Snow falling, blowing at night, 1,100 metres in Valais, Switzerland
Blowing snow, Valais, Switzerland 21 December 2009
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Winter arrived in Switzerland 21 December with a screech of cold air accompanied by howling winds and snow in many areas. By Tuesday noon temperatures had risen, but the country remains blanketed in white.
Switzerland suffered fewer accidents and other weather-related problems Sunday and Monday, compared to many areas in Europe, partly thanks to the warm foehn in mountainous regions. Strong winds whipped up but also melted some of the snow. The highest winds were recorded at the Diablerets glacier, 145.4kph, reports TSR.
Forecast from the national weather service, MeteoSwiss: clouds and snow alternating for the next few days, throughout the Jura, Lake Geneva and Swiss Alps region. The snow line will rise and fall between 400 and 1,500, with snow down to the plain at times in Valais. Temperature highs, 4-9C on the plain, 2-4C in Valais, with +1C at 2,000m. Colder as the week wears on, but some Alpine valleys will be warmed by foehn winds, which will be strong at times this week.
Finding a home in Switzerland has never been easy, and the tight housing market in the Lake Geneva region makes it even more difficult. A web site that can might help you is Homes.ch, which has existed for some years, but owner Simon Allen has been adding new functions and marketing it more strongly. The site gives some idea of price trends and allows people to place free multi-lingual advertisements.
Swiss Alps: a fine day ahead
Swiss sheep, canton Valais, May 2009, before a summer on top of the mountain
Update 09:00 Saturday 10 October Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The warmest October day since 1910 was a treat earlier this week, with temperatures staying above 10C even at night and rising to 30C (Meteoswiss explains why, in French).
Good weather ahead in the Lake Geneva region
A day of rain in the Lake Geneva area Thursday cooled things down and the leaves have begun to fall, but the weekend promises a good dose of fine weather, mixed with occasional showers. At 09:00 Saturday morning it is raining everywhere in Switzerland, it appears, but the forecasters are still promising it will mostly disappear and we’ll have sunshine: have faith!
It’s relatively warm, with temperatures rising to 18C, perfect for outdoor markets, planting new wild grasses, just reading a suspenseful novel in a sunny spot, cooking up a storm with seasonal foods, or hiking through the vineyards.
What’s on in Geneva and Lausanne, the rest of the region
Sunday is Expat Expo in Geneva, the second of the region’s two big fairs with exhibitors and more, for the English-speaking population. Head out of town, under two hours from Geneva, to watch the sheep come down from the high alps, in Champéry Saturday morning. Head for the circus Saturday night: the famous Swiss Knie circus has started its 2009 programme on the lakefront in Lausanne.
Be sure to check the GenevaLunch events pages for what’s on throughout the region (click on a date on the calendar to see full display).
Title: World Trade Organization Open Day
Location: Geneva
Link out: Click here
Description: Guided tours, art display, documentaries, food stands, children activities and much, much more. Program begins at 10:00.
Date: 06 Sep 2009
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’.
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
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
Schumacher's new home in Gland (©E Wallace 2009)
The race driver's old home, now for rent (image: GetImage/Immostreet.ch)
Vufflens-le-Chateau, Vaud, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Formula 1 superstar Michael Schumacher has put his house in the Vaud hills above Morges up for rent for a cool CHF29,000, which even in the Swiss housing market is on the high end. And that doesn’t include les charges, such as electricity, for which the amount is not given.
Here’s what you can rent for this price in Vaud:
Title: Lake Geneva biking tour
Location: Lake Geneva region
Link out: Click here
Description: The race, open to all goes around Lake of Geneva -both Swiss and French sides are included-.
Three stretches are proposed for the race, pick your own according to your endurance.
Date: 31 May 2009
Crossing the tracks (click on image to view larger)
Lake Geneva region (GenevaLunch) - Meteo Swiss is forecasting more rain for the next two days, so bring out your umbrellas, or do as the weeds do, and just get on with life. Temperatures with highs hovering around 13-14C, but by the weekend it should be warmer and sunnier.
