A quote from a BBC article, giving an amusing two paragraph synopsis of Switzerland:
Switzerland is what was left over when the Europeans formed their nation states. Italian, French and German ultra-conservatives escaped to the mountains, joined forces and then created 500 years of peace, the cuckoo clock and the gnomes of Zurich.
Today the Swiss feel a bit disorientated, because the country's business model - neutrality - is problematic. Totally surrounded by the EU, they "have no-one to be neutral against".
In more news, today I found out for the first time (being naïve and ill-informed) that Malaysia has a king! Or at least that’s what the paper here said – apparently this is an elected head of state, in a constitutional monarchy. Learn something every day!
Perhaps because I’m American, the whole concept of kings and royalty is somewhat bizarre but also fascinating – in the same way that a fuzzy yellow bobble-head daschund in a roadhouse trinket shop in South Carolina might be fascinating, I’m there, it’s there, there’s nothing else to do… Anyway, speaking of kings, anybody who wants to read the ramblings of the King Father of Cambodia can go to this site which never fails to amuse me.
Vietnam used to have royalty, now it has the guys with REAL motorcycles lording it over the rest of us…! The former prince of Vietnam died last weekend. He was born on Réunion – some of the royal family was ‘banished’ by the French colonial government to Réunion! I guess it would be a good place of banishment, some odd thousands of miles of ocean away from everything else, but it always seemed appealing to me. Mostly because it is really too small to show up on a globe but, since there isn’t anything else anywhere near it, it does show up.
Now that I’ve gotten all that important information out of my head, perhaps I can get some work done!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment