Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL) – There’s a kid waiting to meet you at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Like any kid, it will amuse you, it will ask you lots of questions, and it might even bother you a little bit. But unlike most kids, it doesn’t walk or talk, and it pays perfect attention. Meet Wizkid: part computer, part robot, a Swiss kid who’s changing our concept of how people interact with machines.
Wizkid is part of MoMA’s "design and the elastic mind" exhibit, 24 February to 12 May 2008. This unusual device is the result of a collaboration between an engineer, Fréderic Kaplan and an industrial designer, Martino d’Esposito. Kaplan, a researcher at EPFL, Lausanne’s polytechnic institute, worked 10 years for Sony, creating "brains" for entertainment robots. D’Esposito, who teaches at ECAL (The University of Art and Design Lausanne), designs objects and furniture for several companies including Ligne Roset and Cinna. Their collaboration was supported by the new EPFL+ECAL Lab, a joint initiative of the two Lausanne-based institutions that aims to merge engineering, design and architecture in new and innovative ways.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Benjamin Marais is the new wine steward at the Kempinski Grand Hotel’s recently opened restaurant, The Grill. At the fair age of 25 he has amassed considerable knowledge about wines, but also about the people who drink them, including younger drinkers. He previously worked at the Mirador in Lausanne where he landed after spending some months enjoying the Swiss Alps. "I came to Switzerland from the Val de Loire because I love the mountains," he confesses. The Grill is targeting, among others, sophisticated young people, not so different from Marais himself, who don’t want to spend hours eating a large meal. They want good wine with their meals, says Marais, but they often don’t know how to find it.
His advice: start with what you know, your own preferred tastes, and if you don’t yet know that, he’ll help you find out. "At a certain age, people know what they want, but the young don’t. They haven’t worked out their own taste in wine yet. I want to help them discover a coup de coeur," a wine they’ll fall in love with, he says. "I ask them about the sensations they enjoy, I try to find out the structure of a wine they might like."
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Valentine’s Day: the mind and heart turn to wine and roses, wonderful Swiss chocolates, and, if your budget allows, a magical night at a special restaurant – this is a gentle reminder that you don’t need 14 February to think of these delights. Love knows no season. Swiss chocolates, by the way, have been selling well, year-round.
Photo: water wall and winter garden East-West Hotel, Geneva
Geneva has never been short on great places to go but a quiet revolution has been going on in Paquis that is turning it into a quartier to compete with Carouge for a healthy mix of chic, charm and liveliness, perfect for romance at any age.
The recently opened East-West Hotel’s Sens restaurant and The Grill, newly open at the Kempinski Grand Hotel Geneva on the edge of the district, offer two excellent romantic dining interludes, if not for Valentine’s then another evening or even weekend, as these are two of the most interesting new additions to Geneva’s hotel options. [Ed. note: Kempinski has a Valentine's Day special offer that is good until Saturday, 16 February.]
Paquis, for those who don’t live near it, is a name that has provoked twitters for years: It’s the city’s red light district, with a few seedy bars and cheap hotels, sandwiched between Cornavin train station and Lake Geneva. As international city red light districts go, it was always small and pretty tame. Even a recent apparent love triangle murder in the area shocked locals for days because in Paquis, at night, ça bouge, things happen, but crime is not common.
Photo: the Hotel de Rivoli was completely renovated but its 19th century stone stairwell was kept by the East-West and jazzed up
For the past four or five years, Manotel has been quietly upgrading its several hotels in the neighbourhood, on the basis that Paquis’s great central location offers travellers convenience. Manotel prices are affordable to the average business traveller. City records show that hotel stays are rising.
Small ethnic restaurants, many of them very good, have sprung up, notably in the area between the train station and the rue des Paquis that is bordered on one side by Rue de la Navigation and on the other by the rue des Alpes and Sigismond. The prostitutes are still in the neighbourhood but they are now a minority on the streets at night.
A serious boost to the neighbourhood came at the start of 2008, when the faded old Rivoli Hotel was reborn as the ultra-chic East-West Hotel, with its Sens restaurant under the direction of the much-touted twin Pourcel brothers from Montpellier, France.
Also see:
- Interview, Anne-Marie Morrongiello, "Making a home for world travellers," owner of East-West Hotel
- Interview, Benjamin Marais, "Starting point for wine: find what you like," wine steward, Kempinski Grand Hotel, Geneva
Lausanne, Switzerland – The foundation stone was laid Tuesday for the Rolex Learning Center at EPFL, Lausanne’s federal polytechnic institute, although the word "stone" was mostly symbolic.
Nine containers, each holding symbols of the five faculty’s work, as well as symbols chosen by other groups, were put inside the main slab for the library. The Learning Center, scheduled to open in late 2009, will serve as the heart of the campus, housing the library, dining areas, meeting and work spaces.
The campus has grown rapidly since it was founded in 1977 and has suffered to some extent from a lack of "living" space which the new centre is designed to change.
GL ed. note: The CHF104 million centre is 50% funded by the Swiss government, with the rest coming from private donors: Rolex is the main one and Credit Suisse, Nestlé, Logitech, Losinger, the Schnitzler Foundation, and Daniel Borel are also sponsors.
Japanese architects Sanaa won the bid for the Learning Center. They have been working closely with Losinger, the general contractor, and engineers to turn the audacious design into reality. The shifting levels of open spaces, environmentally-friendly heating and cooling systems and acoustic challenges require significant testing before each stage of the building work goes ahead. Two key elements of the contract were that there will be no cost overruns and construction would start 31 August 2007 and be completed in just over two years. Where unexpected additional expenses occur, a means of cutting costs elsewhere must be found. The project is currently a month ahead of schedule, according to newspaper Le Temps.
EPFL has made a conscious effort to actively involve students, staff and faculty in the two-year construction progress, marking various stages with images, web pages with background details and news, an internal blog and a short story contest won by student Flavien Rouiller (read the winning story).
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – "I was the only one there recording them talk about those war crimes," recalled Jasmina Tesanovic, a Serbian writer also known as the "Balkan blogger" talking about her wartime online diary.
Photo: Jasmina Tesanovic, left
Tesanovic, wearing a shirt with an image of Che Guevara and seated confidently in front of her MacBook, was part of the opening morning of the LIFT08 conference in Geneva.
Lift seeks to connect entrepreneurs, bloggers, journalists, and investors through exchanges about the
social impact of new technologies. The brainchild of Laurent Haug, a French entrepreneur, LIFT08 marks the conference’s third year. Wednesday opened with a full day of workshops at Unimail, part of the University of Geneva, led by a range of presenters, many of whom have previously attended Lift.
Next to Tesanovic’s workshop was one run by Stephanie Booth, a Lausanne-based web consultant and blogger. She preached relaxed writing styles and interactive interfaces for blogs to a small group who were there to hear about getting started blogging, all seated behind laptops. "Blogs are for ‘now’ content," she explained, "whereas your website is where you put your static content and your thematic material."
Adelboden, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Blue skies, white snow, crisp air – the perfect skiing mix, right?
It turns out that some 406,692 people think one more element is needed for a great time on the slopes: the handsomest ski instructor around. And thanks to a Swiss national tourism campaign to find him, Andreas Belser, age 27, is now the officially elected man of our ski dreams.
Belser, from Bernese ski resort village of Adelboden, received 181,468 votes in the online competition. Manuel Utiger from Bettmeralp in Valais came in second and Thierry Wenger from Gstaad-Saanenmöser came in third, which goes to show that you can ski in the shadow of handsomeness in most corners of Switzerland.
Utiger, who is 23 years old, had 141,059 vote, so perhaps age increases handsomeness: only the voters can say, but this is bound to console older men.
Belser is a sports teacher who earned his official Swiss "moniteur" or ski teacher certificate in 2004. He has been teaching skiing in Adelboden since 1999, but now teaches fulltime in Adelboden during the ski season. He grew up in Balsthal, Solothurn where he still spends six summer months.
