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Archive for the ‘Switzerland’ Category

Achetringele Laupen: Of the weirder Swiss traditions…

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The past few weeks was “that time of the year” in Switzerland again, time to say goodbye to winter and the Fasnacht celebrations. The Solothurn carnival is my favourite, so this year we went back there once again and came back home with hair full of confetti.

But admittedly even more interesting this year was the Liestal “Chienbäse”. Among different cultures and in different countries I’ve come across fire celebrations before… but honestly I had never seen anything of this magnitude. I still have no idea about the historical roots of this thing, and I think I need to do some digging. The best way I can describe the event is by showing the pictures.

Here is the album for Solothurn Fasnacht, and here is the album for Liestal Chienbäse.

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Yesterday evening at the Transmedia Zurich event, we were introduced to 2 very interesting new location based games: “Rundercover” and “Gbanga Famiglia Rise and Fall”. Even as the so called “cell-phone boycotter”, I found both pretty cool / creative. I think this genre of game generally appeals to my need for being physically active while playing… The games are both being developed here in Switzerland, and they both have crowd funding campaigns that you can check out and then hopefully support. Here:

Rundercover website / Kickstarter

Gbanga Famiglia Rise and Fall on Indiegogo

P.S.: The mandetory back-side shot courtesy of these guys.

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Castle Of Gruyères

Forgot to mention, pictures from our visit to the Castle Of Gruyères [a few weeks back] are online. The castle was quite amazing, one of the most majestic I’ve seen to far. But that was about all that we saw that day, due to the horrible weather!

Pictures here.

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[Last one is a panorama]

Lenzerheide Magic Forest

One of most memorable events/places we visited this Christmas, was the Lenzerheide Magic Forest. We spent a few hours looking around the tiny town of Lenzerheide which was covered with snow, and then spent about an hour in the church as the snow was absolutely insane. Then we headed to the forest for the light shows and the market. The light shows were absolutely marvellous, and the market was quite authentic and beautiful. I’m actually looking forward to going there again next year!

Pictures here.

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Montreux Noël Medieval Market!

Last year I found out about this a tad too late, this year I managed to finally pay a visit to the Medieval Market in Montreux, at the Chillon castle. The market itself wasn’t much, it was just stalls here and there spread inside the castle. But the staff were dressed like elves, and the castle was beautiful.

Afterwards we walked from Chillon to Montreux, around lake Geneva…. this was simply lovely. After arriving to Montreux, we also paid a visit to the huge Christmas market in the centre of the city. Huge, and covered with chocolate and gingerbread for the most part. 😉

Pictures here.

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Last week we went to Basel to visit the two huge Christmas Markets. As usual though, we went early in the day to do some exploring first. We walked over the border to Saint-Louis [France], then to Huningue [France], then we crossed that amazing bridge in between the 3 countries and walked into Weil am Rhein [Germany]. Then we finally walked back to Basel and visited the markets!

As for the markets, they were amazing! These were probably the biggest, prettiest and highest quality [in terms of actual shopping items] Christmas markets I’ve ever seen anywhere! I even managed to find myself “Francesco Rubinato” glass pen… which was a real surprise! [More about that later…]

So… pictures are here.

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Ensiedeln & The Christmas Market

Einsiedeln is a truly lovely little town about an hour away from Zurich, and around Christmas each year they have a rather sizely Market which attracts tourists from just about everywhere. I had never been to the town itself, so the usual suspects and I decided that we could spend a day in the town itself, and then visit the market in the evening’s dark.

The town as I said is just beautiful, and of course tiny. And so we ended up walking to the nearby town of Birchli, and then to the lake Sihlsee. I really enjoyed the heavily snow-covered scenery and the lake was just dreamy! Of course we also went inside the well known Ensiedeln monastery which was quite amazing.

The market was also very pretty, and very big. Not really the best place for gift-shopping, but more for eating. 😉 But I think maybe the local band should choose a different selection of songs to perform for the next year. A little less funeral-ish, maybe!

The album is here.

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[And a panorama of the lake]

Üetliberg

And, I’ve uploaded the pictures from our trip to Üetliberg couple of weeks ago. It was a heavily foggy day and not much could be seen, but at least the group photo turned out well. =)

Album here.

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A Day In Geneva

Another short trip we recently took, was a one day trip to Geneva. One day is definitely not enough to explore Geneva, and as usual we have to go back. But we did manage to see a good deal. Pictures are finally uploaded and can be found here.

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[This one’s a panorama, click to see the full resolution.]

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Hey, I'm Aasemoon, and this is my blog which has been around since 1998. Childhood toy project that ended up growing up with me. You can reach me here: aasemoon.blue

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