Lake Geneva region, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – General practitioners in cantons Vaud and Geneva have closed their offices Tuesday 24 March in protest against new conditions under which laboratory fees are reimbursed.
Ed. note: emergency coverage is provided, as always – tel. 144 and other numbers are provided below.
Etoy, Vaud: snowy fields, orchards and A1 autoroute
Lake Geneva region (GenevaLunch) – It was hard to avoid the weather 17 February in the region: either you were out in it or everyone mentioned it, or both.
The media covered it: Le Temps, Tribune de Geneve, TSR, 20 Heures.
Snow, accidents, and slippery roads until daytime Wednesday 18 February, when the sun is expected to shine, with temperatures just above 0C: that sums it up.
Which came first, the skid marks or the sign?
Ed. note, French lesson: if you’ve read the articles in our links you’ll have seen the term tôles froissées several times. It does not mean fried rooftops or cold tolls. Translation: Minor accidents or fender benders.
Saint Prex, Switzerland (La Côte, Fre, available with subscription) – GenevaLunch (GL) features on the front page of the Lake Geneva area regional newspaper La Côte today. The article focuses on GL’s development as a regional community online newspaper in English and the new community news association, announced 11 December, that is being created to support GL and other future projects.
(Ed. note: please contact the editor of GenevaLunch if you would like to receive an e-mailed copy of the article.)
Miserable, near Gland, Vaud
Ed. note: series of Lake Geneva area photos at end of article (click on images to view larger)
Lake Geneva region, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Snow is beautiful, if the weather and the altitude fit it, but when the white stuff falls too close to Lake Geneva the snow turns sloppy and slushy and damp, wrapping around us like an old chilly sheet.
In short: it’s not much fun.
Cars slip and slide, people without good treads on their feet do the same. Animals carry on grazing, but they look miserable.
Lake Geneva region, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Temperatures were below zero throughout the region early Monday and the cold is expected to stay around all week: highs of 4C Tuesday, but dropping to a high of just 1 or 2C until the weekend, forecasts MeteoSwiss. Lake Geneva is too deep to freeze over, but it turns a remarkable shade of black in certain lights when the weather is cold, as it did Monday when the first rays of the rising sun warmed this swan’s back, in canton Vaud.
Click on image to view larger.
Gingerly stepping: catprints
Lake Geneva region (GenevaLunch) – Brrr, unusually chilly weather is accompanying the sunshine in the Lake Geneva area, with Meteo Swiss measuring 0C at Cointrin Airport early Wednesday, and minus 7 in Sion, along the Rhone in Valais and also at La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Jura. Elsewhere in Switzerland, temperatures dropped as low as -27C.
Lake Geneva region (GenevaLunch) - The Swiss plain and the Pays de Gex, down to the lakefront in the Lake Geneva area, received up to 15 cm of snow during the night of Sunday to Monday, but police reported no major problems or accidents
GenevaLunch will be at Expat-Expo, table J9, where you can view our fresh new site and learn more about the Lake Geneva region's online community newspaper!
Transparence SA, a Geneva-based company founded in 2007 by Veerle Vanwauwe to promote clean gold through its online retail platform, transparencedesign.com, was named by IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) in July as one of its Women Environmental Entrepreneurs. She was invited to participate in its world congress in Barcelona, Spain this week but Vanwauwe returns home in time to join Expat-Expo as one of its newcomer exhibitors. [Ed. note: See Vanwauwe interview in GL, "Real hope diamonds are traceable"]
Expat-Expo is in its third year in Geneva and while the newness of a fair aimed at the Lake Geneva area’s English-speaking population has worn off, the interest has not.
GenevaLunch is growing up, shifting into a more sophisticated community newspaper format to meet the demands of our readers, who have grown steadily in number each month since we began. GL has been free to everyone, entirely online, five days a week for two years and we would like to thank our readers by offering you an even better service.