As the MySwitzerland site puts it, "Andreas first learned to ski at the age of two and since then has
matured into Switzerland’s Best-looking Ski Instructor." The man himself seems more interested in what he does than in how he looks, which might have played a part in his appeal. "What I enjoy
most is being able to meet so many different people and sharing the
sheer fun of skiing with them."
The contest was the brainchild of MySwitzerland, the Swiss tourism office, and it kicked off in October 2007 to much publicity, with 37 ski teachers in the running.
Photos showed them on and off the slopes. Voters selected their favourites in a series of knockout votes until it came down to a final 10 skiers, 26 November 2007. From there it was all smooth schussing for Belser, who said he had no idea at the start that he had a chance at winning. He says he is pleased, but has not yet commented on the impact on his personal life or how fast he might have to ski if wannabe students start chasing him. He did confide to MySwitzerland that he likes to unwind with a glass of cucumber juice after skiing and that his friends have been positive about the contest. Even the tourism office can’t get him to say what he would consider the perfect date or candlelight dinner, "although he
admits he wouldn’t mind a date with the reigning Miss Switzerland –
perhaps a tasty fondue in an igloo?"
And yes, dear Anglophone readers, he does speak some English, having spent the summer of 2005 on Mt Cheesemann (where else, for a Swiss man?) in New Zealand.
Nearly half the votes came from Switzerland, 49%, with 12% each from The Netherlands and Great Britain, and 10% each from Germany and the United States.
Belser will be given an award 14 February in Bern. Meanwhile, another winner, Marion Brenner of Switzerland, was picked, among those who voted, to spend a week in Adelboden, ski pass and ski lessons into the deal.
No word on who she voted for or how she feels about the reigning Miss Switzerland.
Shangri-La, China (GenevaLunch) Shangri-La: a mystical and isolated paradise in the depths of Western Tibet.
British writer James Hilton described this mythical valley in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon, and Shangri-La has gained world fame since. Nearly 80 years since Lost Horizon and Shangri-La came to be, dozens of "Shangri-Las" have sprung up, from China to Pakistan and even to Orange, Texas.
The dream has captured the minds of many and although Hilton’s Shangri-La was fiction, people have undertaken expeditions in search of the true Shangri-La.
On a dreary, cold, and damp night my bus pulled into Zhong Dian, China, a town whose name was officially changed to Shangri-La in 2001. Zhong Dian is yet another Chinese town striving to boost its tourism. It claims to be the real Shangri-La.
I was not in search of paradise but rather on my way to explore the Tibetan countryside. Shangri-La happened to be on the way.
The warmth of Yunnan province’s lush river basins, bright colours, and lively dancers were still a fresh memory, and I wasn’t prepared for the chill of the Himalayas. I stood in a sleeveless shirt and argued with freezing temperatures as the bus pulled away and left me to the drizzling rain.
I trudged through the puddles of Shangri-La looking for somewhere to stay before finally finding a lodge and collapsing into a cozy bed that smelled of pine.
Several weeks earlier, in Beijing on business, I had been desperate to get away from the crowded capital. In the sprawling metropolis I could stare directly at the red sun and not fear for my eyes, with several thick layers of protective smog between us. Enough time in the city had made me long for wilderness and adventure.
I headed to Tibet.
My first morning in Shangri-La was an improvement: the warm mountain sun replaced chilly rains of the previous day. I recalled seeing a photograph of "China’s Shangri-La" several months earlier: a blue sky, lush green hills and monks clad in red robes around a golden monastery. I decided to find these beginnings of paradise.
I talked to some locals and my best bet sounded like the local Song Zan Lin monastery, meaning the three playgrounds of the gods. A bumpy and dusty 20-minute bus ride later I was at the base of the gilded monastery. Tibetan children flocked around me and offered cheap photos.
This was not the slow-moving Buddhist monks I expected. My photographic attempts of the monastery didn’t measure up to expectation, either. Modern electric cables were an eyesore in the picture. As I knelt on the ground and tried to find an angle from which I could avoid the power lines, I found myself unable to breath through the thick clouds of gray dust thrown into the air by passing cars.
I soon stood up, abandoned my photography and concluded that if it ever had existed, this most definitely was not James Hilton’s mythical valley of happiness anymore.
I moved on.
Thoughts of Shangri-La came back to me only weeks later. By this time I was well into the depths of Tibet having walked and hitched rides in trucks from the border. I had chosen to enter Tibet without the necessary travel permit and without passing through any border controls. I wanted a trip where I was free from the Chinese government’s bureaucracy, free from regulations.
Near the small, dusty roadside town of Ba Su I found a truck parked in the grass, the driver taking a break. The driver appeared to be about 25 and wore a ragged shirt that covered most of his chest. He hid a bush of scraggly hair under an unusual cowboy hat. My Tibetan was non-existent, so we talked in broken Mandarin for several minutes until I was shown the way to his truck. I was surprised when I climbed into the back to find myself surrounded by five generations of Tibetan family, along with a tired and annoyed-looking brown horse.
I bounced up and down next to the horse for several hours until the truck pulled to a sudden stop and everyone got off. I didn’t know where our driver had disappeared to and tried without success to ask what was going on. Eventually I worked out that there was a police checkpoint in the next kilometre. Surprisingly enough, it isn’t legal to drive 30 people and a horse through a checkpoint.
Without a permit to be in Tibet, police checkpoints were problematic: being seen would result in a visit to a Tibetan jail, and deportation to the east. I started to make my way up the nearest mountain. Mountains in the east of Tibet are large rolling hills on a scale unseen in the West, rising to well over 6,000 metres. I had to hike up and around the mountain to avoid the armed police at the checkpoint below.
I climbed for several hours in the sun before making it to the top of a ridge overlooking the valley, where I dropped my pack and collapsed onto it. I sat perched on this ridge overlooking the rolling hills of Eastern Tibet. In the distance herds of yak could be seen making their way up steep hills, an army of black dots with the occasional white tail swishing in their midst. Far below me the Tibetan family and horse could be seen on the road, past the checkpoint. Far above me white marshmallow clouds perched in the blue sky, the type that make you hungry just to look at them. Two black dots stood out against the clouds: a pair of eagles that soared gently above me on the currents.
I sat on this mountain and caught my breath, observing the wildness around me.
This was Shangri-La. This was untouched, natural and very free. Gazing at the pair of eagles gliding along the horizon I felt a sense of freedom and thought back to Zhong Dian. James Hilton hadn’t been describing a particular temple, town or valley: Shangri-La caught me by surprise, it was a state of mind. A state of mind brought on by a place like this.
Editor’s note: Liam Bates, from St Prex, Vaud, Switzerland, is co-founder of Bridges to China, which offers Chinese language and martial arts courses in China. He has contributed several articles to GenevaLunch, the most recent of which is "Tibetan thumbing lessons," 27 August 2007.
(GenevaLunch) – Helen Stubbs Pugin, one of the owners of Off the Shelf bookstore in Geneva, has provided GenevaLunch readers with her own list of great books to curl up with this winter, for yourself or as gifts. The links lead directly to the shop’s information and ordering pages. Check out the virtual tour of the shop on its photo gallery page, and let the warm oak floors of the former art gallery and the view of the old plane trees in Geneva, out the window, put you in the mood for books. Beyond these ten favourites, the store has 40,000 books on its list and regularly takes orders for more.
- Sotheby’s wine encyclopedia
- 100 days in photographs: Pivotal events that changed the world
- Man who saved Britain: A personal journey into the disturbing world of James Bond
- How to talk about books you haven’t read
- How to fossilize your hamster & 99 other experiments for the armchair scientist
- Red mandarin dress
- Ghost: A novel
- Fire in the blood
- You don’t love me yet
- Kennedy’s brain
[Ed. note: today, 15 December is the last day for cheaper price earlybird registrations for Lift08!]
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Laurent Haug is sitting with a snappy new iPhone and a sleek Apple laptop, nodding his head enthusiastically.
