Happy Swiss National Day!

In 1291, the three cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden formed an alliance which eventually became the Swiss Confederation as it is today (26 cantons), so Switzerland is 721 today!

But just as I think the Beatles were really only formed in 1962 when Ringo Starr joined the others, one could say that it was only in 1815, with the addition of Valais, Neuchatel and Geneva, that Switzerland finally became Switzerland. That still makes it at least 150 years older than Singapore. Wow. It's also baffling to remember that 1815 was four years before Raffles set foot on our little fishing village of an island...

Here are some FUN FACTS about Switzerland! And a few extras thrown in. (I LOVE fun facts 8-))

1. The Swiss Flag is SQUARE.
It occurred to me last week that I'd never seen a Swiss flag in the regular flag dimensions of 3:2, so I googled it. Apparently, the 3:2 is only used on ships. Also, the only other square flag is that of the Vatican City. The Red Cross's flag is colour-inverted and derived from the Swiss flag because its founder was from Switzerland (Geneva!).

2. There are FOUR official languages: French, German, Italian and Romansh.
a) Swiss German, though, is very different from regular German German. From what I understand,, it's more of a spoken difference -- signs, written forms and mass media are in regular German, but they're read out loud and spoken in Swiss German, which can be unrecognisable to speakers of regular German. A bit like how Singlish is unintelligible to other users of the English Language, dun Choo think?

b) There is an invisible line that separates the French side of Switzerland from the German-speaking side. It is called the Rostigraben (rosti-ditch), thus named because rosti is German-Swiss food. It can be a little peculiar on trains sometimes, when between one stop and the next you notice that the ticket inspector suddenly greets everyone in a different language.

Linguistic map of Switzerland

3. The internet suffix (?) for Swiss websites is ".ch", and the currency, Swiss Francs, is abbreviated as "CHF". WHY, you ask? Neither Suisse, Schweiz, Svizzera, nor Svizra starts with "ch"!
Upon careful examination of the coins (or notes), you will notice that the "CH"stands for "Confoederatio Helvetica", apparently the Latin equivalent of "Swiss Confederation". My trusty Guidebook also suggests that this usage conveniently dodges the potentially prickly issues arising from multilingualism. How clever! Oh, and yes, the font Helvetica was created by a Swiss.

I'm going to stop here (for now) because I realise how wordynerdy this is. Some day I will post some of the sillier (but not entirely untrue) things I've heard, like, it is illegal to flush your toilet after 10pm.

As I'm typing this (in the afternoon), there are alphorns being played somewhere in Geneva, and there's a cow-fight (seriously) going on in Plainpalais as part of the Swiss National Day celebrations. Fireworks tonight!

celebratory flag on our rosti dinner

Happy Swiss National Day, everybody!

edit @10:51pm: Fireworks have been going on for more than an hour! If you don't think about how much tax money that is, it's actually pretty nice... From the vantage point of our balcony we can spot at least six fireworks sites around Geneva :) I'm playing NDP theme songs. They go well with fireworks!