Swiss and Switzerland

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:

I thought this snap of the Swiss village of Elgg was rather artistic, shown here through the blurry trees:

Every year there is a street festival in Winterthur called the Albanifest. Here’s a snap, but it really doesn’t do the festival justice:

In fact, the Albanifest is the largest yearly street festival in all of Europe! There are well over 100 stands from local restaurants, dozens and dozens of temporary halls for music and dancing, and it’s visited by well over 100,000 people!

Interestingly, I originally thought this festival was to honor the population of Albanians who live in Switzerland. In fact, it’s name honors this fellow:

That’s St. Alban, one of the patron saints of the city of Winterthur!

I took this snap in color, but due to the overcast weather it came out rather stunning, I think, in a faux black and white:

The coast of the Swiss town of Montreux is known for many interesting sculptures, and in the wintry Swiss winter this one really comes into its own:

Continuing the series,

I’ve heard about them for years and years and years, but I only saw one for the first time at a train station in Sargans,

I tried to buy a syringe – as far as I know, anyone can buy one, and I really need something like that for cleaning out a fancy fountain pen that I have – but sadly the machine was empty when I tried.

One of the truly wonderful things about Switzerland is that their wonderful lakes are plied by even more wonderful ferries, as this snap on Zürisee shows,

The big cities in Switzerland like Zürich and Bern keep a small number of their old, antiquated street cars in good functioning order, then from time to time put them into limited use.

This is a snap of the “Old Timer” tram in Basel – and it raises a very good question:

Is there no phrase in German – or in the more advanced, evolved language of Basel (know as Alemannic) – besides “Old Timer?”

Continuing the series, I was lucky enough to accidentally capture not only the first full moon of 2019 over Saigon (called the Wolf Moon) – but in fact, it was a super moon.

Well, one month later there was another super moon, as you’ll see in the snap below. But . . . let me put this into perspective for you. I took this snap in the early afternoon, and in normal circumstances it would be so faint as to be invisible in the sky.  Being a super moon, this was was nearly blinding!

This is the highly restricted “operations” building at Zürich airport (ZRH), where pilots brief their crews and certain nameless government protection organizations carry out certain unmentionable tasks

As part of my job at Swissport I was involved in a complicated IT transformation project that impacted the IT infrastructure at the airport – so I would come here regularly for meetings.

I thought this was a fairly artful way to capture the brilliance of the train station in Spiez,