"This is our third year, this year we are validated. Lift is on the map," he says, looking particularly techie in his glasses and chic clothes. Now in his third year as founder and director of the Lift conferences on technology and innovation, Haug’s project to support innovation and idea-sharing in the technology community is expanding worldwide. Best, he’s just attended a web conference where people mentioned Lift as a place you go to for ideas.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Wikimedia Foundation inhabits a world far from the tightly controlled research laboratories familiar to Anecova (related GL feature). The French-based but US-managed non-profit organization is ironically one of the best known and least understood international companies around. Users know its main product very well: Wikipedia is among the top 15 most visited web sites in the world, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF), with 210 million unique visitors a month. Less well known are some of its other Wiki products, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, and Wikiuni, to name a few.
Photo: Wikimedia’s Florence Nibart-Devouard oversees a
worldwide empire that remains an informal collection of thousands of
volunteers, with only 10 employees. Here, at the Lift07 conference on the society of tomorrow, in Geneva in February.
Even less well known is the fact that the foundation which runs these projects has only 10 employees and a budget of $4.7 million, 60% of which goes to cover the cost of its army of servers, Florence Devouard, the foundation’s board chairperson, told GenevaLunch. Wikimedia relies on an even larger army, the “wikipedians” who feed its content.
And it relies entirely on Internet donations and fundraising to function.
Americans give the most, she says, often in $25 donations. “For us, the problem is that this depends on the country. Our fundraising for now is aimed at Americans, but the culture for this is different in each country.” Wikimedia is studying ways to have local associations raise money. Devouard says the task is daunting, in part because Wikipedia is anything but local.
The sheer size of its content makes Wikimedia’s business hard to grasp, but the concept is simple. The WEF, in naming the non-profit organization as a Tech Pioneer winner 29 November describes Wikimedia as “dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world.”
(This is the first of two articles.)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The World Economic Forum (WEF) 29 November announced the 39 winners of its Tech Pioneer 2008 awards. On the list are two companies which are very different, showing the remarkable range of businesses that the annual prizes cover.
Anecova is a small life sciences company based near Lausanne which is working closely with EPFL, tightly focused on producing one product that could change the lives of millions of infertile couples around the world.
Photo: Florence Devouard, far left, chair of the board of Wikimedia, in Geneva for the Lift07 technology conference in February
Wikimedia is the parent foundation that runs the massive Wikipedia project and half a dozen offshoots such as Wikiquote and Wikibooks. Its partners are "dozens of thousands" of volunteers around the world who contribute to its knowledge base.
Anecova is currently running clinical trials in Europe on a permeable vessel that can be introduced into the uterus. The vessel would allow fertilization and embryonic development to take
place under conditions that are more natural than those currently used.
The principle is to provide in vivo fertilization and embryo
development, within a vessel in the future mother’s uterus, rather than
in vitro, in a test tube.
[updated, Cern by Dan Brown link, 20 November 2007]
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Cern is in a race with time: the pace in ’08 will be unrelenting, the deadlines tight, and success
will depend on the fine minds and expertise of dedicated teams numbered
in hundreds.
Photos, Cern 2007, reprinted
with permission. Left to right: Allan Cameron (production designer),
Sam Breckham (location manager), James Gillies (head of communication
at Cern), Jacques Fichet (Cern audiovisual service), Rolf Landua
(former spokesman of the Athena antihydrogen experiment at Cern, head
of Cern’s education group), Ron Howard, and Renilde Vanden Broeck (Cern
press officer).
Experimental physicists are currently trying
to recreate the Big Bang 100 metres underground, with a start date of May 2008 for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). While Cern is a familiar name in the region, its staff say only a small number of Europeans are aware it exists. This is about to change and Dan Brown may have a role in making Cern a household name.
Hollywood
arrives soon to film scenes at Cern for Angels & Demons, a blockbuster prequel to the worldwide phenomenon of The Da Vinci Code. The parallel Big Bang and Hollywood deadline races could be billed as science v fiction; Nobel v Oscar; a search for the "God particle" v making Angels & Demons.
The movie business is newly familiar to Cern staff, who 8-9 November successfully staged their own multinational festival of
short films, Cinéglobe. To establish Cinéglobe in its inaugural year, an entry form
was linked from the websites of established festivals of short films. Four hundred entries were expected, yet 1,400 arrived from more than 80
countries.
David Bennett, Sotheby’s auctioneer
who accepted the winning bid for the newly-named Chloe Diamond in Geneva Wednesday night.
[Update, 15 November, 07:00, 2 links added]
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The founder of Guess jeans, Georges Marciano, Wednesday bought a little something to slip into the pocket of one of those jeans, an 84.37 carat gem of a diamond that he has baptized Chloe Diamond in honour of his 12-year-old daughter. The diamond was sold to Marciano for a cool $16.2 million ($16,189,769 to be precise), which at $191,980 a carat is the highest price per carat ever paid for a white diamond at auction.
Chloe is the world’s largest, purest white flawless brilliant-cut diamond sold at auction, according to Sotheby’s, which sold the gem in front of a standing-room only crowd of mainly private buyers, in the centre of Geneva.
Marciano was in California, where he lives, and he bought the gem by telephone in an astonishing two-minute sale that came down to two buyers bidding hard at the end.
The world’s highest-priced diamond, Star of the Season which weighs a little over 100 carats, was sold in Geneva in May 2007, also by Sotheby’s, for $16.5 million. It took a more leisurely 22 minutes to reach that price. Chloe was expected to sell for $13-15 million.
Veerle Vanwauwe, founder of Transparence
Dardagny, Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A quiet revolution has hit the diamond industry, in Geneva. One woman with the drive and professional experience to make it happen, Veerle Vanwauwe, opened a business to show that consumers want, and therefore should have, traceable diamonds. Her company, Transparence, was launched Friday 9 November to ensure that the Kimberley Process, which was set up to regulate the rough diamond trade in conflict areas, doesn’t break down at the point where diamonds move beyond the export stage. "I want to show manufacturers that it’s possible to sell traceable diamonds for a premium, that consumers are willing to pay for this," she told GenevaLunch. "My argument with them is always that if you can do it for a banana you can do it for a high-end product like a diamond."
Tracing diamonds through the entire mining to end buyer process is a key step in moving towards fair trade diamonds, she argues. "Unfortunately, there are still a lot of dubious practices out there." The Washington Post in a December 2006 article, citing Global Witness, noted that while a tiny 1% of diamonds come from conflict areas, about 20% of the world’s diamonds are produced under conditions many buyers would consider unacceptable.
For Vanwauwe traceability too often disappears mid-process. Diamonds are traded as a commodity, she points out, with the Kimberley Process covering mining, export and import, but the industry does little during the second half of the process, from import to manufacturing to retail, to trace diamonds for consumers.
Transparence was born of her frustration as a consultant to the industry in Antwerp, where companies hired her to help them manage "consumer credibility" when they began to fear the damage the 2006 Hollywood movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, "Blood Diamond" could cause, shortly before it came out. Antwerp was long the world diamond cutting centre, home to the cutters who work with giants like De Beers, a group that sells nearly half of the world’s rough diamonds. India now cuts many of the world’s diamonds, but much of the high end of the market is still in Antwerp. Vanwauve produced strategic reviews in Antwerp showing that tracing diamonds and using indigenous designers would give added value, but the smaller companies said they could not afford to do it unless the larger ones did, and the large ones said consumers were not demanding it.
[Ed. note: Managing Director Gareth Penny of the De Beers Group in October 2007called on the industry to support diamond cutting and polishing in Africa, saying that political stability would help safeguard the industry and future supplies.]
"I’d never worked in a world where there was such a lot of fluff!" Vanwauve says bluntly. She had moved into consulting after seven years as a marketing manager at Procter & Gamble, a job she left for a short break from work after her second of three children was born. "At P&G you always have your facts when you’re marketing. You have research behind you. If you have detergent, it has to wash."
In the diamond industry, clear information to back up marketing claims often simply does not exist, she points out. As a result, diamond marketing just doesn’t cut with many potential buyers, especially those able to afford larger, well-cut gems.
