Swiss and Switzerland

As artistic a snap as I thought I could take of a building whose architecture I found particularly attractive, bathing in sunlight that I thought was particularly attractive, in a city that I find particularly attractive, Zurich.

Continuing the series, Zürich has a lot of hidden treasures that tourists unfortunately never see. One of these in a passage way next to the Fraumünster Church, and the walls of this passage way are decorated with stunning miniature Gargoyles, most of them no bigger than a post card!

Continuing the series, Zürich has a lot of hidden treasures that tourists unfortunately never see. One of these in a passage way next to the Fraumünster Church, and the walls of this passage way are decorated with stunning miniature Gargoyles, most of them no bigger than a post card!

Continuing the series, Zürich has a lot of hidden treasures that tourists unfortunately never see. One of these in a passage way next to the Fraumünster Church, and the walls of this passage way are decorated with stunning miniature Gargoyles, most of them no bigger than a post card!

 

 

Well, I actually suspect this fellow is NOT Swiss!

Last weekend I stopped at the Zurich Airport (ZRH) for grocery shopping, and I had a coffee in a café in Terminal 2. Located in this café were two pallets filled with dozens of huge bags of ground flour – the writing on the bags was foreign but I never stopped to look at which languageg.

And directly above this palettes I captured this fellow – yes, he was as big as he looked, I’d say at least 4 centimeters long:

I saw this electric charging station for buses in the North Central Swiss village of Schaffhausen – but sadly, there were not any of the buses around.

It looks as if a bus can just drive up to one of these stations:

Here is the sign on the charging station, which basically warns you that the batteries in the station have enough juice to electrocute you for a full five minutes if you touch them:

And here is a snap from a different angle:

Continuing the series, Zürich has a lot of hidden treasures that tourists unfortunately never see. One of these in a passage way next to the Fraumünster Church, and the walls of this passage way are decorated with stunning miniature Gargoyles, most of them no bigger than a post card!

 

Continuing the series, Zürich has a lot of hidden treasures that tourists unfortunately never see. One of these in a passage way next to the Fraumünster Church, and the walls of this passage way are decorated with stunning miniature Gargoyles, most of them no bigger than a post card!

As artistic a snap as I thought I could take of a public water fountain in the medieval Swiss village of Einsiedeln,

Nestled deep within the Swiss Kanton of Schwyz is the medieval village of Einsiedeln. Coming here on a tip from my manager, I was more than impressed to see this magnificent Benedictine Abbey, dating back to the year 850 no less!

This is just a tiny snap of the abbey, showing an incredible gold fountain in the middle,

Einsiedeln is a wonderful village in the Swiss Kanton of Schwyz, and home to the world famous Kloster Einsiedeln, a Benedictine Abbey that dates back to the middle ages – unbelievably, the middle ninth century!

Here’s a wonderful snap of the town of Einselden, looking down from the abbey:

Normally on a beautiful day like this day the whole village would be crowded. It’s quite empty, because I hazarded a trip here during the height of the Covid-19 outbreak in Switzerland.

Zürich has a lot of hidden treasures that tourists unfortunately never see. One of these in a passage way next to the Fraumünster Church, and the walls of this passage way are decorated with stunning miniature Gargoyles, most of them no bigger than a post card!

A church-clock, to be more precise – and a red one, at that.

The newest of the medieval church clockfaces in Switzerland are all blue; those slightly older are all red; and those older than that are black – but they are very rare and it‘s almost impossible to spot one.

Why?  Presumably there was a company carrying out renovations – but I have not been able to find out any more details on the Internet.

The Swiss color clockface mystery continues!

In a rare treat I was able to capture all of them at the same time in a clear morning sky!

Here’s the much redder and larger Jupiter, just next to the fainter Saturn,

And here’s the Moon and Mars,

The canals on Mars are clearly visible in this snap. Even today the Martian canals are recognized as massive things that previously transported huge volumes of water. It’s a little known and oft hidden fact that despite all the rovers on Mars, scientists have yet to prove or disprove this amazing network of canals was somehow formed by nature, or else created by alien intelligences greater than man’s but as mortal as his own.

Schaffhausen, a jewel in the crown of northern Switzerland, has more Bay Windows than any other medieval city in Europe, and most of them are too fantastic to believe without seeing, as this snap shows!

Continuing the series, this shows that the clockface on the main gate to the  medieval  village of the North Central Swiss Neuenkirch is also blue,

“I don’t like mysteries – they give me a bellyache, and right now I’ve got a beaute.” That was Capt. Kirk, but I am the same way. It drives me nuts that almost 100% of the more modern clockfaces on medieval Swiss churches – and there are dozens of them – are the same blue; whereas the somewhat older clockfaces are an orange-red. Presumably, there was a movement (no pun) to refurbish the clocks – but until now I could find no historical record of this.

Continuing the series, here’s a shot looking down the long street towards the main medival gate,

The timing and location of the sun were almost perfect, as the shadow very neatly runs exactly down the line of buildings!

It’s not Winterthur – sorry about that – but one of the dozens and dozens of small villages that surround Winterthur and whose names are too numerous to mention: Elsau, Seuzach, Rätterchen . . . I’ve been to all of them so many times that their names and their sights blend into homogenous obscurity. Some of them were named in a time when people had no education – such as the Swiss Dorf named, appropriately enough, Dorf . And some of them dating back eons, when Switzerland was home to enclaves of Neanderthal humans with their massive jaws and presumably unique language, and the names of the villages are linguistic remnants of that pre-paleolithic time gone by – such as the village named Thaa.

This one is a bit different:

It’s different because the clockface on the church is red, not blue. I have a theory – unconfirmed until now – that the overwhelming majority of churches in North Central Switzerland were outfitted with new – and blue – clockfaces at about the same time. Clockfaces on churches that are demonstrably older are universally orange-red in color.

I call it the Gort head, because it reminds me of the head of the famous robot, Gort. What the artist calls it, I don’t know.

An artistic a snap as I thought I could take of the Gort-Head, in the north central Swiss village near Romanshorn,

I live in an area that has been surrounded by dozens if not hundreds of acres of open fields.

Today there is nary a field that does not have a large construction project, as this snap shows:

As artistic a snap I thought I could take of an ivy-covered lamppost in Zürich,

If you look closely, you’ll see the new shoots all growing to one side!

I don’t know if it is or it isn’t – by volume?  By height?  By number of fish killed as they spill over and are crushed in the turbulence?

But regardless it is something nice to look at!

As artistic a snap as I thought I could take of some violent, angry storm clouds threatening Europe’s largest waterfall,