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A motorist in Bülach, Switzerland, was towing a boat behind his vehicle and came to a stop at a stop light. When the car continued, the boat became unhitched and was left sitting at the intersection!
One witness said: “As the car drove off, the boat just stayed there and the driver didn’t seem to even notice. The other drivers were pretty shocked, but police caught the guy who’d been towing it and escorted him back so he could tow it away.”
A new power plant in Switzerland will be situated up in the Alps. Construction requires huge excavator trucks, but there is no road to the site. What to do? Oh, there’s a cable! It must be pretty strong, because that’s how they are transporting the heavy equipment. See more pictures at Biglorryblog. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
Forget New York, London, and Washington, D.C. The greatest concentration of economic power in the world is in teeny tiny little Swiss town of Zug (pop. 115,000).
Well, at least on paper anyhow:
Zug canton — there are 26 cantons in Switzerland — is the small nation’s smallest state, with just 115,000 people. Yet its commercial registry lists more than 29,000 companies — nearly one for every person in town — and more than 1,000 more companies arrive each year.
Why Zug? The good ol’ Swiss secretive banking and ultra-efficient post office system:
[The companies'] "headquarters" exist entirely within the stolid post office building, whose hall holds thousands of P.O. boxes retained by foreign companies. "Many company names are not even on any door. They just have a post office box in Zug," says Rolf Schatzmann of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Zurich.
Vivienne Walt of TIME Magazine has the secret companies of Zug: Link
I hope that you don’t rely on your GPS to the exclusion of your common sense. This guy followed his navigator’s instructions to “a glorified goat track.” and had to be rescued by a helicopter crew!
Driver Robert Ziegler, 37, found himself stranded near the peak at Bergun, Switzerland, unable to go forward or turn around to go back the way he came.
Rescue workers scrambled a heavy lifting helicopter to carry the van and its driver to safety after he dialed for help on his mobile phone.
“I was lost and I kept hoping that each little turn would get me back to the main road. In the end it told me to turn around but of course I couldn’t by then,” the driver told police.
Link -via the Presurfer
Dairies in Switzerland make many varieties of Swiss cheese, and only some kinds have the holes we associate with it. Gadling has a short course in Swiss cheese making from the Appenzeller cheese dairy in Stein, Appenzellerland, Switzerland.
Now, onto what you’ll learn about the 700 year old Appenzeller cheese, renowned as the “spiciest cheese from Switzerland:”
The dairy guys get to work at about 4 AM to receive and test the milk brought in by local farmers. They test it to ensure that the cows ate nothing but hay and meadow grass. If farmers bring in bad milk once, they get a warning; twice and they are banned.
To create a consistent product, part of the milk is skimmed, then slowly re-added to the whole milk to ensure an exact fat content. This is a practice older than most cheese dairies.
That’s only the very beginning of the process. If you are ever in Switzerland, you can take a tour of the cheese plant yourself! Link
Photo: Annie Scott
Most hotels try to convince you to book your stay with them by touting their five-star ratings. Not Null Stern Hotel in Switzerland! Not only does it have "zero star" rating, the hotel is actually a converted bomb shelter.
Annie Scott of Gadling stayed there and lived to write about it:
The "Null Stern," or "Zero Star" Hotel is a cross between a hostel and an art installation by Swiss concept artists Frank and Patrik Riklin. The former air raid shelter retains remnants of its past purpose and challenges one’s perception of what "hospitality" means. There are ear-protecting headphones and heavy machinery, as well as sleigh beds and a sexily-dressed female butler. It was quite an experience.
Link – Thanks Willy!
National Geographic’s Adventure Magazine named ten people as Adventurers of the Year, and invite you to rate each of them to help them determine the readers’ choice top adventurer. One of the profiles features 37-year-old Dean S. Potter, rock climber, tightrope walker, and BASE jumper. Potter set a world record in 2009 by jumping off a high face of Switzerland’s Eiger in a wingsuit and sailing for almost three minutes! The trip was 9,000 feet vertically and four miles horizontally. Links to all adventurers. Link to voting. -Thanks, Ethan!
So. Three decades after he fled Los Angeles, director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland.
In 1977, Polanski pled guilty of "unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor" to avoid being charged with rape by use of drugs (he gave alcohol and quaaludes to the then-13-year-old female model he was doing a photo shoot with) and sodomy, amongst other charges. He fled the United States before his sentencing and has been avoiding traveling to countries that could extradite him ever since. The victim has since forgiven him and settled a civil suit against Polanski for an unspecified amount.
Granted, the Polanski case was tawdry. It was filled with celebrity, sex, drugs and violence (not to mention charges of ethical misconduct of the judge presiding over the case). In short, it was the stuff of Hollywood. So the media frenzy of the arrest was not unexpected. But what surprised me was the diplomatic row that ensued when both France and Poland (Polanski is a dual citizen of both countries) protested Polanski’s arrest.
Is rape of a minor not a serious offense in those two countries? How about fleeing and being a fugitive from the law (while not exactly hiding – Polanski continued to direct award-winning films even with warrants outstanding)? Was the arrest outrageous, as journalist Anne Applebaum wrote in a column for The Washington Post? Or was it justice finally being served?
What do you think of the whole drama?
[poll=12]
A recent trend of cows leaping off the high mountain cliffs in the Swiss village of Lauterbrunnen has given rise to speculation. With no natural predators, locals are puzzled as to what could have spooked the cattle into jumping to their doom. Twenty eight cows have died in three days as police continue to investigate.
Are a few wild dogs or other critters spooking the cattle? Or have these cows turned suicidal because of a bad case of the blues?
‘We are investigating because cows growing up in the mountains normally can estimate dangers and do not plunge down cliffs.’
According to local reports, there had been violent thunderstorms in the area which may well have spooked the animals.
Cows do occasionally fall to their deaths in these Alpine regions although it is rare for so many to fall in one particular place.
There has been speculation in the past that when this does happen it is because a tightly-grouped number have followed each other as they search for more grass.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by coconutnut.
Months later, I received an email from a William Diesslin, regarding my photos of Matten:
You didn’t know it at the time, but you photographed my great
grandfather’s store front! I’ve attached the photo for your reference.”
I scoured my photos until I found what seemed to be a match for the historic black and white picture Diesslin had sent. During the next few weeks, I learned the rest of the story. Diesslin’s search for his ancestry had been unsuccessful until he discovered my blog. Once he saw my photo he was able to identify the present day building and track down the owners, who confirmed the store had originally belonged to his great grandfather.
In a subsequent email he remarked:
"This will be a landmark for my family as my dad was orphaned at 14
years old, all family history was lost. Your photos may have opened up
a long lost link to my ancestors.”
There’s more to the story, like the fact that Diesslin stayed in that very building (it is now a hostel) back in the 1980′s and had abslutely no idea that it had any connection to his family. The series of coincidences are so bizarre as to be almost unbelievable. To read the rest of the story, and to see the histoic and present day photos, visit Hole In The Donut Travel Blog.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by baweibel.
Migros, a supermarket chain in Switzerland, got a brilliant idea for its underwear advertising campaign: they are modeled by good lookin’ singles who you can contact!
In a wide-spread press release Migros announced to advertise their latest underwear worn by real singles, who are looking to meet and find a partner. The story quickly became a topic for the media, already giving the campaign a first ignition. 700 willing models applied and there from 26 where chosen. Following was a campaign that used real life singles modelling the underwear with possibility of the viewer to contact them over their email address. Hundreds of national and international media covered the story about the singles in Migros underwear.
