Life in Switzerland can be quite expensive, so it is important to know where to find good offers.
On DeinDeal.ch there are regular offers for all kinds of services, as well as just shopping sales.
For example:
You love acting. You want to be on television. Maybe you want to be a movie star. But how do you get there? Where do you start? Who can help you? That’s where we come in.
The Celebrity Experience is an interactive talent extravaganza for emerging young actors. It offers an exclusive perspective into the entertainment industry by bringing young performers to Universal Studios in Hollywood, California to meet casting directors, talent managers, and agents.
Our 5-day talent event, hopeful stars will:
At Celebrity Experience, we care about your success and present you the keys to unlocking it. You bring the talent; we’ll give you the experience and the connections to become an industry insider.
I thought I’d been invited as a travel writer to attend an orientation lecture for new employees learning to be guides at the Pro Natura centre.
I was told this would provide information for my article about the local flora, fauna and giant 23-kilometre Aletsch Glacier (called the greatest glacier of the Alps, capable of providing one litre of water a day to everybody on earth for six years).
But after leaving nearby Bettmeralp, a tiny village accessible only by aerial tramway, I discovered the so-called lecture was a day of field orientation — which, if offered as part of a tour, might have been described as follows:
A full-day hike: 8 a.m., return at 5 p.m. For experienced and fit hikers. Occasionally challenging terrain: small and large boulders, slippery roots, narrow and sometimes no trail, some steep sections, including time on a very uneven glacier. Pace will be set by a group of 20-yearolds. Weather forecast: sun, rain, wind, hail, snow, requiring all your protective clothing and appropriate footwear. Bring sunscreen, food and water.
There was no turning back — even though I had only rubber boots.
Taking more than occasional stops, I could enjoy the tiny white, purple and orange alpine flowers, catch a glimpse of a herd of deer or a solitary goatlike chamois, or listen to the call of a cuckoo.
On to the glacier we went, and on went the crampons to give me the traction I needed to climb precipitous slopes and avoid deep icy-blue crevasses: “Don’t think, just walk,” advised one of the mountain guides, specialists in glacier exploration who had been engaged to provide in-depth information to the Pro Natura newbies.
We met unexpected wildlife, like the glacier flea, which populates pools of water, but avoids humans because we are too warm.
We learned what happens when three glaciers merge into one. The lateral moraines — matching ridges on either side of the glacier of rock, soil and sediment which have been picked up by the ice flow — join and form medial moraines. These appear as dark lines running down the centre along the length of the glacier.
Instructor Gregor Wittwer poured custard into a slightly sloping board cut to represent the three glacial flows, then added chocolate sprinkles to represent the lateral moraines so we could see how the medial moraine forms. Afterward, he gave everybody spoons to provide a sweet finish to the lesson. British Columbia is blessed with spectacular and rugged mountain scenery, too. But it’s the Swiss alpine traditions going back hundreds of years which provide so many memorable experiences. Most people have heard ofSwitzerland’s popular tourist attractions like Zermatt, the Matterhorn, St. Moritz and the major cities like Zurich, Geneva and Lucerne.
But very few outside Europe know about Bettmeralp (permanent population 520, growing to 3,000 in summer and 6,000 around Christmas), a village with almost no cars, accessible only by aerial tramway from the Rhone valley and 1,950 metres above sea level.
The main street runs the few hundred metres from the upper terminal of the tramway into the village. The mountains tower above the village and across the valley climb equally steep. Indeed, picture postcard perfect is the only way to describe the “sunburned” (as one local put it) chalets that cluster in the villages or cling to impossibly steep mountain slopes, their wooden exteriors having weathered into a dark, almost black brown, with flowers adorning their windows and balconies in the spring and summer, and deep snow covering their roofs in winter.
With narrow-gauge mountain trains that always run on time, cows with multi-toned bells, cheeses and chocolates and surprisingly good wines — and reaching to the sky, snow-covered mountain peaks with hiking trails on their lower slopes that attract people of all ages — Switzerland has it all.
It’s common to be out on a rugged hike and just when you are starting to feel hungry, you round a bend and find a chalet restaurant in the middle of nowhere, with a perfect coffeeand-cake combo or full lunch menu.
