At 18.17 today, Swiss time, the 30,000th visitor came to this blog. From the first post on 9 December 2009, it took over five months for reach 10,000; then two more months for 20,000, and six weeks for the thirty grand mark. That’s mainly thanks … Continue reading
Switzerland isn’t the biggest country in the world (in fact it’s number 131 on the list), but it manages to punch above its weight in some areas. To end my month of Swiss trivia, here’s a handful of records that Switzerland holds, sta… Continue reading
It is the Swiss cheese, the one with the holes. This is Emmentaler, to give its proper name. Emmental is the generic name for holey Swiss cheese, wherever it’s produced, but Emmentaler (with an extra ER) is a protected brand, made only in a specific … Continue reading
I blame Orson Welles. He linked Switzerland with the cuckoo clock forever when he ad-libbed those famous lines in the film The Third Man, damning the Swiss as peaceful democrats and clockmakers. Nice speech but so wrong. The cuckoo clock is a German… Continue reading
It’s famously triangular and sold in almost every duty-free shop, but did you know that Toblerone is only made in Bern? Every single one of the seven billion triangles produced annually comes from the factory just outside the Swiss capital. Its c… Continue reading
On 27 August 1965 an architect known as Le Corbusier died while swimming in the south of France. He was 77 and famous for concrete buildings and square chairs. And he was Swiss. He was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a town in C… Continue reading