100 Jahre Zementi Siggenthal

Yesterday I pointed out a conveyor system to transport rocks to a nearby cement plant. Well, here it is -- a Holcim plant that is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. 

The plant is in Würenlingen, the town across the Aare from Villigen. In fact, the PSI is split across the Aare as well, with half of it in Villigen and the other half in Würenlingen. 

There's an open house at the plant next Saturday. I went to one of these a few years ago and had a lot of fun. If anyone reading this lives in the area and has children, or is simply enthralled by large mechanical objects, I recommend it to them.

The flyer is here:
<http://www.holcim.ch/fileadmin/templates/CH/doc/Events/SG100_PromoFlyerKleinOpt.pdf>

Embracing the fog II

The good thing is that it doesn't stay this way all day. 

That thing on posts in the back? That's a conveyor belt for rocks from a quarry to a cement plant. More on that tomorrow.

Embracing the fog

A not-so-nice aspect of Villigen is the fog that hangs around on fall and winter mornings. This year I'm going to try to capture the photographic possibilities and maybe that will make it less depressing.

The explanation of why this area is so plagued by fog appears to be our proximity to the confluence of the three rivers, the Limmat (from Zürich), the Reuss (from the Gotthard, via Lucerne) and the Aare (from Bern). They join together near Brugg and then flow as the Aare into the Rhine (from Graubünden) before entering Germany on its way to the North Sea in the Netherlands.

Upon merging near Brugg, the water flow reaches 555 m³ per second (it ain't no Mississippi!). The area is called The Wasserschloss. About 40% of the entire area of Switzerland drains here. In 1989 the people of our canton (Aargau) voted to preserve and support this floodplain which provides habitat for many creatures and plants. A bonus for us are the many nice park areas for all to enjoy.

Some of my older posts about this topic are filed under the label "wasserschloss schweiz".

PSI and the Aare

We hiked up to Besserstein recently and I got the chance to play with my new second-hand 40mm to 150mm (80mm to 300mm: 35mm equivalent) lens. I'm hardly an expert, and I'm finding that there's much I can learn with it.

One of the interesting things about Villigen is that it is home to the Paul Scherrer Institute, which is the largest Swiss research facility. The topics covered range from the applied such as fuel cells, and cancer therapy using proton beams, to the fundamental such as determining the proton radius. There are people doing ice core studies to measure atompheric pollution, probing unexpected behaviors in magnetic materials and developing new detectors and techniques to "see" closer, better, faster.

They offer tours of the facility (in German). The contact site is the psi forum.

Piles of wood

Ready for the winter months.

I just noticed how many typos I make in my posts. I'm so tempted to go back and fix them. Trouble is, the services that pick up the feeds show them as new posts, and I'm rather intolerant of people who keep editing their posts, so I need to just sit on my hands and try to ignore the errors.

Swiss Roots

At the main train station in Zürich there are often promotional giveaway events and recently these bags of chips were being handed out.

Terra Chips is an American company, and in the last few years they have started licensing production a few European countries, Switzerland being one of them. They appear to personalize some of the limited editions, for example, this one here is sold as "Swiss Roots".

I'm a fan of their apple chips, and these root vegetables are quite yummy as well. Sugar beets, beets, carrots and yellow carrots make up the mix. 

Men in funny pants

There are a couple of topics of interest here.

1. In Switzerland it is possible to buy hard-boiled eggs in the grocery stores year-round. They're called Piknik-Eier -- picnic eggs -- in the German-speaking parts.

I mention year-round, because in some countries, during Easter, such eggs are available for sale. I'm curious to know in which countries one can buy hard-boiled eggs all the time -- are you in such a country? Drop me a note if you are, or know such countries.

2. Now about the stickers on the eggs. These eggs are advertising the upcoming Schwingen festival which takes place once every three years. Schwingen is Swiss-style wrestling, which is also called Hoselupf, literally pants-raising. And that brings us to the funny pants in the title. The participants wear "wrestling pants", over their normal clothes, and it is the belt on these pants that have to be used to bring down the opponent.

Turns out that there are also Schwingen competitions held in the San Joaquin valley, in Ripon, California.

For technical details, visit the Wikipedia page:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwingen>

Tractor at the yield sign

This man in his tractor is waiting to turn onto Hauptstrasse (Main Street).

Cow grazing

Yes, we've got lots of grazing cow shots.

Nice mix of types, from the black-and-white to the mousey-brown.

Worthless

Once well used, now left out to decay.

Grazing cows

A few dairy cows grazing just outside Villigen.

Thirty seven hundred each

Each of these concrete counterweights weighs 3700 kilograms. Which is 8157 pounds for you non-metric folks.

This crane is set up over a walkway in the near by city of Baden, and I couldn't help feeling a little bit uneasy walking under it. If walking under ladders was considered bad luck back in the day, just imagine what this sort of potential calamity would merit.

Still life with a chair and a half

A study in greys and red.

AKA I'm running low on photos :-)

Hurricane lanterns

Expect the unexpected. On one of my walks home I walked by these two Chalwyn hurricane lanterns that had been set out, for what reason, I don't know.

I wonder how many of the people landing on this page even know what they are. Where I grew up, far away, frequent electricity outages made these items everyday tools. 

Backlight

Here's me playing around with backlit scenes.

