Swiss and Switzerland

Continuing the series, here is another snap of the Roman ruins in the Swiss village of Avenches:

 

Some flowers I caught growing out of the side of the mountain,

Switzerland is well-known for the cleanliness of its public toilets – and as you can see from this snap of a 2000 year old Roman amphitheater in the Swiss village of Avenches, in fact have well-built toilets is a very long tradition indeed!

Avenches has an interesting history, being just outside the largest Roman town in Switzerland (Aventicum) which, unfortunately, collapsed several hundred years after its founding.

In a recent blog post, I talked about Switzerland having the world‘s largest building with no indoor supports – a massive installation used to cover a huge toxic cleanup site.  The site‘s long been cleaned up, and the building has long been dismantled, but I can‘t stop thinking about the purpose of one of the vehicles I showed in a snap,

There’s no attachments to push or pull anything, so as near as I can tell, it can’t do much more than drive people around.

Well, you can imagine my surprise when I was travelled through a small village in north central Switzerland and came across this site!

Is this the same vehicle? Regardless, why does it look so strange and what doesn’t really do? Well, the side of the vehicle advertises a museum dedicated to excavation, so I guess I‘ll have to go back one day and check it out!

I‘ve written about storks in Alsace, storks in Germany, storks in Bulgaria – and lots of other places.

I‘ve written about stork migration – how they learn their destinations and even their flying technique from their local neighbors.

I‘ve even written about stork poop. Until now, just about every stork nest that I have come across has been relatively clean and poop-free.

Until now . . .

In the country that prides itself as being the world‘s cleanest and most organized, it seems the storks have a lot to learn, as this snap near Tuggen, south of Lake Zurich, shows:

A lot of people think he was the fictional creation of an author, but that hasn‘t stopped Switzerland from adopting Wilhelm Tell as one of their most famous local folk hero’s. Deep, deep within the Swiss village of Altdorf, deep, deep within the Swiss canton of Uri, there is an incredible statue of Wilhelm Tell – which is so big and incredible I can only reveal it piece by piece, such as this close-up here:

What I don‘t really know is whether the artist tried to capture father and son before Wilhelm used his crossbow to shoot the apple off his son‘s head – or after. From the fearful look of the small boy, and the „try to be brave, my son“ look of the man, my guess is that this scene took place just immediately before the Apple was shot off – but that‘s just my guess.

Lake Zürich – or Zürisee as it is called by the locals – has so many dozens of fountains scattered around it, it is probably impossible to count them all.

Here is a shot of a water fountain at the northwestern end of the lake,

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.