Transparence’s jewelry online reaches out to that buying group. Prices range from just under CHF1,000 to 50,000 for finished jewelry. Each piece of jewelry comes with a passport and each jewel has a certificate from Respect Inside, which monitors corporate conduct.
The shop also accepts custom-made work. Vanwauve has regrouped independent, established designers who work only with traced materials. Two are hot contemporary Italian designers, Alex Ball and Garavelli, one is a noted Australian designer, Jason Ree, and Cred from the United Kingdom is known worldwide as a pioneer in fair trade gold. She is working to extend the network to include designers from less developed countries, a demanding and complex task that involves helping them see what the world market will take. Many companies have donated equipment and funded training, she says, but "what these designers now need is to sell, and the only way for them to do that is to give them honest feedback."
Transparence is using its site to profile the designers and pieces with the advantage that people can shop at leisure with no sales pressure, says Vanwauwe. "But for now we want them to contact us so we can discuss what they really want and help them find it. If they want the help of a gemologist we can put them in contact with one. If they want help shopping for a gem, we can give them that." A key goal for Vanwauwe is education: to help people learn more about the trade that lies behind the jewelry they buy.
Transparence
sells online but it opened for business Friday night with an elegant in-person event at the Domaine de Coully in Satigny and the tag line "luxury with a conscience."
Despite the glamour of the product and the event, the focus was sharply
on fair trade in an industry pilloried by controversy fed by the Oscars-nominated Hollywood
"Blood Diamond" and the successful 2006 Emmy-winning documentary "Blood Diamonds," which ran on the History Channel in the US.
"I hope Transparence will open the doors to people who previously
had reservations about buying jewelry because they weren’t
comfortable," unhappy at not knowing where the gold and diamonds come
from and how they are mined and traded, says Vanwauwe.
Diamonds are in the news at the moment, but as is so often true where precious gems are concerned it is the large and spectacular that draw the most attention. The world’s largest diamond goes on sale in Geneva 14 November and crowds are expected by Sotheby’s for the public showing. Meanwhile, the Kimberley Process held its annual summit starting 7 November (BBC report) in Brussels, readmitting Congo Republic (Reuters report).
For Vanwauwe, "diamonds have always been an expression of affection, there is always strong emotion attached to giving them and people don’t want to buy them knowing that they have caused harm." Whether it is mining and trading in conflict areas or using child labour or working on the diamonds in unhealthy settings, she believes the real work is just starting: for consumers to support efforts to make diamonds symbols of hope not just for the buyer, but for those who work on them.
GenevaLunch recommended background reading
- "Have you ever tried to sell a diamond," The Atlantic, EJ Eptstein, February 1982
- DeBeers, wikipedia
Deniz Saral, The Hub’s new director, teaching MBA students at Webster University in Geneva
Bellevue, Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Young entrepreneurs outside the fields of science and technology have a new option for help in setting up businesses as a means of creating their own careers. The Hub is a new foundation, financed by Finial CEO Omar Danial and directed by Deniz Saral. The foundation will be housed at Webster University’s Geneva campus, where Saral is chairman of the business and management programme.
The Hub will select six young entrepreneurs in its first year, with the application process open to all. There are intentionally few formal restrictions, points out director Saral because "We want, first and foremost, to encourage innovative ideas." He adds that a business plan is not necessary: people can contact him directly with their ideas, no matter what stage of development they are at, and "if it’s promising, The Hub will get involved."
Those selected will be assigned a group of Webster MBA students who will draw up a feasibility study to be used in developing a business plan.
The goal is to provide counsel, mentoring, help in developing a business plan, assistance in finding initial financing and roundtable planning for the future.
Danial is a Webster graduate who founded Finial Capital SA in 1975. The Geneva-based company has been active in commercial investments and, worldwide, in alternative investments. It is a majority partner in the Manotel chain, which has 10% of Geneva’s hotel capacity. Early in 2007 Finial invested CHF1.5 million in the CGN navigation company. In May 2007 Danial he was named one of two Graduates of the Year by Webster University worldwide, based in St. Louis, Missouri in the US.
The Hub will open its doors with two days of entrepreneurial fun to which it has invited students from several Lake Geneva region schools. 28 November The Box Game, which is designed to teach players to become successful company managers, will be played by teams from EPFL, the Lausanne Hotel School, Glion Institute for Higher Education, the César Ritz Hotel Institute, les Roches hotel school, Swiss Hotel Association, School of Hotel Management and Webster University Geneva. They will be joined by players from Custime, a local company and the online social network Glocals.com.
Another round of play will take place 1 December with secondary students from the International School of Geneva’s campuses, the International School of Lausanne, International School of Basel, Aiglon College, Brillanmont, l’Ecole Bilingue Haut-Lac and St George’s School.
For more information on The Hub contact the director:
- Deniz Saral, The Hub
- Tel: Webster University 022 959 8000
Tony Johnston, new presenter
[update, Monday: the new station is revising its web pages and while it is in flux some of the links below may not work correctly: we suggest you visit the home page and move to WRS programme pages from there. One the new pages carries a photo plus complete list of the WRS on-air team. The site's new url: www.worldradio.ch]
Ed. note: GenevaLunch provides news commentary Tuesday to Friday for the WRG/WRS web site.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch, by Laila Rodriquez and Ellen Wallace) – Geneva’s popular English-language radio station WRG-FM on Monday 5 November launches WRS: World Radio Switzerland.
Regular listeners, of which there are more than 50,000 will notice a number of changes, from the jingle for the station to the disappearance of ads to the addition of several new personalities who join the familiar voices.
Presenters Mark Butcher, Hansine Johnston and Pete Forster have a fourth partner, Tony Johnston (yes, that’s two Johnstons!), a recent arrival from Australia. Reporters and other staff boost the total of newcomers to 11 people, making a team of 20 for the station.
Richer content and more people on the air to make the shows more dynamic are two key changes, says station director Philippe Mottaz. Specifically, this means more reporters will be joining programmes like The Breakfast Show with Mark Butcher. A brief news item can now be developed in greater depth during the show.
Mark Butcher, who hosts the popular Breakfast Show, says WRS creates new opportunities for more content.
Five-minute news bulletins, a feature well-known to listeners who commute by car, will continue but they are being reinforced by longer features and lively interaction with reporters. Two people joining Butcher’s show are Tom McAlinden, a former BBC
journalist from the UK who until recently worked in Sweden, and Michèle Mischler,
who says she grew up "Swiss in an ex-pat home." Her mother is
Canadian.
Mischler is fluent in French as well as German and lived in Canada
and the US for several years. She is handling the current affairs
section of the morning show. McAlinden reads and comments on the news
throughout the morning. The two are rapidly moving into their new
routine of starting the day very early by reading news bulletins and
checking Swiss and regional news updates.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Lift08 conference (see GL feature published 23 October on Lift and European conferences), which expects to draw some 700 people in February 2008 now has an advance list of speakers which includes some key presentations:
Kevin Warwick, a British designer who implanted a microchip in his left arm to better study how the latest technology might help disabled people, and Henri Markram from EPFL in Lausanne, who heads the Blue Brain project run jointly by the polytechnic institute and IBM, will address the February conference.
Lift brings together "observers, explorers, and builders from around the world to discuss the current challenges and creative solutions presented by emerging technologies." (www.liftconference.com)
Warwick and Markram are part of a track called "New frontiers" where speakers will describe how ethical and physical boundaries may be crossed by technological developments. The conference will have eight tracks, or themes.
Other speakers on the partial, early list include:
- Rafi Haladjian, Minitel startups founder and creator of a series of unusual ventures: the Nabaztag, a wi-fi and RFID-enabled rabbit, part of the “Stories” track
- Robin Hunicke, Electronic Arts, an academic at Northwestern University: creating Nintendo-Wi games such as My Sims
- David Marcus of Zong and David Sadigh (IC Agency): how the web is reshuffling work practices, part of the “Web and companies” track
- Heewon Kim, researcher at Yonsei University in Seoul: how teenagers use social software in South Korea, and Marc Laperrouza, EPFL researcher who specializes in new technologies in China: current state/trends in Chinese telecommunications. Both are part of the "A glimpse of
Asia" track.
