “Grüezi wohl.” Between Olten and Freibug he switches dialects and greets the passengers with the Bäärndüütsch greeting “Grüessech wohl.” And between Freiburg und Geneva he switches languages completely and speaks French, “Bonjour Madams, Monsieurs.”

A mathematician would say it like this: If C is the set of all good cows, and B is the set of all bad photographs, then the intersection of C and B is the empty set.  But it is easier to just look and see, as I tried to catch the combined emotions of satisfaction and self-indulgence in this cow, just freshening up after a busy day of chomping on fresh, Gruyères grass shows:

Switzerland is the land of cheese – well, it is the land of plenty more things than just cheese, too, but you have to give the Swiss a lot of credit for their cheese. And to take a lot of credit for their cheese, they need a lot of cows. And to keep a lot of cows well fed in the winter, they need a lot of grass.

So sights like this are a common one all over Switzerland in the warm summer months, as the farmers ensure their clipped grass dries thoroughly in the sun:

Tractors themselves are amazing, amazing things, and there are literally hundreds of different attachments that farmers can buy. Because I lived for nearly a decade in America’s farm land, I knew many farmers and I got to know a thing or two about tractors: this tractor above is pulling a so-called rotary rake. I’m afraid I don’t know what it’s called in German.

It is a physical impossibility to capture a bad photograph of a genuinely good cow, as this snap of many cows relaxing in the Swiss Gruyères countryside shows. They are very content in the knowledge that although their babies may now be Züri Geschnetzeltes, soon their milk will Switzerland’s most famous brand of cheese:

Continuing the series, this is a very interesting snap for two reasons and three directions!  The first reason, direction to the left, denotes where the German speaking half of Switzerland begins. The first reason, but direction to the right, denotes where the French speaking half of Switzerland begins.  And the second reason, direction down under, is a hidden canal you cannot see!

But to prove there is really a canal here, as is my usual custom, I simply turn 180 degrees and take the following snap:

The boundary between the German speaking and French speaking sections of Switzerland is often known as the Röstigraben. Rösti (the Swiss version of American hash browns) is a famous dish in the German section of Switzerland, and Graben is a very old German word meaning moat.

Continuing the series, this is a crane that I spotted in the Swiss village of Oberwinterthur,

This is an enormous, 20-foot-tall shiny metal statue of a girl, located in front of a hotel in Zürich: