Nyon, Switzerland

Some 9km north of Coppet, NYON – a major town under the Romans which has mellowed into a laconic and attractive little port – is a perfect stopover on a leisurely tour of the lake. The town, on a flattish plain sandwiched between the Jura and the lake, is spread out among fields and lawns which reach down to the water, and is backed by acres of vineyards on the gentle slopes behind. There’s a château and an excellent Roman museum, and the nearby Château de Prangins houses the regional branch of the National Museum. Stop for a while and play some checkers. And if museums aren’t your thing, there’s the option of riding a mountain railway up to the little Jura resort of St Cergue.

Flickr set is here.

Prague, Part 3

I took a taxi to Prague Castle (Prazsky hrad) and found myself with ten million of my closest Japanese, German, Russian, and Spanish friends. It must seriously be annoying to be a local during the tourist months. Attempting to plow through the major historical monuments, I lept into the St. Vitus Cathedral (Chram svateho Vita) in the corner of the footprint of the castle. Security stopped me and asked to see my "ticket". I had apparently stepped into God's VIP section ticketless and would only be able to pass if I coughed up some koruna that would invariably go to help pay for one of the priests to get some monster rims on his Opel. I respectfully shrugged and stepped aside. I am sooo b-list.

It wasn't until later that day that I realized I knew someone in Prague. He was an old high school buddy that had come over from Prague as part of the Rotary Exchange Program. Even though being dumped in the middle of Wyoming in 1994 could be tantamount to Stalinist persecution, he made the best of it and even joined the swim team. We remember him as being the only kid with chest hair. I Googled him from the hotel and sent randomly-addressed emails to his domain, hoping to get the email naming convention right. I received a call two hours later and was catching up with him and his family over beers that afternoon.

We walked to Petrin Hill, a point overlooking the city near the Castle and had a pig knee lunch at Zhlato Tygra, a tiny bar where Vaclav Havel took Bill Clinton for a beer. I departed from my friends and found myself wandering the streets of Prague like a man on a mission.

Trying to take advantage of the last hours I had in Prague, I was a man consumed with trying to see all that I could in the span of 2 hours. I stopped to glance up Ginger's skirt at the dancing building, traversed across Charles Bridge a few hundred times, set up and then cancelled a massage, drank a Pilsner Urquell, made final scores for my hottie:ok-looker ratio (17:42), and found a last specimen of badly used English on t-shirts. I dumped 1160 koruna on the cab ride to the airport, found myself virtually alone in the terminal, jammed out with the bus driver to AC/DC, and cried to myself when I plopped down in my seat diagonally across from a screaming child.


Idea of the Day:

• Follow me GPS tours of cities. This is something that I think Garmin should cash in on. A big complaint of mine is that I don't like touring around a city with the other cattle. I have often skipped big monuments or crowds to find the out of the way places. There should be a website that allows users to plot GPS waypoints in a city and provide a short narrative of their trip. Other users would then be able to download the trips (including waypoints and narratives) and skip around a city instead of constantly referring to their Lonely Planet books and crumpled maps. You could also couple it with downloadable mp3s (like tour guides) that would give you a narrative on the historic value of where you are. If you mash it with a social networking site, you could meet other people whose trips you found enjoyable or meet those people in person in the cities you were visiting.

Gratuitous Copycating of the Day:

• Orbix.cz. Any guesses as to who this website is trying to copy?

Parkour: Drink your milk

If you haven't already heard about Parkour, you soon will. Although the sport originally started in France, it's growing in popularity mainly thanks to the viral videos on YouTube and other sites. One of the guys here in Geneva is a fanatic and it's pretty much a superior temporal sulcus, just-do-it kind of deal. The photo is of him. I'm pretty sure that if I were to do it, I would look like Johnny Knoxville from Jackass.

My buddy's parkour photos here.
More on parkour here and here.
Johnny Knoxville taking one for the team here.

Davis Cup 2006: Switzerland vs. Serbia

Went to the Davis Cup on Sunday and saw the Fed kick the crap out of the Serbs in straight sets. Also clocked my first serve at a consistent 150 kilometers per hour (93 mph). Now if I could only hit a consistent backhand. For reference, we saw some players hitting a consistent 210 kph (130 mph) first serve.

Davis Cup website.

Flickr set of the Fed up close are here.

Recipe of the Day

Nougat is a confectionery made with sugar or honey, roasted nuts (almonds, walnuts, pistachios or hazelnuts are common) and sometimes chopped, candied fruit. The consistency of nougat can range from chewy to hard depending on its composition. It's a pretty common site in the candy bar aisles of stores in Geneva and is addictive as all getout.

680g (1½lb) Sugar
340-450g (12-16oz) Pistachios and Almonds
340ml (12floz) Golden syrup
235ml (8floz) Water
60ml (2floz) Clear Honey
2 Egg Whites
1 tsp Vanilla Extract

• Put the sugar, syrup, honey and water into a saucepan and cook until a temperature of 127°C (260°F) is reached or a brittle ball will form in water.
• Beat the egg whites stiffly and pour the mixture slowly into them, beating constantly until the mixture grows stiff and waxy.
• Then add the vanilla and nuts.
• Mix well and pour into a small box or pan lined with waxed paper.
• When it has cooled sufficiently, cut in squares or slices.

Random Ramblings

Great post on Prodicus about why Switzerland is so nuts. Hilarious.

Prague, Part 2

Remnants of "socialism with a human face" still exist everywhere in Prague - sort of like those "Believe" stickers in Baltimore, except the Prague version would be more akin to "Please don't be so sad". Untouched for the most part by war, the influence of Moscow on the city is clear: spires and domes, heroic Lenin-like statues striking poses, and those fuzzy souvenir KGB hats (imported from China, amusingly). One can only wonder what Praha would look like if Patton had liberated Prague instead of the Red Army. Wandering through the downtown maze of passageways is like walking through your high school during summertime: clean, quiet and echo-y, you can almost hear the chattering voices of ghosts still wandering the buffed-floor halls. It reminded me a lot of the Chicago underground (literal) shopping culture.

I crossed one of the major bridges across the Vltava river and traipsed through Nove Mesto, Stare Mesto, and down the Vaclavske namesti, or the equivalent of the Champs-Elysées for Prague. The goofy souvenir shop : nice shop ratio climbs to astronomical levels as one gets closer to this, the major shopping district of the city. The street was jammed with tourists and I spent the first few minutes becoming accustomed and claustrophic with 5000 of my closest friends as we all jockeyed for the best picture position.

I impulsively walked the streets of Prague past sunset, into the night, and found myself on a narrow street where the clear "ka-chink" of typewriter keys could be heard. I moved closer to the sound and found it was coming from the open window of a brightly-lit, second-story building: the police station. No Microsoft Vista upgrade problems for these guys! I turned the corner and literally ran into three teenagers smoking a small bong and eating FRIED McDonalds pies (they apparently still fry them here). I laughed out loud and drew very paranoid looks from the kids who scattered like cockroaches when the lights come on.

Hungry and tired, I wandered into a small restaurant that had a tiny door and loud jazz emanating from its cavernous depths. I stumbled past the bar and sat down at a tiny, 10-table venue called Red, Hot, and Blues - not anything like it's American counterpart, it is a hangout for struggling artists trying to get enough gigs that will pay for their dinner. A band called Fency was belting out versions of rockabilly and jazz classics in broken English, all while trying to pick up on a table of British tourist girls in the front. I inhaled my pork tenderloin, potatoes, and Stella Artois, listened to a few more songs, then made my way out into the light rain that started to come down. On the way back across the bridge to my hotel, I stumbled across an outdoor film festival that was playing a Bollywood film at ridiculous audio levels. I jammed out for a few minutes, then took my tired ass home.

A few recommendations to the Prague Tourist Council:

1. Get better cabaret promoters. Walking past one of the random cabarets at the end of the Vaclavske namesti near St. Wenceslas square, a promoter said "Come on in. It's sort of a nice place." Wow. Remind me never to get a marketing guy from Prague. In a city where operas and symphony orchestra concerts are promoted as aggressively as cabarets, it's important that you send the right message to win market share!
   
