Meditating in the mud - Photo, Jared Bloch
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Natural skin defoliation? Spiritual cleansing? Or just plain dirty fun? According to one young mud bather interviewed by GenevaLunch, “It’s just mud. That’s all.”
Paleo revelers were invited to take a dip in a mud pool set up in the center of the Mangroove art installation. Mangroove, a virtual swamp of passageways constructed from lengths of mangrove limbs, is a joint project between Paleo and the Haute ecole spécialisée de Suisse occidentale (HES) (University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland).
Santigold brings Brooklyn to Paleo
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Not Fancy but Funky, Funny, and Fun. This was a summary of the Santigold show Saturday night at Paleo.
Santigold, a Brooklyn, New York native, has discovered what those other kings of kitsch from the borough, the Beastie Boys, found out 20 years ago; chutzpah is cooler than gangsta’.
A GenevaLunch feature on the new sailing marvel, Alinghi 5: the boat, the technology, the view for Lake Geneva area viewers
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Alinghi 5, 90-foot catamaran - photo, E Wallace
Alinghi 5 sailing first time, 20 July 2009 - photo, © Carlo Borlenghi/Alinghi
Le Bouveret, Valais, and Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - There are sailboats, and then there is Alinghi 5: at 90 feet (27 metres) far larger than anything else on Lake Geneva, technologically astonishing and a delight to the eyes, but also exciting in terms of the sailing challenges it presents. The catamaran, built at great expense and specially for the next America’s Cup race in 2010, was presented to a mostly-charmed group of international journalists Thursday 23 July, but the weather was not cooperative. “We took it out into the harbour Wednesday and hit 31-knot winds,” said Alinghi’s president, Ernesto Bertarelli. It was forced back to shore, where the Alinghi team then kept busy with shoreline duties for the next two days. “Lake Geneva is a challenging place to sail. Yesterday was a real test for us,” he said of the failed outing.
Alinghi 5, a giant among sailboats at Le Bouveret, Lake Geneva - photo, E Wallace
A heavy mix of high winds, hail, thunder and lightning made it impossible to hoist sails, but the weekend weather was decent Saturday and is predicted to be beautiful Sunday 26 July: sunshine and good breezes on Lake Geneva. (Ed. note: Twitterati can follow Alinghi on the water via Twitter at alinghiteam)
Lake Geneva area: Alinghi 5 now on the lake
For the next two weeks people who live along Lake Geneva or who are visiting the area will see the new America’s Cup Swiss boat as it runs tests and the team gets used to handling it, working first from the base in Le Bouveret, at the Valais/Vaud end of the lake, then from Geneva.
The Alinghi team will sail the length of the lake, from Lausanne near Le Bouveret to Geneva and its home port at the Société de Nautique de Genève for the first of August Swiss national holiday.
Bertarelli and his team are inviting all interested sailors in the region to accompany them in a public flotilla of pleasure boats, which should create a spectacular sight (cameras ready!).
Private banker by day, Hip Hop fan by night arriving at Paleo
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Amidst Paleo’s 35,000 concert goers on Friday, I met a private banker who had come straight to the festival from the Geneva airport, hoping to catch some of the Hip Hop acts.
“In fact, I was hoping to see NTM [the French rap group Nic Ta Mere] but the lead singer is still under arrest, so they are cancelled,” the Swiss banker, Damian told me.
Damian, who lived and worked in India, was upbeat when I shared with him the lineup for the evening including a Bhangra performance and South African Hip Hop.
Achanak welcomed concert-goers on Friday night with their dance-friendly mix of Bhangra and electro music.
Achanak's irresistable dance rhythms - photo, Jared Bloch
Unbridled energy with La Pulquería at Paleo 09 © Paleo Festival 2009
Paleo Festival Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The crowd at Paleo couldn’t keep up with La Pulqueria Friday 24 July. The energy level on the stage was reminiscent of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern – well, when it works – and lead singer Huracán Romántica exhorted the crowd in very passable French to dance, to DANCE. He even went into the crowd and gave people liberal shots of tequila from a bottle in an effort to get them fired up.
