Swissness

Hi there! I've been putting off posting about some random things because I wanted to keep my super spectacular post about my recent news on top. But I have some things to comment on and can't figure out how to rearrange my posts on here. So I'll just put a link to my love story, in case you still want to check out how it all happened.

I feel I've occassionally strayed sometimes from discussing Switzerland, so I will do that today! Two things I have recently learned which I thought were awesome:

1) Switzerland has air rescue service throughout the country, something called REGA, which can dispatch a helicopter or air ambulance to come get you. Everywhere in the country, except the Valais region (which is the big mountainous valley area with awesome skiing and wine) can be reached within 15 minutes. AND they also cover the ENTIRE WORLD using jet aircraft if necessary to come rescue little Swissies stranded atop some mountains in Peru or Nepal. How much does it cost to get such insurance, you might ask? Like 1000 bucks a year? 500? No. 30 Swiss Francs if you are single or 70 Swiss Francs for a family. That's cheaper than going out to dinner in Switzerland! And it is completely private - not one cent from the government. If I had known about this before, I definitely would have joined for ski season. I honestly don't know how they figure out some of this cool stuff.

2) Geneva has recently been voted by Mercer the #2 place to live in the entire world!! That's right. So how lucky am I that I have been able to live here for almost 2 years? Number #1 is Zurich, which is nice but...they don't speak French and I can't imagine they have as much good wine and cheese as we do here in Geneva, because we're closer to France. So just my personal opinion...I know that normally they are also rated 2 of the most expensive cities in the entire world, but I have to say I have certainly not gone into any sort of debt living here (although if I did more shopping and eating out, I definitely could). The U.S. didn't even crack the top 25 - only Honolulu landed on there, at #28. Even the U.S.'s northern neighbor managed to sneak 2 cities, Toronto and Ottawa in there (clearly, the writer of the article was bought ooout). Obviously if Chicago was able to upgrade its public transport system and recycling programs to a grade above where they are now (D+ for transport, F for recycling), and the winter was 3 months shorter (4 instead of 7) and maybe they could make some big mountains nearby for skiing, it would be just as good as Geneva.

Did I mention the sun is setting at almost 10pm every night at the moment? So cool.

You can read an excerpt of the article here.