2. Sell out, but don't do it with KFC! Freaking KFCs everywhere! I never thought I would see Czechs swallowing the greasy-ass (but oh so delicious) chicken skins off of a Colonel Sander's breast.
   
3. Only you can prevent horrible t-shirts. I believe that Prague may be single-handedly responsible for the proliferation of tshirts with bad english. Most involve the f*ck word or funny (and nonsensical) uses of English. Where's the industry that sells random Czech slogans to Americans? Why isn't this industry bigger?
   
4. Get better casinos. I walked into a casino and amazed at how it sucked. Our casino nights during rush week at Pi Kappa Alpha were better. The sullen tourists dumped money onto the 3 roulette tables, 4 slot machines, and 2 poker tables. When I wandered through, there must have been around 6 people in the entire place. Sad, sad, sad.
   
5. Cities with a history of espionage are cool. If DC can put together an okay-version of the Spy Museum, I'm sure Prague could do better - especially since it's REALLY a hub for espionage.
   

Ideas of the Day:

• T-shirt shop for Czechs (or other nationalities) to create random t-shirts and sell them to willing Americans who like to see random foreign words on their shirts. Cafepress - time to start mirroring in .cz!
• Ipod-based currency exchanger. Trying to figure out dollar prices from koruna is a bitch. Hey Apple, give us an "Extra" on the Ipod where you can set the exchange rate, thumbroll up to a price, and see the relative value.
  

Flickr set is here.

Uh, that's user error.

$15,000 for one night in a one-star Zurich hotel? What a friggin bargain!

Ninjazz

Waking up late this past Tuesday, I sensed a great disturbance in the force. Picking up a local paper on the way to work, I saw what was creating the rift in time and space. Steven Seagal has a band. Yes, THAT Steven Seagal.

Now, I may have been in Switzerland for close to eight months, but who the hell knew that Steven Seagal had a freaking band? And on top of that, was TOURING? It appears that Steven Seagal and Thunderbox are on a European tour right now. They hit Paris and Geneva earlier this month and are well on their way to promoting their version of bluesy jazz with a flying monkey fist beat across England and Ireland. If it is any indication of how successful the Seagal brand can be, the Steven Seagal energy drink Lightning Bolt seems to be gaining market share among 12-16 year old kids who still think Erika Eleniak is still hot and have that scene from Under Siege on loop.

Prague, Part 1

A last minute flight deal and an acute onset of guilt that I hadn't been taking advantage of my time abroad prompted me to jump on a flight to Prague last Friday.

I was welcomed onto the plane by a screaming, undermedicated child. I have beliefs that the Swiss are undermedicated in general, but I will get into that later. The mother, who suffered from jaw-dropping stunning Czech features, wore an el-gigantor diamond ring which she wielded like a weapon and was able to successfully defuse the anger of the plane with her flirty smile on multiple occasions. I was notified by her child's 130db scream that we had begun our final descent.

Fantastic weather and a 1 dollar:22 koruna exchange rate greeted me. I piled into a cab that was blaring Red Red Wine and observed a landscape that looked much like Montana. Set on a plateau northwest of the city, you can actually see the curvature of the earth from the airport. Nervous that my cabbie was taking one too many random turns, I checked the signal strength on my cell phone. Images of my limp, lifeless body dumped in the middle of a Prague alley -- still on hold with the police -- flashed through my mind.

I was dumped at the Best Western Premier Kinsky Gardens hotel 600 koruna lighter. I unpacked and headed out the door, not realizing that I wouldn't return for another 6 hours.

Apparently, French women DO get fat

According to a new report, nearly 42% of the French population older than 15 years has a weight problem. Almost a third are overweight and 12.4% are obese. Extra-large clothes comprised 22% of French women's clothing sales at the beginning of this year compared with 18% in 2004.