LIFT expanded to Asia in 2007, hosting an event in Seoul. "A glimpse of Asia" will share some of the highlights from the August Korea event.
The full program is available online on the Lift site.
[Wednesday 17 October, Smartvote link and information added at the end. Link to an English-language blog post on gfs.bern, political research institute, on uninformed foreign coverage of the Swiss election]
photo: Vaud, October 2007
Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Swiss federal elections take place Sunday 21 October, the first national elections in the four years since the UDC (People’s Party) began to change the face of Swiss politics.
The right-wing UDC in 2003 gained a Cabinet seat, taken up by Christophe Blocher, and it aggressively pushed the limits of the country’s relatively genteel political system. For more than 40 years Swiss political parties have negotiated their way to a consensus on most issues. The process is slow but the Swiss have prided themselves on its workability. The Federal Council, whose seven members represent the four main political parties, is often referred to as the cabinet. It has long had a policy of "collegiality," where issues are resolved behind closed doors and individual members do not voice their differences publicly.
The UDC has been forcing a change, with Blocher frequently making the news by stepping outside the tidy boundaries of the system. In 2006 he created a furor when he said that Swiss anti-racism laws needed to be revised, during a speech in Turkey, a country with whom Switzerland has had tense relations over the issue of Armenians massacred in the first world war. His party has courted controversy regularly by taking firm stances that other, more liberal parties find unacceptable, such as limiting immigration and toughening laws on foreigners who commit crimes.
This week the party is back in the news for backing legislation that would make mariages blancs, or convenience marriages to obtain residence papers, far more difficult.
Oskar Freysinger, one of the party’s rising stars, recently told a group of foreign journalists at a pre-election information session organized by Presence Switzerland that the UDC is not against foreigners. It is against specific problems that it fights with a series of individual measures, he pointed out.
These, taken one at a time, are acceptable to many Swiss. Who will argue against having more cash in his pocket or safer schools?
photo: Geneva, October 2007
The Socialist Party, the country’s second largest, has begun to more vocally fight the UDC’s loud voice, gathering signatures for a referendum on greater equality on the tax front, to start. It argues that the UDC wants to raise the retirement age to 67. But its publicity expenditures are tiny compared to those of the UDC, which has several millionaires, including Blocher.
News coverage of the elections for Parliament, beyond Swiss borders, have focused on the UDC’s growing popularity – recent polls show it may slightly increase its current 26% share of voters. The UDC, whose "C" in fact stands for "centre," considers itself a populist party with an agenda that is pro-Swiss rather than anti-foreigners, the description outside observers tend to give it.
Swiss pundits have begun to ask if the
consensus system is strained beyond its limits. TSR reported in
September that polls showed 18% of voters wanting the Greens, the
number five party, to have a Cabinet seat. In French-speaking
Switzerland 22% want the UDC to lose one of its two seats, but only 13%
of German speakers want a change in the balance of party power.
Inside Switzerland there is widespread concern about the UDC’s tactics. The influential Le Temps newspaper last week devoted considerable space to showing that the country is not moving to the right and that Blocher and his UDC have more bluff and bluster than power when you look at legislative votes in the past four years. RSR, part of the Swiss Broadcast Corporation, has run an in-depth series on the election, as have most newspapers, but tactics and election methods, not just issues, continue to get coverage. RSR cites an expert who says that in this election more than 20% of voters are turning to the Internet for information, versus 5% in 1999. Shock tactics work well on the Internet and the UDC is the party which has mastered the method.
Two tasks are put before Swiss voters with their ballots this week. Some cantons put referendums to the vote. In Vaud, for example, voters will decide if the cantonal Service des vehicules et de la navigation, which licenses cars and drivers, should be privatized.
The main task of the elections is to let voters decide which of the 15 political parties will have seats in the upper and lower houses of Parliament, respectively the Conseil des etats and the Conseil national. The elections are federal only in the sense that it is the Swiss federal Parliament. Citizens vote for parties in their own cantons and the issues are often cantonal rather than national. A voter is handed lists for each party’s own candidates plus mixed lists for alliances between the parties, a daunting task that makes party lists appealing for their simplicity. Once a party is assigned a specific number of seats in Parliament it decides which of its candidates will hold them.
In 2003 the UDC increased its power base largely by gaining votes in French-speaking western Switzerland. It is possible that in 2007 the increasingly respectable Greens will gain seats in eastern cantons. Then again, if the UDC continues to gain in the Lake Geneva region, where its candidates appear to be less to the right than their colleagues in eastern Switzerland, it’s unclear where the balance will lie.
Ed. note: Smartvote
gives voters the opportunity to see which candidates are best aligned
with their own political views. Take the test yourself, in any of the
Swiss national languages, and see results on TSR for a cross-section of well-known Swiss people who are outside politics. This is the first election where SSR, the parent Swiss Broadcast Company, has teamed up with Smartvote, driving more voters to the site. According to Le Matin, Smartvote is a victim of its own success: more than half a million results have been given out, but last week the six servers appeared to have problems handlling the workload.
[Ed note: Read the recap of the 2010 meet here]
Morges, Vaud, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – “I am a fan of British cars, and there are so many beautiful cars here today,” says Wolfgang Schueler, a British classic car owner from Luzern, Switzerland. Schueler and his wife were among the more than 20,000 spectators (ed. note: some Swiss media mistakenly reported 2,000) to attend the Swiss Classic British Car Meeting in Morges on Saturday afternoon, an annual event now in its sixteenth year.
Cars made by Aston Martin, Rolls Royce, Jaguar, Triumph, MG and others made up a collection of 1,400 cars parked along the quai in Morges, says event founder and organizer Keith Wynn. Drivers from Switzerland, France, Germany, England, and Wales showed up at the meeting, some even wearing British-themed driving costumes.
Wynn came to Switzerland 34 years ago from Britain. Each event, he says, requires 18 months of planning. Wynn explains his motivation for putting on the free show: “It’s love for cars, and I want to try to get the young interested in old cars,” he says. Plans for next year’s show, to take place in Morges again, are already in the works.
Schueler, the driver from Luzern, said he learned about the event only this year and decided to take his car to the show. He’d like a new car, he says, perhaps one like the dark green Jaguar roadster on display in Morges.
Several of the vehicles at the meeting were marked for sale.
Photos: copyright Julie Schindall, 2007. More photos in the GenevaLunch photo album, Classic cars, Morges 2007.
Geneva grape harvest, 2007 (photo, J Schindall)
Satigny,
Switzerland (GenevaLunch, by Julie Schindall) – “Winemakers must now be not only artisans and farmers, but also salesmen and experts in marketing,” says Roger
Burgdorfer, owner of the Domaine du Paradis winery in Satigny. Burgdorfer speaks
animatedly about the need for innovation and development in the Swiss wine
community as he stands surrounded by his vines overlooking the Salève and the city of Geneva. He argues that the two most pressing issues are the battle against environmental damage and global warming, and the need for training vintners to manage not only their vines but also their balance sheets.
Burgdorfer is clearly passionate about the romance and tradition of making wine, but he is by no means stuck in the past. The son of a Swiss German father who came to Satigny to pick grapes, Burgdorfer established his own winery in 1983, planting grapes and constructing most of the buildings on the farm.
Now a well-known Geneva vintner, Burgdorfer grows 25 varieties of grapes and bottles 20 types of wine at his own cellar. During the
weeks of September and October, Domaine du Paradis is at the height of the grape-picking season, the vendange. Burgdorfer’s work day begins at around 7 o’clock in the morning, and ends, sometimes, at midnight.
