This weekend has been a little bit strange. Yesterday I spent the day reading the last couple of chapters of the most excellent spy novel entitled “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold”. This I did sitting on a bench next to a lake that had more to do with a swamp than anything else. Should you not have read this novel, read it! Today I found myself surrounded by eight or nine very well brought up, charming and gifted fifteen year old teenagers whose pictures I was asked to take.
I also once more discovered, to my complete and utter delight, that the Sony A-100 is still a camera to be reckoned with and, furthermore, takes very good pictures – even in jpeg mode – despite the fact many people will consider it a rather dated digital SLR. Thing is, folks, it sports the same sensor as the Nikon D200 and very good Minolta technology inside the camera body. Yes indeed, it might contain a DX format CCD sensor and the build quality also leaves a lot to be desired for, but it nevertheless features the least amount of back-panel buttons of all dSLRs, which is always a blessing to my mind, and it is quite simply a very well behaved and friendly camera that always tries to do exactly what you want it to do within normal parameters.
Today I was, however, also treated to a brief encounter with a divine Canon A-1. A seriously lovely piece of engineering and I do wish camera manufacturers would return to making solid cameras made of metal, instead of all these cost saving composite materials that feel as if they will fall apart, if they are knocked and banged about a little bit too harshly…
A few years ago I was looking after a pet bunny over the Easter period and the moment I took this picture I thought the conversation Mädi was having with the paper bag must have gone something like this: “I’m chocolate bunny number two. I love me and I love you.”
Tomorrow I am off to visit the Kunstmuseum Basel. It is one of the finest collections in Switzerland and probably the whole of Europe. For some bizarre reason they also have a small summer exhibition running that appears to feature something to do with Teddy Bears and women’s shoes. I have to admit, I am somewhat perplexed as to why anybody would want to see this sort of thing when there are truly sublime masterpieces to admire by such geniuses as Picasso, Chagall and also Lucas Cranach the Elder to mention but only a few of the many masters on display in Basel. In any case, if prints of cuddly bears and female footwear manage to temp all those people – who usually avoid art galleries like the plague – to also dare explore the really amazing stuff, then Teddy Bears and women’s shoes it shall be…
Having travelled, lived and worked in a fair few countries during my time here on planet earth, it is always quite interesting and instructive to peruse restaurant menus. In Greece I once encountered a menu item inviting me to feast on “Swine’s steak with beans great”, while on a visit to Spain my mind, though luckily not my tummy, was left boggling as to what “Pork with fresh garbage and sliced children with broccoli”, might reasonably have consisted of, prior to having got lost in translation.
Of course every country prides itself on having a certain national dish they like to identify themselves with. Rarely, though, does this pride extend to non-alcoholic drinks. Imagine Coca-Cola or Pepsi being advertised as uniquely American drinks on the menu of an American restaurant or standard issue tea being billed as something uniquely English. Well of course that’s hard to imagine, because nobody in their right mind, except the seriously Swiss among us, would ever think of marketing a drink along nationalistic lines. Soda water, just for the record, is not Swiss at all. If memory serves me well, it was actually invented in the late eighteenth century by a certain Englishman called Joseph Priestley. Then again, this might very well help explain why nobody outside of Switzerland has ever heard of all these Swiss soft drinks such as Sinalco, Elmer or, dare I say it, Rivella. Let’s face it, if not even global free trade can help Swiss soft drinks cross beyond their own national boundaries, then, perhaps the above menu excerpt is actually meant to serve as a sincere warning to unsuspecting tourists and not as a cunning nationalistic marketing ploy…
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