Geneva, a city you’ve probably never seen, even if you live there

The pot at the end of the rainbow, for British bankers, might be in Geneva

Some things never change, and a certain class of wealthy Brits seeing quaint little Switzerland as a playground is one of them. Another is the itch of UK newspaper writers to get the editor to pay for a trip, preferably during the ski season, to trot along on the heels of the rich to write about this fabled, gorgeous, expensive, boring little police state where people survive on chocolate and cheese. The Times has just done it and so has the Telegraph.

If you’re determined to see a place as an old cliché, you will, and they did. Clichés work, of course, because they have an element of truth in them. The younger brother of a friend was put under my care for a long 24 hours in Paris when I lived there, and at the end he dismissed the city as boring, with terrible food and ugly people. The women were short and bony, he said, and restaurants didn’t even serve ketchup with their hamburgers which were, by the way, awful, he added.

I couldn’t disagree, but I did think he’d missed something.

So did England’s newspaper writers. Geneva officials might be annoyed with the articles, Times and Telegraph fans will lap it up, and the rest of us will roll our eyes in wonder.

Once a year people in Geneva dress alike, many in gray, it is true (photo: Laila Rodriguez)

When I began to work as a journalist in Switzerland my editor at Business Week, who was based in Paris, admonished me to always include something about cheese with holes, cuckoo clocks or gold under the streets of Zurich. Why, I asked, assuming that my job was to add something new, preferably intelligent to what the world knew about the place. “The editors back home want it. They say that’s what readers like, and they’ll never read the more serious stuff if we don’t give them the clichés first.”

I also worked for Time magazine then, and asked the bureau chief there if he agreed. Absolutely, he said. It helps the editors in New York keep Switzerland and Sweden straight in their minds. Those white, snowy capital S places.

A little cliché-busting

The Times and Telegraph reporters got some of the basics wrong and don’t appear to have entirely understood the Swiss tax system.

Sign out for British bankers?

Here is a summary of the news story, the more or less serious stuff that’s prompted editors to shell out the cash for an EasyJet flight from London, I assume (times are tough in the media world). Hedge funds are moving out of London to Switzerland: 8 of them made the decision in December. British media are increasingly focusing on the story because UK tax rates on bank bonuses and high income levels will go up sharply as of 1 April 2010, and this is prompting some companies to move.

Here are my two bits on the story: Geneva’s Ivan Pictet, president of the board of the Geneva Financial Center, said in October when asked about hedge funds moving in, that Switzerland is and will continue to have only a tiny role to play in the international hedge funds business. He used a figure of maybe up to 2 percent of the global business. Geneva would welcome more companies moving in, but it’s not about to replace The City as a hedge fund capital, he noted.

End of story. But if you want the editor to pay for that trip to the fabled playground you have to have a bit more to write. So here’s what we get: Geneva is boring, expensive, people all dress alike, and communes dictate how you live. Taxi drivers think only about money (well, you probably do recognize that one, but London has a couple of these, too). The place is crazily racist.

Geneva and Switzerland, as viewed by London’s newspapers

From the Times:

• Hedge funds and wealthy people want to take up Swiss residence so they can get a tax forfeit: lump sum taxation (GenevaLunch: Some  confusion here: the rules are clear that this is only for people who “do not pursue an occupation in Switzerland”, which lops out anyone employed by a hedge fund, no matter how much they make. There were, 5,000 people who paid lump sum taxes, less than 0.1 percent of the Swiss population, in 2008)
• “There are hardly any normal shops: most seem to sell only diamonds and furs.” (GL: That’s not called Geneva – it’s called a two-block area)
• “. . .supper at a studenty restaurant where they serve only steak and chips: £150 [CHF220] for three, excluding service (GL: That’s a silly price for what you ate unless it was in a trendy restaurant and included a bottle of wine. The wine is generally better and cheaper than in London – and service is included, by the way)
• A Geneva lawyer says he buys his groceries in France because Switzerland is too expensive (GL: ask him what he buys: some stuff is cheaper in France, other stuff cheaper in Switzerland, and the great thing about Geneva is you can do your shopping in both – toilet paper in Switzerland, steak in France)
• Geneva is boring. (GL: No, it’s small. There’s a difference. I have been to Cardiff three times, a city about the same size as Geneva, and thought it was boring, too – everything shut before 6 in the evening, food was either bad or else it was good but way too expensive. I had the good grace not to write that because I figured there might be more to the place, if I took the time to find out.)
• Communes rule people’s lives with police-state style rules (GL: okay, at this point the writer veers off into fiction, with visits from Interpol and commune rules about flowerbox colours, which is fun, but I’m starting to wonder if she really caught that EasyJet flight or just cobbled together the story over a nice cup of tea in London.)
• CHF40 an hour for cleaning help. (GL: that’s the rate you pay for a cleaning company, not a regular cleaning woman, who gets CHF20-25, and for this you get someone who is used to cleaning to Swiss standards, which is nice)
• Crans-Montana is not as well known as Gstaad because wealth whispers. (GL: Rubbish. Italians have been flaunting wealth for years in Crans-Montana, but the Brits don’t mingle with them – a language problem?)
• You can’t make friends in Switzerland. It’s an expat’s life or nothing (GL: The woman quoted is 26, can’t have been here long or have lived in many cities, and she goes home to London every weekend – a little reminder needed here that life in any city is what you make it, but you do have to make an effort).
• Switzerland, and especially Geneva, is racist (GL: Calling kettles black, etc. – look around you when you get back home).

The Times is having a hayday with Geneva-drubbing in its Sunday 16 January edition: we get another Times article, by a different Times writer, saying Geneva has no nightlife, so it won’t be able to attract London’s high-flying financial companies. He quotes the Economic Development agency in the city and some relocation agencies, looks briefly at the Glocals.com website. He doesn’t find much going on. It’s not at all clear that he actually visited Geneva  to write this. He makes the weird remark that a lack of nightlife and no show-off flashy lifestyles “constitutes one of the main obstacles facing Geneva, along with the rest of Switzerland, in the quest to attract the financial sector away from London.” (GL: Surely people with the smarts to make that kind of money can figure out how to spend it having fun? And outside London, not many people think Switzerland is scrambling hard to attract these people.)

And then the Telegraph jumps into the fray, but with a much more upbeat story, which appears the same day. I suspect they heard about the Times articles and decided to write the opposite story. But it, too, suggests London’s financial crowd wants its Little London in Zug or Geneva. Some do. Many don’t, from what I’ve seen.

From the Telegraph:

• “Jay-walking [is] an arrestable offence” (GL: And yet people do it all the time, but people are very rarely stopped for it unless they do it in front of a bored police offier – but hasn’t the journalist ever been to California? Switzerland is pretty relaxed on this, compared to a lot of places)
• “Each of Switzerland’s 27 self-governing cantons sets its own tax rate, many with ultra-low levels to attract foreign finance firms and workers.” (GL: true, but the thing that makes Switzerland interesting for staff is the relatively low income tax rates for individuals, which apply to all of us, not just rich bankers)
• “The Swiss, a conservative nation, generally expect mothers to look after their own children.” (GL: an urban myth related to the idea that Swiss women don’t work – although this was true 35 years ago. Things change. Switzerland has one of Europe’s highest number of couples where the husband works full-time, the wife part-time: twice as many as the number of couples where the wife does not work, which is about equal to the number of couples where both work full-time. And it has one of the highest percentages of couples where both work part-time, according to 2008 figures published by the UN’s Economic Commission for Europe. Childcare options are limited, but changing. The Swiss political system reacts slowly.)
• Switzerland’s 27 cantons (GL: 26 – more on them at www.ch.ch)

I’m left with a sense that the British, or maybe just British bankers and wealthy Brits, don’t relocate well. Fortunately, I know quite a few of them in Switzerland, and I suspect that the ones who like to live well and who know how to spend their money well were all out doing that when the UK journalists came to town for a day. The problem might be that these people are hard to spot: they’ve learned how to fit in and enjoy life.