This is clearly a labour of love for Burgdorfer. His cellar walls are adorned with prizes from international wine competitions. His friends and colleagues in the wine business, it would seem, are equally passionate. Nicolas Bonnet, Burgdorfer’s longtime friend and owner of Domaine de la Comtesse Eldegarde, is even rumoured to play the piano for his wines. His favourites, he
likes to say, are jazz classics.
Roger Burgdorfer, Domaine du Paradis, Satigny, Geneva (Photo, J Schindall)
During the vendange season, however, a vintner’s days are filled with more tasks than
playing tunes for his wines. Last Wednesday at Domaine du Paradis, Burgdorfer spent much of the morning driving around his 40-hectare spread collecting filled containers of grapes and transporting them to the cellar, where four employees process the grapes to produce wine. Burgdorfer shares the work of the winery with his wife, son, and a few
permanent staff. His primary job is tending to the grapes.
During the harvest, he relies on large machines rather than traditional hand-picking to cut the grapes. Machines do the work of 20 men, Burgdorfer explains, and while they require an initial investment of over six figures, they save money and hassle. Burgdorfer admits with a rueful smile that he’s glad to end his role as mediator for disputes between groups of seasonal labourers.
The Swiss wine industry has made huge advances over the past two decades, and
the quality of Swiss wines, Burgdorfer and Bonnet say, has increased dramatically. However, Burgdorfer still worries for the future of agriculture in Switzerland. General farming of wheat and corn, he says, is no longer profitable, and farmers are saved only by government subsidies. Swiss wines can compete to some extent because wine is an upmarket product for which
people will pay a premium. Nevertheless, Burgdorfer thinks that agricultural protection in the European Union may eventually threaten the profitability of Swiss wines.
The tradition of making wine in Switzerland dates back to the Roman period, although the Guides des Vins Suisse notes that there is evidence of grapes as far back as 3000BC. Workers from abroad have long helped harvest Swiss grapes, but the pace picked up in the 1970s, when migrant workers from Italy came to Switzerland in large numbers to pick grapes. Waves of immigration brought different groups: Spaniards in the 1980s, and Portuguese in the 1990s.
The 2002 Free Movement of Persons Agreement with the European Union is affecting the type of employees at Swiss vineyards. Workers from Poland in particular are beginning to seek temporary agricultural labour in Switzerland.
Domaine du Paradis: Large equipment has replaced many of the grape pickers in Geneva (photo J Schindall)
The most talked-about labour development in Switzerland today, however, is the rising use of grape harvesting machines. They cannot be widely used in some areas, notably in Vaud and Valais where the steep slopes pose limitations. They suit Geneva’s vineyards, however. According to Alexandre de Montmollin, director of OPAGE (Geneva Cantonal Office for Viticulture and Oenology), there has been a significant decrease in manual labor for the grape harvest. He estimates that 60% of grapes are harvested by machine and 40% by hand.
At the Domaine du Paradis, Burgdorfer keeps a small year-round staff and tends to use the same seasonal workers for the harvest. He pays them SFr135 per day and
provides lodging at a large building on his property. Burgdorfer speaks French to his foreman, who translates instructions into Portuguese for the workers.
According to Burgdorfer and Bonnet, the overarching concern for Swiss winemaking today is how to remain profitable. Most winemakers believe high quality is the way to success. Bonnet states firmly that winemakers cannot rely on government subsidies. “Switzerland does not support agriculture very well,” he says. Bonnet would rather have liberal markets for all of Europe and be able to
compete openly with other European vintners. “Building barriers – I’m against that,” he says.
Geneva’s vineyards, harvest time, late September 2007
Burgdorfer and Bonnet remain committed to producing the finest product possible. They point to Geneva-area restaurants and hotels as some of their best customers. They reason that if they can convince Swiss wine drinkers, whose standards are high, perhaps then they can make an impact at the international level.
The photos in this series show Engine 55 in lower Manhattan’s Little Italy, just before the alarm sounded, followed by the firemen racing to pull on jackets as the engine pulls out of the station, shouting the address of where they are headed to the firefighters as they clamber aboard.
Manhattan’s fire engines respond, on average, in under five minutes to city fires. Photos: Ellen Wallace, 2007 (click to view larger)
by Ellen Wallace
New York City, NY, USA – I fell in love with firemen when I was little, after reading and rereading Number 9, The Little Fire Engine. Author Wallace Wadsworth in 1942 spun a tale of high drama but it was Eleanor Corwin’s bright and energetic little red engine tearing off to make the world safe that plucked my heartstrings.
This week in New York, on the border between Chinatown and Little Italy I was lovestruck again when the firemen at Engine 55 rushed to a fire as I stood admiring their turn-of-the-century station. My friend Judy and I were tsk-tsking as a man pulled up, parked on the
curb illegally in front of us: we had just spent 30 minutes trying to find a place to
park in Chinatown. I photographed
the beautiful old Engine 55 fire station and we suddenly realized why the fireman had parked there – he was answering an emergency call. The truck pulled out of the station, lights flashing and siren startling us, and off they went.
The station had charmed me completely, but my breath caught, and so did Judy’s, as we watched those fit young men running to save one of the rest of us from yet another accident or bit of stupidity, while most people in lower Manhattan shopped and sat at sidewalk cafes on a beautiful September day.
Engine 55 must be one of the prettiest fire stations in the world. The company was created in 1887 but moved to its present address at 363 Broome Street in June 1899.
The city’s fire department has photo archives that show an 1899 steamer with three-horse hitch in front of the station. There is also a beautiful 1936 Mack pumper that reminds me of the little red engine in my childhood book.
Pretty, but the station front only briefly hides the rougher side of firefighting.
In 2006 in Manhattan alone firefighters answered 11,457 fire calls and more than 57,000 non-fire emergencies. There were 633 "serious incidents" of which 579 were "all hands" fires, the kind where at least four engines are called to a blaze.
The station drew attention 11 September 2001 because its firefighters were early on the scene when the World Trade towers fell, since the station is nearby. Several of its firemen died and their names are on a plaque in front of the station, with a large angel that hints at an Italian heritage looking over them. "The bravest of the brave" becomes more than a phrase above those names.
And every time Engine 55′s team roars off to another fire they take the memory of those missing firemen with them, for another plaque on the side of the truck lists them.
A poignant note was sounded in 2002 when actor Steve Buscemi went to the station and spent two weeks, 12 hours a day, shoveling through the twin towers’ rubble to help find the remains of Engine 55′s missing firemen. He refused to be photographed or take interviews, despite his celebrity status, because he was there to help his old unit. Buscemi was reportedly an Engine 55 firefighter from 1980-1984.
New York’s fire stations have a rich history. Many of them started as volunteer fire stations in the 19th century.
You can buy t-shirts from your favourite ones.
Ed. note: Expat-expo 2007 is 7 October at Palexpo in Geneva, 11:00 to 17:00. Admission is free.
Photo, reproduced with permission, Ed McGaugh, 2007
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – "I see myself as kind of a diplomat," Ed McGaugh says. McGaugh, who is both Swiss and American, is the founder and manager of expat-expo, which promotes expatriate-owned businesses for the English speaking community in Switzerland, mainly through events. "The idea is to make things easier for people. To make Switzerland more approachable."
Reaching out to the expat community in Switzerland has long been a part of McGaugh’s life. He grew up in Switzerland, the Middle East, and the US, and McGaugh says he learned early on the importance of adapting to life in a new country. "Some people just don’t adapt," he believes. His goal is to help people make the adjustment, using resources within the community. "The expat community is very close-knit," he says.
McGaugh wondered when he created expat-expo about using the word "expat" in the name.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Many employees may already be negotiating at work without knowing it.
“They might use the skills, but they might not actually be aware of them,” says Peter Drew, who leads corporate
negotiation seminars for Wilson Learning Solutions in Switzerland. Drew points to the importance of
considering the needs of the other party, researching his or her position and
understanding the strength of your own position.
Drew Tuesday evening led a seminar on negotiation skills in the workplace for some 50
professionals, focusing on the value of reaching “solutions for mutual
change” by being an effective negotiator. Drew highlighted ways to become conscious of how to
negotiate for the best possible outcome.