“Most of our visitors come from Switzerland, Germany and Holland,” said Simon Weiler, sales manager for Aletsch Arena, the southwestern portion of the country that includes the Jungfrau-Aletsch UNESCO World Heritage Site. And indeed, during my five-day stay I didn’t meet any native English speakers, although other visitors and the locals could speak English.
Still, it’s worth making the effort to say at least a few greeting words in the local lingo, which is an interesting mix of Switzerland’s four official languages (German, French, Italian, Romansh) plus Swiss-German and in this area, the Valais canton dialect.
So the German guten abend (good evening) greeting, which seems to be used from mid-afternoon on, becomes naben. And goodbye is mostly the Italian ciao.
Especially in a small place like Bettmeralp, you can expect people entering a restaurant to say hello to the diners already there. You don’t necessarily have to greet everybody you meet. But most people do, particularly if you are out on a hike.
And you never know what you will encounter when you set out. For example, on a less strenuous day than my glacier experience, I rode two aerial tramways to the Eggishorn lookout at 2,926 metres where, as luck would have it, 14 alphorn players from all over Switzerland and their conductor had gathered to rehearse. They even finished off with an informal yodel. It doesn’t get any more Swiss than that.
Photograph by Woods Wheatcroft, Aurora Photos
Lake Walen—ringed by the Swiss Alps, with some cliffs rising more than 3,000 feet above the lake—is one of the largest lakes in Switzerland. Walensee, as the lake is called in its home country, links two cantons, St. Gallen and Glarus, while the mountains around it attract hikers and winter sports enthusiasts.
Swiss resident companies and individuals applied for more patents than those in the UK in 2015. The European patent office’s recently released annual report, shows there were 7,088 Swiss-based european patent applications compared to the UK’s 5,037. On the face of it these numbers are not too far apart. On a per capita basis there is a more than tenfold difference. Switzerland filed 873 european patents per million residents. The UK filed 79. In addition, Switzerland is well ahead of its neighbours: Germany (307), France (162), and Italy (64).
The US was number one with 42,692 european patent applications in 2015, but with a population of 321 million its rate per million inhabitants was only 133, far behind Switzerland’s 873.
How does Switzerland manage to invent at a rate more than double the Netherlands, the nation in second place with 419 patent applications per million residents, and more than 6 times the rate of the US?
A paper published by Ernest Miguelez and Carsten Fink at Geneva-based WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) in 2013 offers clues.
Switzerland was one of only three countries to have a significant net inflow of inventors between 2001 and 2010. Only the US, which attracted 194,609 foreign inventors, and Germany, which attracted 25,341, out-did Switzerland at pulling in innovators from other countries.
Unlike Germany, Switzerland also did a good job of retaining its own home-grown inventors. Germany exported 32,158, leaving it with a net brain drain of 6,817. Switzerland gained 20,412 and lost only 3,005 leaving it with a net inflow of 17,407.
The same report shows the biggest inventor migration paths. Between 2001 and 2010 Switzerland gained most inventors from Germany (8,198), France (2,747), the UK (1,555) and Italy (1,536) – together 14,036 or 69% of the inventors arriving.
Switzerland’s clusters of innovation and supportive business environment have succeeded in drawing significant talent from nearby countries.
It is clear from the report that the cross-border flow of talent rose hugely from the decade before. From 1991 to 2000 only 1,786 inventors arrived from Germany and 406 from France.
Europe combined, trails the US on attracting immigrant inventors. Around 10% of Europe’s patents were filed by immigrants compared to the US’s 18% from 2001 to 2010.
Switzerland on the other hand led the world, with immigrants behind more than 38% of it’s inventions over the same period.
The US is the world leader at attracting inventive talent from abroad. An inflow of 194,609 and a net outflow of only 11,131, left it with 183,478 more inventors that it would have had in a world with closed borders, over the period from 2001 to 2010. While Switzerland out does the US more than threefold on attracting foreign talent on a per capita basis, the US shows where Switzerland could do better.
The biggest losers of inventive talent are China (-53,610) and India (-40,097), and the biggest winner from these talent outflows is the US, which attracted 10,649 or 11% of them.
While Switzerland does well at drawing inventors from the OECD, it attracts few from these large pools of emerging market talent.
