I spent yesterday driving across Switzerland with my daughter and her friend – to deliver them to the Swiss Ballet Camp in Saignelégier, where they will be dancing their feet off for the next week. Saignelégier is in the Jura, the hilly area bordering France. It’s beautiful there – sparsely populated, famous for horses and agriculture and a great hiking location for those who don’t want to tackle the rigours of the Alps. Although only a little over two hours from where I live, this area feels so French, heck it even smells French!

The cultural differences are one of the most fascinating things about where I live – two hours south and you could be in Italy, two hours west and it’s France.  We live within spitting distance of both Germany and Austria. The borders are, oh an hour or so away, maybe less. It never ceases to amaze me that the Swiss hold all these cultural differences together in a political mish-mash, characterized by coalition politics where great effort is always made to balance regions and political affiliations as well as the sex of the 7 members of the government’s coalition cabinet. We have the most directly democratic system anywhere – the small size of the country making it beurocratically possible to decide pretty much everything by referenda. We do a heck of a lot of voting I can tell you! I guess the Swiss-French and Swiss-Italians aren’t always happy when things go the way of the Swiss-Germans who make up the largest group though!

We were dodging showers the whole afternoon, so I didn’t manage to make too many photos, but I thought you might like to take a peek at what it’s like there.

I wish I could have stayed a little longer, but you know how it is….

Helen

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2010 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Places. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.