The ideal approach to negotiating, Drew says, is to find a midpoint between "hard" and "soft" negotiating. Hard negotiating uses threats and pressure, while soft negotiating compromises and tries to please others. Neither strategy, Drew says, typically offers the ideal final deal.
Susanne Lengsfeld, a marketing manager, says
she attended the event because she wanted to know how to avoid dead-end
situations without an agreement. “Sometimes you say your own opinion and you
don’t hear the other person. That leads to confrontation,” she says.
The seminar was sponsored by Geneva Women in International Trade.
Life in the Lake Geneva region (click photo to enlarge)
Editor’s note: this is the first of two articles on the English-speaking community in the Lake Geneva region, with the second planned for October.
Geneva and Morges, Vaud, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Two commercial fairs for English-speaking expatriates in Switzerland point to the growing strength of this community, which is multinational and often multilingual. The Léman Expat Fair is new this year: more than 75 groups and companies will present their goods and services at Beausobres in Morges, Sunday 23 September. Expat-expo in Geneva will hold its second annual fair Sunday 7 October at Palexpo in Geneva, making the leap from 120 to 220 tables this year, based on the success of last year’s fair. This is Switzerland’s largest expatriate-oriented event and the fifth organized by expat-expo, which also has fairs in Zurich and Zug.
The Léman Expat Fair in Morges was designed to help expats in Vaud become better integrated, more quickly, into Swiss life, says Jos van Megchelen, one of the two founders of Léman Events. She and Melania Quinn, both seasoned expats who are active in local organizations such as the International American Women’s Club of Lausanne, decided to bring their backgrounds in the travel industry and event management together to create a meeting ground for expatriates and companies who want to reach each other. The fair is not competing with expat-expo in Geneva, says van Megchelen. "People in Vevey and Montreux don’t always want to go as far as Geneva, and we really want to address the particular needs of people here, in Vaud."
Traditionally, English speakers have looked to Geneva for services and a community base, leaving many of those closer to Lausanne feeling somewhat isolated. Several multinationals, such as Ferring Pharmaceuticals, have moved into the greater Lausanne area in recent months and others continue to grow, such as Medtronic in Tolochenaz. Schools, which often serve to strengthen ties, have grown. The International School of Lausanne, for example, began to offer a full high school curriculum only a few years ago. Tight housing in Geneva has sent some expats further down the lake.
The result has been a community with a stronger voice as the English-speaking population spreads out from its 20th century base in Geneva. Changing residency laws, easier naturalization, new multinationals and international organizations: all have contributed to a larger, more mixed community of English speakers, estimated at between 300-500,000 in the region.
Visitors to the two fairs can expect to see some, but not much, overlap in exhibitors and the style of the two fairs is slightly different. The Léman Expat Fair has tables for presenters but is emphasizing a series of conferences aimed at newly arrived expats, with entertainment during the day. KPMG, a main sponsor, will talk about the impact of the Swiss social security system on income, C2You will address the problems of career integration for trailing spouses and Interconseil-Movers will give presentations on property and moving into the area.
Expat-expo was created in 2005 (Geneva’s first fair was in 2006) to give expat-owned businesses a place to
present their goods and services to fellow English-speaking expatriates.
Today it incorporates this same group as well as
Swiss-owned and multinational companies. Local clubs,
churches and philanthropic organizations also participate. The exhibitors at expat-expo
now come from throughout Europe, but organizer Ed McGaugh says, "We are very concerned about providing small,
home-based businesses a place to exhibit, too. Our strength lies in the diversity of our exhibitors."
Ed. note: As of 15 September, say Ed and Melanie McGaugh, Expat Expo organizers, there are still a few tables available for 7 October.
Background: interview with Ed McGaugh, 2006 expat-expo
Photos: top, Catherine Nelson-Pollard, centre and bottom, David Pittuck, 2007.
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – "A fiddler on the roof sounds crazy, no?" is the opening line from the show put on by the Really Youthful Group of the Geneva Operatic Society (GAOS) and crazy would describe equally well the schedule since March of the 15- and 16-year-old producers of Fiddler on the Roof, which opens Friday 31 August in Nyon. The show runs for three nights.
GAOS has been encouraging teenagers, for the past three years, to learn the "trade" to bring on producers of the future. Adult "godparents" help but the young producers run the show. Christopher Hutchison and Suzy Nelson-Pollard say, looking back, that little did they "realize quite how much work it would involve or what we were getting ourselves into."
For the full-scale production with a cast of over 35 the two had to learn about budgets, lighting, scheduling rehearsals, publicity, auditioning, casting, directing, choreography, finding rehearsal space, theatre, royalty rights and much more.
The would-be producers had to write a proposal and pitch their idea to the GAOS committee. This was no mean feat with Hutchison, who attends the International School of Geneva in Founex, studying for IGCSE British-based exams in June and Nelson-Pollard, who attends the Gymnase de Nyon, working on her Swiss Maturité course during the entire process, and starting school this week, as the show prepares to open.
Nelson-Pollard says, "We have been very lucky with this show for many reasons. We managed to persuade a professional opera singer, Peter Jeffes to come on board and be our musical director godparent. He’s sung in almost every opera house in the world and produced shows himself, so he brought a wealth of expertise. We also found other fantastic godparents who have advised us all along the way. But the most important thing we have been lucky with is having a great cast. They come from schools all over the Geneva and area and among the different nationalities there is a lot "of talent with some superb voices and acting."
The lead character in the show, Tevye, is played by Robbie Macdonald. Nelson-Pollard calls his performace of the song :If I were a Rich Man" outstanding. "Robbie went to see the current production in London to get inspiration, and he is a real star. The other musical numbers in the show "Sunrise, Sunset" and "Matchmaker" are very well known and loved by audiences. Even though the story is simple and set in a poor Russian village, there is such a positive, feel-good atmosphere about it, and with the lovely dancing that we have, you can’t help being uplifted by it all. I still am, even though I have been living and breathing it for ten months!"
The two producers say they have added a few modern twists to the production "to stamp our mark on it with new ideas on lighting and sound," but overall it stays true to the core idea. With the show about to open and no vacation this summer they say there are "quite exhausted, but we believe every moment has been worth it and if you come to the show we think you will too."
Fiddler on the Roof, Aula de College du Nyon-Marens, 31 August-2 September. Show times:
- Friday 31 August 20:00
- Saturday 1 September 18:00
- Sunday 2 September 14:00
Tickets: Tel +41 22 341 5190, The Theatre in English online booking
[Editor's note: Suzy Nelson-Pollard and friends wrote several a series of reviews of the Paleo Festival for GenevaLunch in July 2007.]
My life’s hitchhiking experience, at age 19, was two rides for a total distance of under 20km, both in my home country of Switzerland. And then I found myself in Tibet with no means of transport and low on cash.
I could have joined one of the many tour groups of foreigners heading into this land on the edge of the world’s highest peaks, a place holy to Tibetan Buddhists throughout the world, but I wanted an adventure. I wanted a trip into Tibet without a travel permit, a tour guide and without being weighed down by all the other regulations enforced by the Chinese government. I had spent four summers in China and knew something about these, how oppressive they can be but also how the Chinese work their way around them every day.
It was under these circumstances, in a part of the world I was not allowed to be in, that I learned to hitchhike.
I had been walking and biking westwards for several weeks from China’s southern province of Yunnan with a half-formed idea of finding a way into Tibet. At the start of the summer I was in Beijing on business, so several weeks later I was desperate to get away from work and from the crowded eastern cities. I wanted to see the other side of China before change overtakes it. Yunnan gave me remote villages full of women in elaborate red and blue embroidered clothes and men surrounded by clouds of blue smoke billowing from their enormous water pipes. As I neared Tibet the landscape shifted as the altitude rose; the population becoming increasingly sparse. Hours could go by without any sign of life.
