Combining two business trips allowed me finally to visit a friend in Switzerland. Traveling trough valleys, looking up rocky and steep mountains like those in Tyrol (the only ones I know so far) always reminds me of the power of mother nature, of the fact that human being is only a supplemental part of this planet.
However, the region around Zürich where I spent a few days is unlike the valleys in Tyrol a wider one, as far as I can tell a nicer one. You find the lowlands around the lake of Zürich bounded by an impressive vista towards the alps. And what can be more worth of living like a city on a lakeside.
Unfortunately it was the whole weekend raining.
The swiss people are very closely connected to their local government. I don’t think they could assign even some public duties to a far away institution like the EU administration in Brussels.
But if they should panic and generally be afraid of the EU like some politicians want them to be is another question.
The next station on my short trip was a day in Innsbruck and I finally had the time to take a picture of the “Goldenes Dachl” (golden roof).
At the same time the Ice-hockey World Championship was taking place in Innsbruck. That’s why some weird dressed people were crossing your way those days in Innsbruck.
From Innsbruck I went to Munich to attend the german ESRI user conference. This was my first time at a ESRI user conference and I must say that it was more than useful. Unlike other conferences I attended in the past, which were not company driven, I found out a lot how to optimize my daily work with their software, especially the ArcGIS client, about functions, tricks, etc I never would have found nor used (because almost nobody knows them). An interesting detail is that there was no Open Source exhibiter, only the big commercial ones like Tele Atlas or other ESRI distributers. But I found a leaflet of AmeiN! (or on Sourceforge), an ArcGIS extension to ease the use of UMN Mapserver within ArcGIS. Quite interesting, have a look on it!
A thing I never would have expected to see in Munich are surfers.