Horse trailer and horse

Today when I walked by, there were two horses grazing next to the trailer. Here is one of them.

Horse trailer

Horse trailer among fruit trees.

Still life with wheel

Walk along Hauptstrasse, almost out of the village, and you'll see this tidy collection of twigs and things.

Kabelwerke Brugg

It's industrious Monday and we're at the Brugg Cable company in Brugg, the big little town near Villigen. They're located next to the train tracks near the station. They're a good size company, with a factory also in the US. Maybe there are more -- I'm going to have to look into it.

I recently found out that steel cables made by them are used in elevators in many tall buildings around the world, among them Burj Khalifa in Dubai and One World Trade Center in New York City! I find that very cool!

Crates

These are the crates that are used to carry the farm produce from the fields to the Schwarz processing center. I've written about Schwarz a few times before -- search in the archives if you're interested.

The style of this photo was inspired by Michael Wolf's photos of Hong Kong high-rise apartment buildings in his series "architecture of density".

Wild berries

Wild berries growing along the side of a street in Villigen. 

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zur Hirschen: Truth in advertising

Restaurant Hirschen has had several changes in chefs and management scheme, something like four times since we moved here about eight years ago. We really liked the first version in 2005, but didn't care much for the intermediate ones. Now, we like it again. A young local woman, Nadja Schuler, who trained as a chef has taken over with her sister and a couple of her friends and they do a good job. They've also made a lovely outdoor seating arrangement in front, unforunately they can't do much about the annoying motorcyclists without decent mufflers who zoom along Hauptstrasse.

I find the dishes a tad on the heavy side, so it's not a place we go to more than a couple of times a year. Not that we're not warned: check out the bugged-out eyes on the guy with the beer belly weighing himself. 

Hirschen's website can be accessed by clicking here. They still also have the couple of rooms for rent should you need a place to stay. 

Ms. Schuler has had some coverage in the gastronomy magazines (in German): 
Hotel und Gastro Union 2008
On when they ran "Utenberg" in Luzern
Best of Swiss Gastro 2013 (combination of an expert jury and regular diners)
Newspaper coverage of the Best of Swiss Gastro 2013 win
Saison 2013.  

Corn/Mais

I found the following statement on the agronomy department website at the Iowa State University in 'Origin, History and Uses of Corn'. Link here.

The word "corn" has many different meanings depending on what country you are in. Corn in the United States is also called maize or Indian corn. In some countries, corn means the leading crop grown in a certain district. Corn in England means wheat; in Scotland and Ireland, it refers to oats. Corn mentioned in the Bible probably refers to wheat or barley.

In German the word is Mais.

Transporting the bales

The electricity pylons stand guard as the bales of hay are loaded onto a tractor trailer for transport.

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Bales

These are the stalks of cereal plants that have had their grain removed. At least, that is my assumption.

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Fields of gold

Looking at Villigen as one drive in from Brugg. The little S-shaped "cloud" at the right is from Leibstadt, one of the handful of nuclear power plants in the vicinity.

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Making hay I

According to a few sources (books and people I've talked to), there are two cutting schedules that are generally followed around these parts. The more common one is twice a year: the first time in the middle of June, and the next time at the end of August. This year we had a very slow start with a cold, wet spring and the cutting pictured here took place during the first week of July.

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Cows in the corner

I don't know if you can even see the animals in the upper left corner. Perhaps you can make out some flecks of brown and white. For shots like these I do miss my old power-zoom point-and-shoot.

There are these bits of land around Villigen that are used to pasture animals during the summer months. I should try to find out more about how the system works.

Today's side topic is lab-grown meat. I quote from The Independent newspaper (link) in the UK, to describe how it came about:

... the culmination of years of work by Mark Post, a medical physiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. 

And about the points in favor of the stuff:

One assessment, published in 2011 by scientists from Oxford University, estimated that cultured meat uses far less energy than most other forms, apart from chicken, and some 45 per cent less energy than beef, the most environmentally destructive meat.

They also found that synthetic meat needs 99 per cent less land than livestock, between 82 and 96 per cent less water, and produces between 78 and 95 per cent less greenhouse gas. In terms of relative environmental damage, there was no contest. 

I think the greatest challenge will be to get people to eat it. But for the sake of the world, I hope something will change in the meat business.

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Wheat/Weizen

Common wheat (Triticum aestivum).

I walk by this field on my way to work, and like to monitor the progress of the crops.

In this post, I don't want to get into a discussion about things such as farm subsidies, especially when they've been a lot of reforms here. Maybe in later posts, when I've gathered more data on Swiss numbers. One thing is clear, Swiss farms are disappearing and in order to stay competitive, many are turning to the nische market of organic (Bio is what it's called here) goods.

According to data from 2010 (via swissinfo)
Total number of farms: 59'065
(back in 1990: 125'274)
Of those, number that are organic farms: 5'659
Number of people working in agriculture: 166'722
(4.3% of the population)
Value of goods and services produced by the Swiss agricultural sector: CHF 10.8 billion.

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Swiss National Day

The street lamps on the main street in Villigen have been decorated for Swiss National Day.

Back in 1291 (no, not a typo) "three Alpine cantons swore the oath of confederation" on August 1, and this is considered to be the birth of Switzerland. It was only in 1993 that the day was legally established as a paid holiday.

More information at: Swissworld

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