The percentage of women buying bigger C-cup bras rose 7% to 56% between 2000 and 2005. In a related story, Larry Flynt announces the launch of a new French magazine entitled "La Badonkadonk".

Yahoo article here.

Guess where I went this weekend

Cinema au Lac

Back in August, a few friends and I watched "An Inconvenient Truth" on an outdoor movie screen against the backdrop of the sunset on Lake Geneva. It's a rocking setting - even better than Screen on the Green in DC (imho) but maybe comprable to Red Rocks in Colorado.

The movie "theater" was open-air and had a tilting pneumatic-driven movie screen that came complete with its own dramatic music as it tilted. It is built explicitly for the summer (taken down in the late summer) and looks so much more appealing than the existing movie theaters in Geneva.

We drank overpriced beer, ate a complimentary ice cream, watched the sunset (and consequently got quite cold), and felt really guilty about having ever driven a car (thanks Al). Some suggestions to Orange Cinema to make this a more entertaining event:

• Unless they're being served by midgets, midget beer isn't all that funny. Tiny .5 liter cans of Heineken are the sort of thing you expect to find in Spencers next to the sex dice and tequila lollipops.
• Even though the audience for the movie may be more "documentary-friendly" don't use the opportunity to foist a 1-hour amateur documentary on mentally-damaged (ahem, impaired) Swiss people and advertise it as a "trailer".
• Let the VIP seats go. If the jerks don't have the ability to get there when the show starts, they should deserve to be sitting in the front row or nosebleeds.
• Less talky-talk about the movie before you show the movie. It's nice that you can read printouts from Hollywood.com or the New York Times entertainment section, but we have no need - or desire - to listen to you ramble. Don't mistake the tolerance of the Swiss for an engaged audience. In fact, a majority of us in Geneva aren't even Swiss. Watch your back.
• Instead of ice cream, try better giveaways - like trial-period phone service or free phones. Hell, you're competing with Swisscom anyway - why not try and take some marketshare?
  

Link to Orange Cinema is here. Click on Al to be watch the South Park episode of ManBearPig.

Boys In the Hood - Eze / Nice Remix

Woke up quick at about noon
Just thought that
I had to be in Eze-sur-Mer soon
I gotta pack a trunk
Before the day begins
Before Calvin starts bitchin'
'bout original sin

About to go
And damn near went blind
Sun off the water in Eze
Throwin' up mad shine
We went in a bar
to take a sip
With my Casio
On the side of my hip

We walked up the city
And I shuttered my weapon
Just as I clicked,
The fools kept steppin'
We jumped in the bus
Bunch of Irish on our ride
They're front and back
Side to side

Turned up the Denon to hear
I was pumpin' new shit
By Natasha St. Pier
It was Chacun Pour Soi
At the top of the list
Then I played my own shit,
It went somethin' like this:

Promenade cruisin'
In my 6-fo'
Jockin' salopes,
Slappin' the hoe's
Train-ed it to the coast
To get the scoop
Tony Parker out there
Cold shootin' some hoop

A car pulls up,
Who can it be?
Bunch of French students
Rollin Kilo G
They roll down the window
And start to say
It's all about doggin'
That say-pay-ay (C.P.E)

Cuz the boys down in Eze
Are alwayz hard
Come talkin' like Swiss
And we'll pull your card
Knowin' nothin' in life
But the sun and cheese
Don't quote me boy,
Oh Frenchie, please...

Up in Eze
And we wanna get ill
So we hike a jardin
Where some homeboyz chill
The sun is out there
Tryin' to make us hotter
Pulled up to a bar
And drank up like squatters
Greeted with a canette and
I start drinkin'
From the pastis
My breath starts stinkin'
Gotta get some food
And start working those jaws
Before we left
I hit the nicoise

Pulled to the beach
Gotta get off of the pad
And the pebbles on my feet
Were makin' me mad
A rocky-ass beach
I couldn't believe
So I grabbed the stupid rock
and I gave it a heave

Started to rain,
Wouldn't you know?
We turned back like moles
And retreated below

We started to stand
And began to get out
We tipped like Americans
And knocked the waitress' ass out

Cuz the boys down in Eze
Are alwayz hard
Come talkin' like Swiss
And we'll pull your card
Knowin' nothin' in life
But the sun and cheese
Don't quote me boy,
Oh Frenchie, please...

