May 27, 2010

Yesterday, (yes, I'm one day late with the blog) I didn't really leave home so all you will get is the view from our balcony over the Uetliberg and our little gardener watering the tomatoes that I tried to plant.

What happened in the world? Good question, actually quite much even though most thing seems to be about the saving of the euro and the oil leak. The oil has now reached the beaches of Louisiana but some good news that came today is that BP has now managed to at least temporary stop the leak. However, even if they will completely stop the oil flow unimaginable damage has already been done.

I'm not much into important subjects this week so let's talk about the Eurovision Song contest. Living in Switzerland and reading the Swedish papers can really make you laugh sometimes. In Sweden this competition gains so much attention and everyone is involved in which contribution we should send to compete. There are actually a large number of competitions all over the country and people call in to vote for which song should represent Sweden. This year we were even flying in Dolph Lundgren from Hollywood to present the show. In Switzerland I have no idea how the best song is selected as I haven't heard about it at all. When I googled it I found out that it is a song in french this time, 'Il pleut de l'or' which is probably a better choice than Swiss German if you want to go to the finals. Of course I had to check out what the song was like and I found a video from the live performance in the second half final. Please note that all you see is Swedish flags in the audience. When googling I also found that Switzerland hasn't won the competition since 1956 so this might be a reason why they find it so uninteresting here but you would still need to do a profound ethnological study to understand why the swedes care so much.

May 19, 2010

Ober-Letten. We are impatiently waiting for the summer to come so that Letten will be full of happy people again.

Feminism and standing up for women rights is very unfashionable nowadays and often give people bad associations and classifying women who strive for equality as man-haters. However, this doesn't mean that we are anywhere close to a reasonable level of equality. The biggest lawsuit ever against the discrimination of women in the U.S. was won this week against the huge Swiss pharma company Novartis. Twelve female ex-employees will receive 3.3 million dollars in compensation damages for having been denied promotions, having lower pay and unjust treatment during pregnancy. In addition to that Novartis also received a 250 million dollar fine, this high amount is computed on the basis of the revenue of the company so that it will be a sufficient discouragement. This will hopefully send out a clear message to all large companies to impose strict policies on fair treatment of their employees.

As Novartis is Swiss this will hopefully also have an impact in this country. The laws in Switzerland are good in protecting women but it is really important to make sure that they are followed and to take legal action when they are not. Personally, I have been very fortunate in my own situation but I would like to transmit my strong encouragement to the wife of a friend who is now in a legal battle here in Switzerland after having been mobbed by her boss (female boss!) from the first day of her announced pregnancy and then being fired one day before giving birth. Even though it is always difficult to prove mobbing it is clearly against Swiss law to fire women during their pregnancy and maternity leave so she will definitely win this. However, it is not difficult to imagine the mental pain and distress she must have gone through in the process. We should all be grateful that there are women standing up and taking these difficult battles, the benefits of their struggle will come back to all of us.

May 5, 2010

A rainy day in Zürich but in this period of the year even the rainy days are nice and the trees are so green that you almost feel as if you were in a tropical forest. These pictures however are taken at Bellevue on my way for my second attempt to become Swiss. At least this time I could leave with a long list of papers to fill in so I'm slowly approaching the goal.

Since about two weeks a huge ecological disaster is taking place in the gulf of Mexico. An oil platform belonging to BP caught fire, sunk and oil is now being pumped out in masses into the gulf. BP is alone responsible for the disaster and is now spending $6 million a day for the attempts to repair the leakage and clean up the water and the beaches. They estimate that this could continue for about 3 months before it is over. This has an enormous impact on the environment and the fauna of the region and it is really sad to see it all destroyed even though one might see some justice in that it actually happens in the region with the hugest oil consumption in the world. Apparently this is not even the worst occasion of oil spill in history, when googling oil spill you will find innumerably really bad cases and many of them in the US. One could imagine that the Americans would learn from the consequences of these accidents and put more effort into developing alternative energy but they are so amazingly stubborn in refusing to face the reality that it doesn't seem to influence them at all.

Here in Switzerland we seem however to get more and more inspired by the wild west. Last week a police officer shot a french car thief during a chase in the canton of Vaud. I am not at all defending stealing cars but to go so far as to shot anyone unless it is self-defense is a very dangerous direction to go. Violence is only feeding violence. A strong example of this was when Swiss TV went to the french suburb from which the car thief came and interviewed some local kids. Apparently it is a quite common phenomenon to go to Switzerland for the weekend to steal cars as there are more expensive cars here than in France. When the reporters asked whether the kids thought that people would be discouraged to go now the kids answered that no, the only difference was that now they had to make sure that they would go armed.