Links to other sites:

• Times, UK: “Bonus supertax sends the City’s super-rich to Switzerland”,
• Times: “Lack of Nightlife could dull Geneva’s appeal”
• Telegraph, “British bankers find the good life in Switzerland – even before tax“
• Swiss federal government page on tax forfeits (lump sum taxation)
• social networks popular with English-speakers in Switzerland: English Forum, Glocals
• to keep track of what’s happening in the Lake Geneva region: our own very popular blog for newcomers in Geneva, Geneva’s best-read source of news in English (guess who!) and GenevaLunch resources and events
• radio in English
• Geneva Welcome Centre has a What’s on page in English, and the Sortir web page at TSR (public television) has the most complete listing around of music, movies, shows and other entertainment in the region.

US Democrats Abroad is taking up a collection of goods for wounded US soldiers. If you’re interested in contributing, the collection is at Starbucks Waisenhausplatz, 3011 Bern (near train station) in Bern Friday 11 December, from 12:00-13:00 and in three locations in Geneva Wednesday and Thursday, 9-10. Details

Today is the day to pick up a copy of La Cote, the regional newspaper, if you want to find Catherine Nelson-Pollard’s new column in English there. It will appear on Fridays. Catherine continues as part of the GenevaLunch team for two years, writing occasional articles and reviews as well as the Nyon Notes blog.

The column is available online to the newspaper’s paying subscribers.

Most Swiss-based people reading this are likely to be multicultural: it’s the nature of the international population here, so the conflicts, turmoil, dilemmas, frustrations – and richness – of it all are nothing new. Our families struggle with it all the time, as we do as individuals.

Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed this thoughtful article by Ghanaian-American student Crystal Grace Ofori in the America.Gov web site, about her own efforts to come to terms with growing up in a Twi-speaking family, both parents from Ghana, in the US.

Lives are punctuated by history, and tonight, Swiss time, a very important punctuation mark was added to the flowing text that makes up our lives, our personal stories. I don’t yet know what it is. A question mark? What next? Or, an exclamation mark! The promise! The possibility to start afresh!

In my life the story began with a post-war baby boom, men wearing hats to work and women in belted shirtwaist dresses cooking dinner for the family. Then there was Sputnik! Followed by TV, the Beatles, yeah, yeah, yeah. And hippies . . . And Vietnam? And jobs, money-making, Europe, love, travel, family, work. 9/11! 9/11 . . .

I’m an American. I thrummed and throbbed with the crowd, to the beat. I watched it at home, with the computer turned up loud and the TV on loud and the windows open, and I leaned out and cheered, sheer exuberance!

I loved the inauguration cheering, the power that comes from believing in each other, from feeling one person’s confidence plus another person’s confidence equals a nation’s strength. I really loved the not-learned-in-school national anthem sung by Aretha Franklin and for once I forget her voice belting out r-e-s-p-e-c-t! Exclamation!

I’m Swiss, too. I squirmed slightly at the flags and flags and flags, the religious notes that ring foreign to my ears (and this after 16 years of religious education as a child in the US), at the assumption that the US plus Others equals the World. That’s a little too black and white for me, after nearly 30 years of living outside the US.

But Barack Obama holds a light for Americans like me, and my children, too. He’s half this, half that, and so are we. He’s more than the sum of his tribal parts and so are we. We are all giving him the benefit of the doubt, believing that belonging to more than one tribe makes us richer, better able to contribute to (uh-oh, here comes Miss Universe) World Peace,

,

Definitely a comma, with something to follow, but no one has yet quite figured out what.

If you belong to more than one race or more than one country, what does that make you? Question mark.

Someone who is never really more one than the other, someone who carries a history of both, in the form of ancestral memories and stories, someone who knows that putting in place some of those building blocks for the next generation means letting go of some of the richness of your own past.

Tonight is a sweet yet bittersweet night for Americans who live outside the US, especially those who hold another passport.

It’s an evening filled with memories, from bedtime stories and baseball or soccer to the feel of a crisp new dollar bill in the hand. There is an emotional nod to those who went before, the generations we knew and the ones before them who, frankly, are easier to deal with because we can embellish their lives to suit us.