For those that need more historical reference, listen to the Easy-E soundtrack here. Watch the Dynamite Hack version here (much better). To gain an appreciation of Compton 80's rap, click here.

All Your Base

Don't get it? Go here to get some edjamacation.

Roger Federer, Switzerland's Favorite Son

Out of control. Federer working his baby Jesus magic - without the Mike Honcho buttcheek spreading Magic Man magic. Fast forward to 1:22 or so to ridiculous baseline shot.

Flickr Geotagging and MS PhotoSynth

Flickr has just added geotagging to their site. I have to tell you - it's hella fun. Check out some of my photos (and all of the other Flickr community's) here.

I'm waiting for Flickr and Microsoft to team up to use PhotoSynth and Flickr geotagging to create a virtual tourism based on pictures other people have created.

Moved, Again!

Yes. I have once again moved. Which makes this the 3rd apartment I have lived in Geneva in the past 6 months. The trend, however, is generally improving. I have a 5 minute commute to work (walking), can walk to the grocery store, park (across the street), and boulangerie. Living on the top floor of a Swiss house - it's like living in the country in the middle of Geneva.

Big pimpin' at chemin du Pré-Cartelier.

Deathmatch: Verizon Wireless vs. Swisscom

How expensive is it to own a cellphone (mobile to UK readers and handy to you Germans) in Switzerland? Our investigative team aims to find out. We will pit American provider Verizon Wireless against Swiss competitor Swisscom. Both are powerhouse telecom fixtures in their respective countries, owning fixed lines as well as telecomm services. Let's see how they fare head-to-head. So let's get it on!

Assumptions:

• Our callers will place 500 minutes worth of calls a month over the course of 100 individual calls
• We will evaluate the most cost efficient subscription, as of September 1, 2006
• Zip codes selected for evaluation will be 20006 in Washington D.C. and Geneva, Switzerland.
• 50% of calls during night and weekends, 50% during daytime
• No roaming calls
• Costs will be estimated over 1 year (12 months)

Verizon Wireless:

• 450 anytime minutes = $39.99 USD
• Activation fee = $35.00 USD
• Additional minutes are .45 = (50% of 50 minutes) = $11.25 USD
• SIM card included
• Total 1-year TCO: $526.13 USD

Swisscom:

• NATEL Liberty monthly subscription = 25.00 CHF
• SIM card (initial) = 40.00 CHF
• .50 CHF /call up to a max. of 60 minutes; then CHF 0.50 for each further 60 minutes (7x24h)hour = 50 CHF (100 calls x .50 CHF)
• Total 1-year TCO: 940 CHF = $764 USD

Verdict:

Verizon. Apparently, Swisscom's profit model depends on people making short calls of less than 60 minutes. Unless you're a 14-year old girl in a new relationship with the dreamy guy at the front of the class, who is talking hours at a time? Especially if your'e Swiss?

Nice, France - TripAdvisor Remix

Hotel Mercure
Nice, France

"...I really didn't expect our hotel to be like a disco on the outside and a pimpa's paradise on the inside! It's like George Clinton and the P Funk All Stars are in town all the time!"

Cours Saleya Market
Nice, France

"...It's like a medieval version of super Wal Mart, complete with the fish department, produce, and arts and crafts. But with hookers."


Pebble Beach
Nice, France

"...Rocks on the beach? WTF? Someone said "let's go swimming" and I look like the last guy picked for the Competitive Indian Firewalking Team getting there."

The Chateau
Nice, France

"...Something is wrong with this name, but I can't quite figure it out. Ah, how about it's not a f'ing chateau?"

World Cup 2006 Celebrations
Nice, France

"...Worst party ever."

Boobs on the Beach
Nice, France

"...The world must look like a $10.99 Chinese buffet to babies in Nice."

Flickr set is here.