What has changed Read more…
Updated 12 July, photos added
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Edipresse, which owns most of the major newspapers in the Lake Geneva region and has a part in some of the radio stations, said Thursday evening at a conference in Geneva that it will soon be giving public radio WRS radio listeners in the region “another choice” when it begins broadcasting regularly on Radio Cité. The content will come from Swisster, the online English site that the media group created in March and which replaced the English Corner, a few web paragraphs in English, produced for years by the Tribune de Geneve. Swisster carries news items and information for expatriates.
Photo, top, by Catherine Nelson-Pollard: visitors to the 2007 Leman Expat Fair: English-speakers in the region are perceived as a new market by many Swiss companies. Expat Expo in Geneva also has a large number of companies lined up to sell their services and products to this population.
The announcement was made during a sales pitch about Swisster by Patrick Aebischer, president of EPFL, and Edipresse executives, to a group of regional business people at Procter & Gamble in Geneva.
EPFL’s students, 40% of whom are international, and the polytechnic institute’s international faculty and visiting researchers, are an increasingly popular target market for many English-language businesses, social networks and web sites in the region.
Radio Cité is a non-profit station in Geneva that has had financial difficulties for several years. It recently found an additional CHF1-2 million a year through Viviane de Witt’s Foundation des Chênes, created in 2006, and it has now applied for a Geneva FM radio concession, or license, that will be awarded in autumn by Ofcom, the federal communications office. It is one of two stations applying for the license: the other is Radio Meyrin.
Radio Cité’s application, with the detailed descriptions required by Ofcom of what it offers listeners, makes no mention of English. Edipresse, in announcing Thursday evening its new radio role, provided no details of the financial arrangement.
Photo: the news team at WRS in Geneva, December 2007
When WRG evolved into WRS, or World Radio Switzerland, a public station, in November 2007, it left no commercial radio in English in the area. WRS has a national vocation, with federal funding through SSR, Swiss Public. It is broadcast nationally only on DAB, which requires a DAB radio and at this level the station still has a limited following. It is picked up in much of the Lake Geneva region on FM radio, which is how listeners in the Lake Geneva region listened to WRG, and WRS has maintained that strong link.
Image, courtesy of Ofcom: “Arc lémanique” license area. Click on image to enlarge.
Lac Léman is another group bidding for a radio license, with a mission to broadcast in English. The would-be commercial station is based in Nyon and is applying for an “Arc lémanique” license that extends from just outside Geneva to Neuchatel. It is
one of six groups vying for four of these licenses, to be awarded in autumn.
It is owned by Hugh Quennec, Swiss and Canadian financier and owner of the Geneva Servette ice hockey team. The would-be station shows a CHF1.8 million budget for its first year, that will nearly double by the third, in its application documents registered with Ofcam. The second name on the request is that of Isabelle Cornut, to whom WRG outsourced its advertising sales.
While the radio war for English listeners builds, the number of English sites that provide services or information also appears be growing in the region. One of the newcomers is the Geneva Community – which rose from the ashes of WRG, created by a community group that owned 2% of the former commercial radio station. The new non-profit group provides a service to local businesses, allowing members to post events, products and services.
EPFL’s president, Patrick Aebischer, pulled in a crowd for the Thursday evening talk at P&G, on Swiss innovation and the role of multinationals. He noted, in introducing Swisster at the end, that the federal polytechnic institute had “helped finance” the Edipresse English-language commercial venture. Swisster’s business model is bulk corporate subscriptions, with companies offering the product to their employees. He referred to it as the “first Swiss online daily in English.”
Ed. note: Aebischer’s misunderstanding can only be explained by an oversight on the part of the journalists at Swisster, since Edipresse has worked in the past with GenevaLunch. GenevaLunch, available since 2006, is the first Swiss online daily in English, and it now plays a significant role in the international community as one of the most-visited sites in English in the region.