I was standing on a dusty roadside facing a cloud-capped peak of nearly 7,000m when I made up my mind to find a way into Tibet. Most Chinese cities have cash machines so I hadn’t worried too much about having enough for days or weeks of travel. I came close to running out of money several days earlier and suddenly discovered I was in a town with no machines. I found myself too poor to take a bus and decided to give thumbing a ride a shot.
Editor’s note: This is the ninth in a year-long series on the life of a Vaudois winemaker, or vigneron, in the Lake Geneva region. GL follows Raymond Paccot and Domaine La Colombe in Féchy from the 2006 harvest to the next one in 2007.
At the end of the article you will find tips for visiting Swiss wine cellars.
Forecast for the 2007 Swiss wine harvest
Féchy, Vaud, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – "Extraordinaire!" says the man from Marseilles and his wife. She is clearly knowledgeable about wines, agrees enthusiastically. It is noon on a balmy Saturday in August but with Raymond Paccot as host, several of us have been sitting around a cool cellar table talking animatedly about wine, the Vachérin cheese festival since one couple comes from the Lac de Joux area where it’s held, the south of France thanks to the Marseilles couple visiting their daughter in Mont-sur-Rolle, and the apple harvest in Switzerland because an orchard owner from Crassier, near Divonne, and his son are here.
Soon we will head out and join the rest of the world, enjoying the fine weather, the lakeside, the vineyards walking paths. But first we are learning about wine.
Saturday mornings are usually like this chez Paccot, at the Domaine la Colombe. Raymond and Violaine Paccot sell half of their wine directly, so for them it pays, literally, to be at home on Saturday.
Some people have been dropping in for years to say hello or to sample
the new wines and restock their cellars. Others are first-time visitors
who’ve phoned in advance or simply followed a map here. People drift in starting at 9:30 and
St Prex, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Hazeline van Swaay is the moving force behind the St Prex Festival, which is a relative newcomer to the Lake Geneva region arts scene in its second year. "After the first festival and the wonderful atmosphere we created in the church I felt we needed to extend to the other beautiful site of St Prex, the vieux bourg. The church seats only 100 and soon the whole thing would become to elitist. We have a unique venue and if we succeed in this year’s challenge of duplicating the magic we created in the church in the main village street, then we really have something truly exceptional.
"We are taking an ambitious step. We have wonderful artists who are collaborating with us, for music and ballet. My hopes for the festival are to have a top-level cultural event that runs over several days, combining artists from different horizons. A bit like, I am told, the Festival of Spoleto was at the beginning. St Prex Festival will never be huge, because of the size of the medieval village. But it will be intimate and magical."
Van Swaay is quick to give her father, who died in March 2005, credit for inspiring the festival which is an unusual blend of dance, music and artistic lighting. Part of the festival takes place outdoors, in the village’s medieval main street, and part in the 11th century hilltop roman church that overlooks the old town.
"The artistic core group of the festival came together initially through my father’s contacts," says Van Swaay. Professionally, my father Dick Hoog, was a businessman [Ed. note:
directeur general at Nestlé]. He was also a music lover and very good
amateur musician, as a flute player. Coming from a musical family, he
started the flute at an early age. During his studies
Editor’s note: This is the eighth in a year-long series on the life of a Vaudois winemaker, or vigneron, in the Lake Geneva region. GL follows Raymond Paccot and Domaine La Colombe in Féchy from the 2006 harvest to the next one in 2007.
Féchy, Vaud, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Consumers tend to think first about the winemaking process and then about the grape-growing business if they consider the work that goes into a bottle of wine.
For the winemaker, there is a third, critical part of the process, selling the wine. Swiss cellar owners see an influx of local visitors in May and June, which is when Swiss consumers tend to restock their own cellars. July and early August are quiet, but by the end of August, when people return from their holidays, Saturday at the cellar is a must for many wine producers. It’s a busy time for Raymond and Violaine Paccot, who are unusual because their Domaine de la Colombe sells 50% of its wine directly from the cellar. Another 20% goes to restaurants and 30% to retailers.
"We’re probably part of only 10% of producers who sell such a high proportion directly," says Raymond Paccot. Most grower-producers sell a significant proportion of their harvest as grapes in bulk, to cooperatives or larger winemakers. "In 1960 my father sold
Editor’s note: GenevaLunch is a media sponsor for the event, which takes place in GL’s home town. View our "Moods of St Prex" collection of 50 photos by Ellen Wallace, part of the GL photo album.
Photo, left: St Prex’s main street and, through the arches, the roman church: concerts will take place in both areas.
St Prex, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The St Prex Festival comes into its own this year as a new arts event that is likely to become a regular star on the region’s cultural calendar. The quality of the festival itself, the unusual blend of arts and the spectacular setting combine in only the second year of the festival to create what should be a memorable event.
The festival’s choreographer is Cecelia Mones Ruiz, who was for many years ballet mistress and soloist as well as assistant to Maurice Béjart. Among the many notable performers: Brazilian pianist Ricardo Castro. The festival features a variety of music and dance under a tent-covered main street in the old town, with some concerts to be held in the 12th century church high on a hill overlooking the medieval village and Lake Geneva.
A highlight will be a concert the final night, 2 September, with the audience selecting 20 songs from a list of 99, performed by soprano Irene Maessen and pianist Marja Bon of the Wendingen Ensemble, Netherlands.
St Prex’s vieux bourg, one of the region’s tourism jewels, provides the perfect setting. A Roman place of prayer existed on the site of the current small church that overlooks the old town. The village itself was built along the lakefront in 1234 by the Archbishop of Lausanne to protect the population from Savoyard attacks. Villagers within the wooden walls used fire to signal the cathedral in Lausanne from the point of land that juts into Lake Geneva, in times of attack.
In the 18th century the village became a holiday place for some, with genteel summer homes built by the well-off in nearby Morges. Many of the buildings in the vieux bourg today date back to that period. The enseignes, or wrought-iron signs that hang above street corners and over businesses, are a vestige of those artisan-rich days. The Vieux Moulin on the lakefront, which serves as the town’s sports and cultural hall, was part of a gravel pit that was worked until 1955. Before that time the lakefront served many purposes, with its sandy stretches providing the raw materials for glassmaking, giving St Prex its inheritance as a glass centre: its bottle recycling factory is one of three in Switzerland, a country that recycles nearly 96% of its glass.
St Prex’s history stretches even further back, with archeologists finding in its soil tools and materials dating back more than 7,000 years.
The village today is a mix of commuters who work in Geneva and Lausanne and the many towns between, with a quiet weekday life that nevertheless remains centred on the town. There are two primary schools and a secondary-preparation school, a mix of small businesses including eight restaurants and cafes, and large ones such as Vetropak and Ferring Pharmaceuticals. Agriculture continues to play an important role, with vineyards, orchards, fresh vegetables, grains and roses grown commercially within easy walk of the old town.
For tourists, the town has a lakefront walking path (20 minutes each direction) on the Geneva side of town, three beaches. The plage des dames is a tranquil and tiny, nearly hidden stretch of benches and smooth rocks while the other two draw swimmers, ping-pong players and families with picnic baskets. The grassy beaches are rarely crowded.
The true charm of the village lies in its flower-decked facades and gently curved streets, designed to cut out the wild winds of Lake Geneva. Early in the morning the official village fisherman goes out and late in the day, depending on weather, the lakefront is dotted with windsurfers or rowboats from the club in Morges. Walk through the village on a stormy day and you marvel at the lack of wind, until you reach the outer streets, when you suddenly understand why windsurfers flock here on days when the waves are high, the water choppy.
An old clock and bits of the walls that once surrounded the village are all that remain of that time nearly 800 years ago when St Prex worried about being attacked, but there is a strong sense of another era, another pace of life here. It is one of the rare villages where sunrise and sunset, winter days and wild weather days colour it beautifully, making it just as good for visiting as those perfect Lake Geneva summer days when sky and lake are blue and the water is placid.
Article on the St Prex festival in 24 Heures, 15 August 2007.