It’s also a night colored with promise because we are a bridge between that world and the rest and suddenly that world might be more interested in us. Our voices might be heard and our multicultural riches seen as the wealth it truly is.

This evening we hold the hope that some day, someone will take a moment to wonder what we, too, gave up in order to give more:

A colon, we call that. We can probably be diplomatic and call it “two points”,  open to the future.

:

Click on images to view larger

I’m a bit late catching up on some of the local buzz, due to a week spent moving our web site to its new home, but I was pleased to see that the Dragon Boat Races organized last weekend by the English Speaking Cancer Society of Geneva (ESCSG) went well. There was a good turnout for this second year despite thunderstorms. Yet again, the corporate and school groups who volunteered to race these boats on the Lac de Joux came up with great team names, not to mention stroke power. My favourites: WHO Rocks the Boat and, from Cargill, Staying Afloat. Given that 40% of the society’s members are breast cancer survivors, I also quite like the team name Breast Strokers

The races serve several purposes, from raising awareness of cancer to providing support for families and individuals, and offering groups a chance to work on team-building. A percentage of the proceeds goes to the oncology unit at the Childrens Hospital at the HUG (University Hospitals of Geneva), with the rest going to fund several ESCSG projects.

Some people who contribute to GenevaLunch go off traveling and take wonderful vacation photos. Check them out:
MXW watching Brits on the beaches of Greece
Overthemoon checking out the sights of Paris
Phitar in France’s Camargue catching human playgrounds
Xim-crow at a wedding on an idyllic lake near Gruyere

Others of us stay home during the summer to take travel photos:
Oobwoodman caught travelling clouds and I caught a Swiss postal bus near Chamoson, Valais, left, as an alpine storm brewed and creaky cranes taking flight, after a fashion, at Lausanne’s EPFL, right. Click on images to view larger.

Many thanks go to Barbara Boldt for taking copious notes and sharing them, on my presentation to GWIT (Geneva Women in International Trade), "Leveraging your online life."

I’ve been contacted by several people who knew they would have to miss the talk, to ask if I could share it with them. Barbara’s notes are quite complete, so I invite you to visit the GWIT press page and learn about why you should google yourself and how, to start. One of the guests also videotaped part of the talk and we may carry a clip from that here a little later.

The news is zooming around the Internet that two spammers have been ordered to pay $230 million for illegally sending messages to MySpace users. Spammers who do this just for the fun of the chaos it creates are a thing of the past: today’s hackers and spammers do it for money. And they make money for one reason, which is that people make it easy for them to do so.

Photo: we’re all too easily linked on the Internet.

TSR’s leading story about the huge award is coupled with some very sensible bits of advice (Fre). Here are some sources of guidelines in English: don’t be so foolish as to think you don’t need them! Do you belong to any social networks? Have you signed up online lately for prize drawings or seen your name on a group e-mail where there are names you don’t know, sent by a friend or colleague?

• "Lack of security in social networking and wifi," Best Security Tips, UK
• series of tips for home users (parents, adult users) from Stay Safe Online, US
• most universities now have student guidelines; here are the ones from the University of Santa Cruz in California, a good reminder for all of us of the basics.

The problem is not just at the international level, nor is so blatant as someone asking for your bank account number. If you are asked to supply a personal email address by someone you don’t know (use Hotmail or similar instead), the name of your employer, your nationality or other information that could be part of a database, STOP. Don’t give it. In the past two months, while editing our Events pages and some news stories, I’ve noticed that events organizers, social networks and small groups sometimes ask for information they should not. They might not have plans to misuse it, but the public doesn’t know this – and the data you supply might not stop with them, with or without their knowledge.

If you’re a company, an organization, a school group or just a small club DO NOT ask people to send you their e-mail addresses with other personal information.  Do your bit to keep the Internet safe.

Related: "Geneva Security Forum, beyond James Bond and science fiction," 24 June 2007, GenevaLunch

As a non-dog owner it startles me to think anyone might consider giving their dog chewing gum, but apparently people do. If you’re a dog’s master and you’re tempted, don’t do it. Here is why, according to Wrigley, which has a cautionary note to dog owners on its home page. Back to chewing old shoes, dear pup.