Another report, by the business school INSEAD and the Swiss human resource firm Adecco, says that “Foreigners have accounted for more than half of the net increase in the labour force of scientists and engineers in the United states since 1995.” adding that “Foreign talent are more likely to be entrepreneurs and innovators: they are twice as likely to start a business and they patent at double the native rate. Immigrants were behind one in four technology start-ups in the US between 1995 and 2005.”
Switzerland ranked near the top for patents related to measurement (2nd), organic fine chemistry (2nd), medical technology (3rd), and pharmaceuticals (3rd).
Measurement encompasses horology, devices for measuring position and displacement, clocks and watches, navigation systems, volume, liquid and sound measuring devices. Organic fine chemistry includes preparations for medical, dental and hygiene uses. For example, steroids, sugars, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and food ingredients. Medical technology covers medical instruments for diagnosis, treatment of diseases and surgery. For example, vaccination instruments, prostheses, surgical robots and pacemakers.
Areas where Switzerland saw the greatest increase in patent applications compared to 2014, were medical technology (+22%) and computer technology (+23%). Engines, pumps and turbines saw the biggest drop of -10%, while transport (-8%) and pharmaceuticals (-2%) also saw declines.
Who has said St. Gallen is boring?
Honky Tonk Festival is coming to St.Gallen again! Save the date in your calendars and busy agendas: Saturday, April 30, 2016!
On Saturday 30 April, the city of St. Gallen will be transformed into a single large concert venue. A total of 35 bands playing in 28 venues.
Tickets are now available on Ticketcorner
This year the music offered is very varied. From reggae, rock, blues, Irish folk and soul to indie, electro and pop.
A particularly talented musician, Nico Brina, who is now in the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest Boogie Woogie player, will also take part in the festival.
There will be two music bands à la Elvis Presley, Mister Twist care at Rock Story and Royal Flush in the restaurant Marketplace.
The American Country Celebrates Johnny Falstaff and Brazilian rhythms, makes the combo Valeria Eva and Banda Zoa unmistakable, and they will be performing in Stars and Stripes .
Also, a trip to the Linsebühl will be certainly worth it. The Accordionist Frédéric Daverio will be performing in the coffee house to the guest and the Latin jazz musicians of Blue Bolero will perform in Kafi Franz.
It looks like it is going to be an amazing day!
Einstein Bar is offering a platform for local and international artists to perform – whether new to discover or already known.
10 chf per guest
Uncoming events:
Would you like to enjoy and experience something similar to this?
Here you can find where is the closest one to you.
Tickets on: http://www.gambrinus.ch/all-event-list/five-on-fire-strings-attached/
The meeting of JAZZ and CLASSIC, a male quartet and a female quartet, enchanting melodies, moving arrangements and energetic improvisations.
On a day that celebrates the desire to prejudice the warm sound of stringed instruments by Daniel Gubelmann’s heart. The saxophonist and composer prescribes in his artistic work unconditionally essence of feeling, and he knows intuitively: There is life before this moment, and one thereafter. Since then enchanted and swinging his jazz quartet “FIVE ON FIRE”, with whom he already released his debut album “Struggle or Play” at the Montreux Jazz label, music lovers and lovers together with four fantastic string players.
“FIVE ON FIRE strings attached” is (Five), which create from dreams, experiences and thoughts overwhelming music for the five fingers of each hand. Gubelmann and his musical companion put the passion (on Fire) unconditionally the heart of its performance and with “strings attached” to enhance the diverse range of expression to vibrations, moods and timbres, thanks to which you can go along with her audience to new expeditions.
The International Buskers Festival “Aufgetischt» (Busker = Strassenkünstler) transforms St.Gallen every May for lively scene of contemporary street art. Numerous street artists from around the world show their high-profile shows during two days at various locations in and around the historic St.Gallen Abbey District. Various performances in the fields of music, comedy, dance, acrobatics, theatre and magic enchant young and old and make the event an eventful encounter festival for the whole family – with free access.
The purchase of Festival bracelets for CHF 10.- per person is considered voluntary “admission” and is a matter of honor. The revenue from the sale helps to cover much of the basic costs of the festival (advertising, catering, accommodation, technology, infrastructure, etc.).
Along with the festival bracelet you receive the program booklet with all the details about the performing artists, times and locations, as well as many other useful information.
Festival Bracelet & program booklet will be available from early April at various ticket outlets. Here we will inform you on.
lifeinstgallen 