Paleo cup washing operation. © Paleo Festival Nyon 2009
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Last year, festival-goers to the Paleo Festival Nyon discarded 1.2 million plastic cups in six days. Drinks, hot and cold were sold in cups that ended up in the garbage, or more likely on the ground. The festival’s organizers decided that things had to change.
Enter Ecocup, a French company. For the 2009 edition of Paleo, Ecocup is supplying the festival’s 52 bars with 100,000 clean, reusable, plastic cups a day with the Paleo logo on them. When you buy a drink at Paleo this year, you pay a CHF2 deposit on the cup, returnable at any of the bars. Observant visitors will see some of the 80 workers, most of them part of the Paleo volunteer workforce, processing the cups on the way in on the left, about 100 metres before the main entrance.
GenevaLunch spoke to Ecocup’s David Arnaud Friday 24 July.
But who will take our money to finance the mortgage?
Update 25 July 07:20 Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Two well-known Swiss cooperative banks, Migros and Bank Raiffeisen, have made changes in recent weeks to their policies concerning customers who are US citizens, or who are resident in the US. Specifically, both banks refuse all contact from the US. The steps taken by the banks, who are best known for mortgages and retail banking to middle-class customers, are a clear indication that US pressure is having an impact on the Swiss banking system. The moves are part of a trend that saw UBS in July 2008 alert non-US citizens who were resident in the US that their accounts would be closed as it reduced its US business.
Ironically, it is Americans trying to lead normal lives and pay their bills through their banks who are most affected – not the infamously wealthy and stealthy people the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is hunting down. Also affected: Swiss citizens living in the US and people of other nationalities who have at some point lived in both countries. These are not the mythical secret, numbered accounts made famous by the likes of James Bond, but typical Swiss bank accounts covered by data protection laws in Switzerland.
The problem is complicated for US citizens and residents living outside the US because, according to American Citizens Abroad, a Geneva-based group, US banks are increasingly applying “due diligence” rules to refuse banking services outside the country.
Paleo crowd arriving on Thursday evening - Photo, Jared Bloch
Nyon, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Fans enjoyed unexpectedly sunny weather Thursday evening at Paleo, in spite of intermittent showers earlier in the day. Apart from a few soggy patches at the concert sites, shows went on without a hitch, and the extra plastic sacs and rain gear packed in, went unused.
Mexican virtuosos Rodrigo and Gabriela set the tone for the evening, with a near hour-long guitar duel featuring their own material as well as covers of “Stairway to Heaven,” and “Oye Como Va.” See GL’s Paleo Photo Album
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – More than half a million people have been displaced in the DR Congo since the start of 2009, the latest figures published by the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) in Geneva show. Heavy fighting between government forces and Rwandan rebels in the South Kivu area starting 12 July has created a new migration of 35,000 people out of the area, bringing the total displaced since January 2009 to 536,000. Overall, 1.8 million people have been displaced by the fighting.
Paleo crowd, 2009
What it is: The largest outdoor music festival in Switzerland, started in 1976, with over 4.3 million concert-goers since then. In 2008, the audience was 227,000 strong, and there were 146 performances on six stages.
Volunteers, all 4,062 of them, helped to make the experience a great one for all. According to a survey in 2008, 59 percent of concert-goers came from the Lake Geneva region.
Torsten Åkesson, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, et José Manuel Silva Rodriguez
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The European Research Area is significantly closer to becoming a working reality, with Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research) and the European Commission (EC) signing a memorandum of understanding Friday 17 July. The two have agreed to work more closely together in several areas, a key one being to facilitate implementation of the European Strategy for Particle Physics, which has been defined by Cern.
The EC and Cern say the memorandum will provide a framework to cooperate and share knowledge in several areas: research programming, training and mobility of researchers, science education, open publishing, technology transfer, innovation, building next generation infrastructures (including e-infrastructures) and global scientific cooperation.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The death of Zill-e Usman in Peshawar, Pakistan is the third death of a UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) staff member in the country in six months, the Geneva-based organization announced 17 July. He was shot at the Kutcha Gari camp on the border of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in North-West Frontier Province on the morning of July 16. Another staff worker was injured but is not in serious condition and a guard was killed.
Zill-e Usman was one of the longest-serving staff members in the country, who had been working with the Peshawar office since 1984.UN staff in the Geneva office gathered at noon for a minute of silence to honour the slain father of four.
