Swiss and Switzerland

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.

 

You do not – under any circumstances – want to come across one of these terrify, menacing, deadly creatures in Switzerland – well, at least not if you are just a few millimeters tall. Because in fact this fellow is hardly bigger than my finger. I took this snap at the Habsburg Castle in the village of the same name, in Switzerland.

This is UNESCO-recognized city Bern in the Kanton of the same name, in Switzerland. There are many amazing, mind-blowing things in this snap that each deserve their own blogs:

In this blog I’ll focus on the amazing, mind-blowing subterranean stores. If you look to the bottom left, you’ll see half a woman with blond hair. That is not really half a woman – that would be silly! In fact, it is a whole woman, and this woman is standing in an entryway to a store located under the street.

This snap shows many such subterranean shops:

And if you get even closer, they look like this:

I don’t know much about the history of these subterranean shops, why for example people thought they were a good idea. I once spoke with a medieval historian (well, he was a modern historian, but his interest was the Middle Ages) and he said that the level of ground water had a huge impact on what we see today. So it is likely that Bern had a very low groundwater table – which would make sense because it is very high above a river – but that’s just a guess.

So common a sight that I think many Swiss are not even aware they exist. A small brook that channels water off a mountain,

My guess: art

It’s OK. If it were me, I’d chose a different color, probably a hi-vis orange. Just sayin’ . . .

OK, probably not only in Switzerland. But certainly in Switzerland.

An automatic vending machine at the main train station in Gstaad that sells so-called “Alp-Cheese,” a very special type of cheese that is by law required to be made from the milk of cows that graze at very high altitudes in the Swiss Alps:

It’s on my to-do list to explore this topic further. From what I have been able to gather, there is an altitude defined by law above which the cows are required to graze; I’ve also read that the Swiss government pays a bonus to the farmers (per cow) as an incentive for them to keep this industry alive.

OK, I don’t know if they call it a venison farm. But that’s what it is:

I’m not sure why – quite probably due to the meat lobby – but deer meat is very uncommon in the US compared to Europe.

What I find interesting about this shot is how the deer like to remain so close to one another, and how the stag deer (shown on the right) is actually on the edge of the crowd, maybe in order to better defend them?

In addition to farmed deer, the area of north central Switzerland where I currently live is filled with wild deer. I see a few every single morning when I take my daily 10 km Nordic Walk in the nearby forest. Generally they are quite tame and usually they’ll let me walk right by them without running away.

Continuing the series, here is the sign you see when you approach the outlet mall by car:

I tried looking up the village of Landquart, because the name is interesting and I wanted to know more about its origin. Sadly, according to this source, no information is given other than Der Herkunft des Namens ist fraglich. This village is located in the middle eastern area of Switzerland known as Graubünden, and – even though the country is very far away – here people speak various dialects of the Romanian language, known collectively as Romansch.

I’m taking a self-learning training on LinkedIn about photography – I thought it was high time I dived in and learned from the professionals!

In this course they want you to photograph subjects in black-and-white, so you can focus exclusively on things like form, layers, perspective, etc.

For me, I like the way that the tracks and platform draw the observers attention to the skyscraper in the background.

Continuing the series, here is a nice snap of a restaurant for tourists in the Swiss village of Ingenbohl,

Continuing the series, just across the outlet mall in Landquart there is a pumping station that is open to the air but protected by a fence:

Interestingly, there is a small creek just behind this installation, but the screws go down much, much lower (probably a good 15 m) lower than the level of the river:

Things like this really confuse me. It smelled a bit like sewage, so I assume it was somehow for dealing with sewage water. But only one of the huge screws was turning, and in fact the tiniest one.  Does it receive a higher volume in the rain? Does it pump more than just sewer water? Sadly, these things are never documented anywhere that the public can easily read about them!

About an hour south of Zürich there is something usual. Very unusual. Well, very unusual for Switzerland, at any rate: an outlet mall! As a rule, Switzerland doesn’t have many of them; I know of one other in the very south of Switzerland, near Italy. And I know of two in Germany and one in France – but they are much less common than in the US.

And here’s what it looks like when you park your car:

Not sure what this is – it doesn’t look old – but there are a number of them scattered throughout the north central Swiss city of Winterthur – and I find it a bit frustrating that they have these things with no plaques or explanations!

Anyway, I liked this snap, in this light, because I thought that all the colors were somehow related. I don’t know anything about colors, but I understand there are collections of them that are related.

I used Microsoft Lens to unstretch this gate, a surviving artifact of the walled city of Schaffhausen – or, in the Alemanic language, Schaffhuuse:

 

Seeing this up close, it makes me wonder why the skin tones of some of the people in the painting are dark?  This might not seem interesting, but only about 300 m from this tower is the famous Schaffhausen Moor-fountain that portrays an Arab.

Could it be that Schaffhausen has a history involving the Arabs?  It would not surprise me, since Schaffhause is easily reached from the south of France via a long series of rivers.

It’s a mystery I have to come back and clear up some day!

I took this snap in the Canton of Schwyz, but it is a common sight anywhere in the German speaking region of Switzerland:

In the western part of Switzerland, also called Romandie, the architecture tends to be more similar to what might be called a French style, with buildings mostly made from stone.

The town of Schlieren in Switzerland, just outside of Zürich, has to be one of the niftiest little towns I know. There is a very old area that has been overgrown with a slightly-less-old industrial area, and that has been overgrown with a modern industrial area. You have to really go on a weekend and drive around on the roads marked private, but if you do you see a lot of interesting sites like this, a very old church next to a slightly newer but also old industrial building, while all the while I am surrounded (off camera) by very modern industries:

Here’s a slightly different view from a different angle:

I caught this snap just outside of Zürich,

 

 

 

As artistic a snap as I thought I could take of some plants in a planter on a pier at the Vierwaldstättersee in Switzerland, in the town of Ingenbohl,

That’s a luxury 4-star hotel in the background, the Seehotel Waldstätterhof, and unless you are willing to plop down a cool CHF 400-500 per night don’t think about sleeping here.

I took this snap of an unattended stand where you can buy candies and sweets. You can either put your money into a little box – or else pay electronically.

It’s wonderful to live in a modern European country that has such a high degree of security and trust!