Eat, Sleep, Breathe, Travel

Final ruling: no nude hiking in the Swiss Alps

Well, it’s official: if you’re planning to go hiking in the Swiss Alps, be sure to put some pants on. The country’s highest court has ruled to allow a ban on nude hiking.

I’ve actually written about this before in the blog. In recent years, more and more people in Switzerland have taken up the hobby of hiking without any clothes on, and the controversy has been growing.

A lot of it has centered around the legal case of one particular nudist hiker. He was fined about $100 after walking past a family on a picnic in the very conservative region of Appenzell. The man appealed, it went through months of legal action, and last week Switzerland’s highest court said the fine was valid. The court decided that hiking in the nude violated the country’s indecency laws.

Personally, I’m on the fence on this one. I generally like the idea of letting people do what they want. On the other hand, I can understand how the sight of a nudist hiker could ruin a family picnic.

By the way, if you’re taking a trip to Europe and you really feel the need to hike in the nude, you could try Germany. Not only is naked hiking legal in Germany, they’ve even created special trails for it.

Photo: redswept via Flickr (CC)

It's yodeling time in Switzerland

Starting today and through the weekend, there will be much yodeling going on in the heart of the Swiss Alps. The 28th annual Swiss Yodel Festival will be taking place in Interlaken.

The Swiss Yodel Festival expects to draw 200,000 visitors. They come to see about 10,000 yodelers, flag throwers and alphorn blowers competing to see who's the best.

I just looked up yodeling on Wikipedia. I learned some things I never knew. Technically speaking, yodeling is a way of singing where you rapidly and repeatedly change pitch from the vocal or chest register to the falsetto or head register. This makes the very fast high-low-high-low sound that we all know as yodeling.

It’s hard to say exactly when yodeling began, but it’s been around for a long, long time, and for us at least, it's always associated with the Alps. Quintessential Switzerland. Way back in Alpine history, yodeling developed as a means of communicating between mountaineers and neighboring Alpine villages. They’d yodel out from their mountaintop, and it would echo across the hills and valleys. It’s a nice image.

People still yodel. Jewel yodels. A girl on America’s Got Talent yodels. Sometimes even Jamie Foxx yodels.

You can yodel too. Go to Switzerland (EF College Break goes there), stand at the top of a mountain, and yodel. People have been doing it for millennia. Yes, many a yodel has echoed off those Alpine mountain peaks.

Photo: Alex Telford via Flickr (CC)

Switzerland's Alpine Beard Festival

This might not be blog-worthy, because I could barely find any information about it, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write about the Alpine Beard Festival in Switzerland. Especially because this will be the festival’s 25th anniversary.

The Alpine Beard Festival will take place this weekend as part of the popular Chur Festival. Chur is an old city of about 30,000 located in the Swiss Alps, about 75 miles from Zurich.

It’s surprisingly hard to find English-language information about the Alpine Beard Festival (though I did find these entertaining Flickr photos from Alpine Beard Festivals in years past). The best I could do was have Google translate the beard festival page for me, and the results are mostly nonsensical. On the bright side, the summary does end with the nicely succinct sentence: “Invited are all bearded.”

From what I can tell, about 60 men compete in the contest. The judges decide based on just a single category (unlike some other international beard contests), selecting the men with the most rugged and beautiful alpine beards. Participants come from many parts of Europe, and prizes are awarded to the best of the best beards (I think to the top ten).

As for the overall Chur Festival, it's a huge event that draws about 100,000 visitors every year. The festival features food stalls, musical performances, and of course, beards. And it is now on the list of things I have to experience before I die.

Photo: myswitzerland.com

The wide world of cheese

One of my favorite things to do when I'm abroad is to eat. And one of my favorite things to eat is cheese.

When I studied in Paris, brie and comte were staple snacks of mine. When I lived in the Czech Republic, I once ate fresh goat cheese no more than ten feet from the goats that made it. And when I visited Italy, the mozzarella on my pizza put all previous pizza cheese to shame.

I’m no cheese expert, so I found cheese.com, which is a great resource for all things cheese. You can learn more than you’d ever want to know about every cheese on earth. You can arrange cheeses by country, by name, by texture, and by milk. If you like cheese, you could get lost for days on this site.

Here are a few of the world’s most famous cheeses:

France – Brie. Brie is the most famous French cheese. It’s soft and best served room temperature. It smells fairly bad, but it tastes great.

Italy – Parmesan. I love parmesan cheese. It’s named after the region of Italy where it's produced, and it is one of the world’s most popular cheeses. I love it grated on pasta.

Greece – Feta. I have to be in the mood for feta, but when I am, I do like it. It’s crumbly.

Netherlands – Gouda. Smoked gouda is pretty good. It’s pretty creamy on the inside, with a hard brown rind that you can eat.

Switzerland – Gruyere. I love Swiss cheese. I put it on all my sandwiches, and I like it on its own too. Gruyere, named after a Swiss village, is one of the country’s most famous cheeses. It has very small holes.

I could go on forever, but you would be better served browsing cheese.com on your own. And, of course, you’d be even better served traveling to these countries and eating the cheeses in the lands where the cheeses were born.

Photo: chez loulou via Flickr (CC license)

Heliskiing in the Swiss Alps; yea or nay?

Pretty interesting story here about heliskiing in the Swiss Alps. Heliskiing is simply flying in a helicopter to a snowy summit so you can ski off-trail down the mountain on pure untouched snow. Helicopters can take skiers to peaks they could not get to by lift or cable car, and it's a lot quicker and easier than hiking up.

Heliskiing is big business in Switzerland, but many people and groups are quite opposed to it. People have concerns about heliskiing’s effect on the environment (helicopters consume fuel) as well as its effect on the peace and tranquility of the Alpine region (helicopters are loud).

The practice is already banned in France and Germany, and more and more people are pushing for a ban in Switzerland too. At the moment, about 15,000 heliskiing flights take place each year in Switzerland, but the country's environmental groups are all teaming up to fight for a ban. Those who support heliskiing argue that helicopters are simply a part of Swiss Alpine life, not just for skiers but for transporting supplies and for rescue efforts.

As for me, I can see both sides of the debate. I’m not a big skier, so I personally tend to side with the opposition (I like peace and quiet in my Alpine vistas). But I can understand the skiers' perspective as well. I mean, watch this video. I’m no avid skier, but even I can appreciate how awesome that must be.

Photo: Philip Larson via Flickr (CC license)