Switzerland

Merçi au francofous qui sont venu. On s’est bien amuser ce weekend. Voila ce que font les seesmiceurs quand ils s’y mettent :-)

I’m sitting on the balcony with a view of the Lac Leman (lake geneva) after a good evening spent with many of the Francofous, French seesmicers. More videos will appear over the length of the day.

Today I played with the Iphone 3g and was left indifferent. That’s because aside from having the same design as both the ipod touch and the 1st generation iphones it doesn’t offer anything innovative. What really interests me is the idea of more data. Last month i did quite a bit of data streaming. 100 megabytes inclusive of my current setup. I also used quite a bit of extra data. With the Iphone 3g Plan I’d get 1 gigabyte of data per month, ten times more at relatively little extra. When I can get the Natel Liberty Grande paired with the Nokia N95 then I’ll be happy. Until then I’ll feel that they could do better.

Everyone’s always sitting in an office or at least in cities. I’m breaking away from that to stream the countryside. Remind people that it also exists.

It’s a sunday night in Switzerland and I’m with some friends. Spain were playing Germany and won 1-0, a respectable score. I was there with the phone streaming the celebrations at the Geneva Fanzone in Plainpalais. Here are the clips Ten seconds from the end. Spanish Fans celebrate. Drumming atmosphere. Happy girls dancing and the crowd. Dancing Spanish Flag wearing people. Because Women aren’t forgotten after all. Girls dancing, boy texting, more dancing More dancing Still celebrating Leaving the Fanzone

Streaming video from mopile devices is the future and I burned through 90 megabytes of data in just two nights of music festival. As a result of this the third night required a different approach. I used Flixwagon. Flixwagon is in the same family as Qik and Bambuser but with many additional features. You can select the category of content, add a title and keywords to the stream before recording. The advantage of this service in contrast to the two other examples is that this one buffers the data stream in such a way that if you lose the connection you can still continue streaming once you find the data stream. In this particular situation I added the concert access point and went to film a number of concerts like Mademosielle K and Maroon 5. In both these cases I recorded the concert and during the break from one to the other I could let the software automatically push the content to the server.As a result I saved 2CHF per megabyte and uploaded about thirty megabytes within a short amount of time. Arrivals to the Caribana As people arrive ONEFM presenters Waiting for Mademoiselle K Mademoiselle K, first two songs Two more songs

According to a Le Matin article the Iphone will come to switzerland. It’s the 3g version of course so for those that have been patient this should be a fun time. I see no mention of cheaper dataplans as of yet but it’s an interesting time for those creating mobile video content. It’s also a new version of mobile web browsing.

The problem with living in two countries is that the climate between the two homes may be very different. Whilst the weather in Switzerland is warm and sunny in England it’s cold and dreary. It’s gray. I was hoping that the weather in Switzerland would break the day I flew back to London so that the transition would not feel as bad but it backfired. What I had wanted is a cooler rainy day that would be enough to make me indifferent to the trip. This backfired as severe storms delayed quite a few of the flights. As a result of these two or three flights were delayed and waiting in the terminal and everyone was sitting where they could. I found a comfortable place against a wall. At first, I saw that 6 out of 12 flights were delayed due to météo/weather and then 5 of 12. Finally, my flight was delayed by 40 minutes which is not that bad when you’re as used to travel as I am. It’s amusing to watch people as they wait to travel. Young children are tired, falling asleep whilst others are complaining about the delay. Yet more got up and stood for over fourty minutes queuing for a plane that had not even arrived in the gate yet. I was living in luxury though. Two mobile phones, a charged iPhone, and my MacBook pro with over 4hrs of battery life. I twittered jokingly that it’s a 40-minute delay with four hours of entertainment. It was an opportunity to work on the showreel. One of the beauties of the machine I use is the battery life. I’ve been doing some testing whilst at home and I’m quite happy with the results. I’ll go into more detail in another section of the website. Having the level of familiarity I have with Geneva airport I’m more observant, knowing the procedures from months spent there. As I felt that people could start boarding I got up and was by the second cashier. Whilst everyone queued at one deck I saw the second one so of course, I took advantage of this, being the first one to go through although I had been one of the people who had not been standing anxiously. That’s an advantage of frequent flying. Aboard the plane, I started to wonder something. Is it worse to be stuck with children who can talk or babies that cry? I think that talking children are worse. Some of them are not very articulate and others play with words and songs. It wasn’t that bad luckily. Stewardesses are amusing because sometimes you see them get anxious. One of them saw some gormless passengers blocking the aisle and sounded stressed as she asked them to move in so that others could board the plane due to the short flight slot the aircraft had been allocated. In the end, we took off without much delay and the rest of the flight went well. Had to take the Stansted express to seven sisters and from there caught a bus to get home due to the tube lines closing, no problem though. Now it’s back to London life and getting on with my career.

If you’re looking for an interesting food experience then you should drop by Laguna, a tropical restaurant a few minutes out of Geneva. There’s a meal there that’s really good called la plancha. The concept is simple. Food is laid out buffet style so you chose the ingredients you want and chose from onions, lettuce, coriander before selecting the types of meat. The meat on offer when I went to was lamb, beef, horse, pork, and chicken. Once you’ve filled your plate with all the ingredients you go over to a large metallic platter where the chef will prepare the food you’ve selected as you wait. Once it’s ready you go back to your table and enjoy the meal. You can repeat this process as often as you like. The clientele is also interesting, being a mix between parents and young children, couples, and more. It’s in a relaxed atmosphere where you hear the birds tweeting and nature rather than urban sounds. You’re also surrounded by furniture from tropical locations. The food is good, the atmosphere is good and the type of people make this a nice evening place where to get a nice meal. I’ll be thinking of going there more than once.

There is such a large contrast between life in London and the village where I grew up in Switzerland. In one place you can walk for kilometers before getting to the shops whilst in the other going down the street is enough. In one place there is a 24hr a day life going on outside your window and in the other you hear children playing and you hear the birds tweeting whilst water flows in a river next door. It’s amusing to sit in a house in Switzerland rather than a flat in London because of how much space there is. The entrance hall is as big as London bedrooms. The kitchen is as wide as the house I’m living in in London. There are basements in Switzerland whereas in London those are rare. You find that the people wake up far earlier in switzerland and are so tired by the evening that they loose the motivation to go out. In London you can start the day at 9 or 10am and leave later. By 10pm you should be quiet in Switzerland whilst in London noise starts at 1am and sleep is not attainable till about 3am but this depends on what you’ve been doing before attempting to sleep. You’d pay 14CHF to go back and forth to Geneva whilst in London you’d pay around that price and have access to over a hundred stations for at least one day. That’s quite a contrast. There aren’t as many people. In Switzerland minorities are small enough not to be noticed whilst in London they’re large enough to take large swashes of London over. Go around North West london and you’ll understand what I mean. I can walk from one country to another from where I’m sitting. If it’s foggy I can go up several hundred meters and arrive above the cloud layer and see the Mt Blanc and blue sky. I can also go for an hour’s walk and walk through a few villages. In London I’d have to drop by a number of parks, three of which are conveniently on the tube line I live along. Food shopping is more fun in Switzerland because I’m brought up on this food rather than that found in England. It’s fun to get fresh pasta with meat in the tortelloni rather than vegetables for example. It’s nice to have arrabiata sauce. It’s nice to find European food, whether French, Italian or other. It’s nice to have international news, news that focuses around UN organisations since the TSR is in the same town as the broadcaster. Another thing that changes is driving. A few months ago two close friends of mine and I decided to meet at a drive in McDonald’s and we were all in different cars and this struck me as odd, as though we were in America. Driving is an integral part of life in Switzerland for those who live in the countryside rather than towns like Geneva. It means that we’re comfortable behind the wheel and think nothing of driving back and forth from Nyon to Geneva several times a day. It does get tiring and boring after a while, especially with four or five road radars trying to catch and fine you. We know where all the radars are but this does not take away the nuisance that they are.  When there’s a lot of traffic it doesn’t matter but if it’s 3am and you’ve been with friends the whole night all you want to do is open up the throttle and race down the motorway and get home to sleep. Instead you’re coasting at 120km/h. It’s frustrating. To add to this over the years I’ve learned that Genevans hardly ever leave the city. It’s always up to the rural people to make the effort and that’s often frustrated me. As a driver you need to put up with congestion, increased fuel costs and parking fees. It’s also time consuming. When there’s no traffic it takes 20 minutes to get to Geneva, when there’s traffic then the time doubles. Once you get to Geneva people will want to drink whilst you’re having ice teas. They’ll have glass after glass whilst you’re no longer on the same wavelength. After a while it gets extraordinarily tiring. That’s why my dislike of the city of Geneva grew worse and worse. Nyon is a small town set in a beautiful surrounding. You can cycle, you can sail, you can pedal on a pedalo, you can swim in a swimming pool with the Mt Blanc within sight and the CGN boats passing by. It’s a really nice town. It’s close and has good transport connections with Geneva. It’s got everything you’d expect to do in Geneva but without the hassle. I’ve hardly ever known Genevans to come to the town though. They think it’s too expensive and there’s nothing to do. That’s what I think of Geneva ;). That’s one reason I love London. Everyone has an oyster card and everyone moves around the city. If you meet with friends they travel some distance as well. They will catch the tube as will you to meet in one place or other. You have such a wide selection of things to do. Go to Covent Garden and you’ve got the street performers, go by the Tate Modern and you’ve got the guy with the birds, go by the Film theatre and you have the street painter doing famous painters. Find an arch on the Thames walk and classical artists are performing as a quartet, as operatic singers and more. Go to other parts of London and you’ve got a huge selection of international foods. It’s got so much to offer and once you get to know the city you can easily walk from one place to another. (just got a phone call… to be continued….)