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.