Swiss and Switzerland

Continuing the series, Le Landeron is a medieval village in central western Swiss canton of Neuchatel that is one of a very tiny minority of Swiss villages in which most of the houses have been equipped with medieval dormer cranes, used for lifting things to the highest level:

For a long time I wondered about this, until I spoke with a historian in the German village of Villingen-Schweningen. He told me that people are lazy, if they can they prefer to keep their grain in their basement, and only in cases where the water table was very high were the higher floors of buildings used for grain storage. Et viola, dormer cranes.

If you are not from Switzerland, you MUST exercise extreme caution before visiting this village.

Otherwise, there is a real possibility that your brain will explode!

Stein am Rhein is a little medieval village in north central Switzerland, and it’s famous for its medival houses that are elaborately painted, as these snaps show.

Here is one of many houses:

And here is a close-up of the bits that are elaborately painted:

Continuing the series, I took this snap of an uncovered bridge over the Thur river while en route to the Rhine village of Stein am Rhein in Switzerland,

Stein am Rhein is a very unusual medieval Swiss village, in which a majority of the historical buildings have painted facades. I’ll show more snaps in upcoming blogs, but first a view of Stein am Rhein from high on a hilltop, looking south:

In this region there is no way to describe the border between Switzerland and Germany except to say highly irregular. Sometimes Germany is north of the Rhein, sometimes it’s south, same with Switzerland. The border takes zillions of twists and turns.

Found a terrific iPad app called Autostretcher. Seems to be the best one I’ve used so far. Just cover a region with lots of snaps and the app stitches them together into one snap, as shown here:

Continuing the series, a one-lane bridge over the mighty river Thur in north central Switzerland,

I took this snap of an uncovered bridge over the Thur river en route to the Rhine river town of Stein am Rhein in Switzerland,

I took this snap on a field just outside of the fence that borders the Zurich International Airport (ZRH),

I took this snap just outside of the Swiss historical village of Le Landeron, in the Kanton of Neuchatel,

Bank of the Rhein River, looking north, that is:

I took this snap of the covering of a tram stop in the Swiss city of Basel. Interestingly, I did not convert this to black-and-white, this is really a color shot:

Nothing special, actually a bit disappointing. I thought this snap would turn out a bit prettier and more artistic than it did:

On a remote Winterthur road, in the direction of Pfungen,

Not much to say

OK, maybe a bit to say. What you can’t see here is the other side of the street, behind me, which is in fact a valley with a river below it. So the idea here is that the buildings are competing to get a good view of the valley and the river below.

Continuing the series, here is a black-and-white snap of a cement factory in Winterthur,

Continuing to demonstrate the universal truth that it is impossible to take a bad snap of a good cow, I can’t tell you whether this cow self-identifies as an Eschenberg cow. But I can tell you I took this snap during my daily 15 km Nordic Walk in the forests of Winterthur, in a spot known as the Eschenberg:

This cow was one of 49 other cows being led to a new grazing field.

Every country is filled with mysteries . . . and Switzerland is no exception. I took this snap of a rotting, decrepit building, high and deep in the Alps of central Switzerland:

Really makes you stop and think . . . why?  Perhaps it was at once time a building of historical significance, and now the owners are forbidden from destroying it?  Or perhaps they receive financial benefits by having a damaged property on their land? Or perhaps . . . they just thought it looked nice – which I think it does!

Hardly more than 1 inch across, I took this snap of a little flower growing out of the wall that is part of the Habsburg Castle,

I’m pretty sure I’ve taken this snap before – and I’m pretty sure I’ll take it again. Probably there are more interesting angles to capture it, but so far I have not discovered any.

The Alps and Switzerland are lot like the Pacific Ocean and the Earth. Yes, there are places on the Earth that are not the Pacific Ocean. But to a very good first approximation, the Earth is more or less equal to the Pacific Ocean.

The same goes for Switzerland. Yes, there are places so flat that some companies have set up remote offices for calibrating the flatness of things like rules and levels. But by and large, Switzerland is very mountainous.

Here’s where a great iPhone app called PeakFinder comes in. You start up PeakFinder, point it in any direction you like, and it shows you a superposition of the landscape together with detailed information about all the peaks. It even let’s you take superimposed pictures!

Here’s a great example:

As you can see here, PeakFinder provides you with many surprises. For example, in the snap above the peak Hausstock looks quite tiny – but in fact at 3’158 m it is by far the highest visible peak in the entire snap!

The Swiss Alps are tricky things!  You may think the Alps shown in the background here are just a little ways down the street – but they are not! In fact, they are so tall that they are nearly 2 hours’ drive from here by car!

That general “bump” you see is referred to as the Glärnisch, the direction is almost directly due south – and it reaches a maximum height of 2’914 meters or 9,560 feet.

Nothing particularly significant, just a doorway on a building in Zürich that I thought looked nice:

There are castles. And then there are castles. This is the Habsburg Castle, and it definitely belongs in the latter category. Not because of opulence and gold – but because of the sheer historical significance.

Located not too far from my home, it dates back to the year 1000, and it marks the spot where the very powerful Habsburg Dynasty was kicked off and more or less controlled huge swaths of Europe for literally hundreds of years – so long, in fact, that inbreeding within the family gave rise to genetic mutations such as the famous “Habsburg Jaw,” simliar to the likes of Jay Leno and John Kerry.