by Diccon Bewes
But perhaps more important is knowing that a mixed salad is more mix than salad. It is certainly not some lettuce with tomatoes and cucumber, and possibly a slice of onion, thrown in. A Swiss mixed salad is four or five different salads arranged around a plate and covered in lettuce. Under the greenery you’ll typically find sweetcorn in a mild curry dressing, pickled beetroot (grated not sliced), white cabbage in vinaigrette, grated carrots, cucumber in a yoghurt sauce and some kidney beans. It’s like a mini-salad buffet on one plate.
As if that weren’t enough, the typical Swiss way of eating a mixed salad is also a lesson in cultural norms. They don’t mix and match the different mini-salads in one mouthful but take a little from each at a time. This doesn’t just apply to salads; so many Swiss people, when presented with a plate of food, eat in a very similar way. They do not take a morsel of meat on their fork, add a bit of potato and a piece of cabbage (or carrot or whatever) then eat it altogether. Instead, they tend to eat everything separately, having some potato, then some meat, then some broccoli. This is so that each can be appreciated in turn and not be lost in the mix. No matter that you might discover a new flavour sensation by combining the foods on your plate; better to stick with what you know.
Fondue and muesli are the two foods that people most immediately associate with Switzerland, but it’s chocolate that has become its iconic edible export. The fact that it’s not a big country and lacks many natural resources (other than water and cows) makes it all the more remarkable that Switzerland became a pre-eminent chocolate producer. Its position as the crossroads of Europe helped secure the raw materials, and Swiss inventiveness provided the tools to create brown magic. But perhaps the crucial part is that with chocolate, as with so much else, the Swiss have always aimed for quality over quantity. Is there such a thing as bad Swiss chocolate? I have yet to find some. My taste test shows that the cheapest own label can compete with posh brands, but to buy that you really do have to visit Switzerland. Unlike Toblerone and Lindor, you can’t get Prix Garantie chocolate in Tesco.
Ask a Swiss person about chocolate, or Schoggi in Swiss German, and they will say theirs is the best in the world. True, the Swiss say that about practically everything made in Switzerland, but perhaps with chocolate their unabashed pride in their own products is not misplaced. Swiss supermarkets are slowly joining the globalised world, so that now, unlike a few years ago, it’s possible to buy cranberry juice, fajitas, red curry paste or salt-and-vinegar crisps. Swiss consumers are slowly waking up to the world of food beyond their borders. But in the chocolate aisle Switzerland still reigns supreme, with row upon row of Swiss brands and hardly a foreign interloper to be seen. After all, who would buy it when there’s so much of the world’s best chocolate on offer?
SWISS WATCHING TIP NO 9: TABLE MANNERS
The importance of time in Swiss life is perhaps nowhere more noticeable than at meal times. Breakfast, lunch and supper, the Swiss eat early and seem quite surprised when everyone else doesn’t. Lunch is the best example. On the dot of 12 most of the country stops. Offices close, as do shops and banks outside the city centres, children leave school, building sites fall silent, almost everything grinds to a halt, except public transport. Go into a Swiss restaurant at 12.15 and you’ll think you’ve won the lottery if you get a table; go in at 1.45, and it’ll be empty, but then so will the kitchen. Evenings are slightly more flexible, though at home most Swiss have finished eating by 7.30. This is partly because supper is usually smaller than lunch – often just salad, or bread and cheese, or a bowl of muesli – but also so that they can watch the evening news on Swiss television, which starts at 19.30 every day, Sundays and holidays included. In the bigger cities you can still find restaurants serving at the worryingly late hour of 10 p.m., and at the weekends McDonald’s manages the ungodly time of 3 a.m.
So it’s 7 p.m. and you’re eating out with Swiss friends. Whether you have won the golden ticket of a home visit or are in a restaurant, there is a certain procedure to follow, starting from the moment the drinks arrive. Do not, under any circumstances, just raise your glass and say a general ‘cheers’ to everyone round the table. I used to think that this was enough; then I went to a Swiss dinner party and committed my first major social faux pas. I raised my glass along with the others, said cheers and took a healthy gulp. Everyone stopped and stared at me as if I had just danced naked on the table. I soon learned that when Swiss people say cheers (or zum Wohl in German), it isn’t a three-second communal affair. Like almost everything else in Switzerland, it’s a deliberate procedure based on age-old traditions.
The host has to start by raising his glass, after which each person must clink glasses with every other person, ideally all holding their wine glass by the stem so that the ‘ching’ is clearer and more pleasing on the ear. Not only that but you must make direct eye contact as you clink, and say zum Wohl followed by that person’s first name. So, for example, at a dinner party of eight people, 28 separate moments of glass-clinking and well-wishing with names have to be completed before the first drop is drunk. To make things worse, some couples also indulge in a quick kiss after saying cheers with each other, prolonging things a little more. The whole procedure is only polite, but can seem interminable when you’re gasping for water and barely able to say the final words for your tongue sticking to the roof of your mouth. Nevertheless, no one should take a single sip until everyone has finished toasting everyone else; woe betide anyone who sneaks a swift glug before the whole rigmarole is over. That’s not a mistake I’ll ever make again.
Then the food arrives. Do not let one morsel touch your lips, do not even lift a fork, until the host has led everyone is saying En guete (or bon appétit or buon appetito). At least this is done communally and not on a name-by-name basis, so it’s not long before you can all tuck in. The Swiss find it unbelievable that there is no normal way of saying this in English. ‘Enjoy your meal’ sounds almost like a command and ‘This looks delicious’ verges on insincere, so we end up using the French rather than the awful English translation, ‘Good appetite’. Even worse, we often say nothing at all, which would be unthinkable for the Swiss. They say it, at every meal in every situation. From about 11.30 a.m. onwards, Switzerland echoes to the sound of everyone wishing everyone else a good lunch. When your work colleague leaves the office, you say En guete; when your family sits down together, you all say En guete; when the stranger next to you on the bench starts his sandwich, you say En guete; when the waiter delivers the food, he says En guete, or at least he should. However, service in Switzerland isn’t nearly as good as the food, which is perhaps why tipping isn’t the norm, or maybe the service is poor because they know there’s unlikely to be a tip at the end. Either way, good service stands out because it’s rare.
Many Swiss waiters have perfected the art of looking straight through you. Not quite ignoring you, but not acknowledging your increasingly frantic efforts to attract their attention. What starts off as a smile or a half-raised finger progresses to a vocal Entschuldigung (sorry) or a definite wave. Then comes the stretched neck and exasperated sighs, but no matter how long it takes, no matter how frustrated you get, never resort to calling out Fräulein or garçon, or you’ll wait for the rest of your life. The one advantage of this comes at the end of the meal. When the bill finally arrives, you can just put down the right money in cash and walk away, safe in the knowledge that no one will steal it and the waiter will not run after you demanding a 20 per cent tip. This is not America, after all.
TEN
CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN
National newspapers do not exist in Switzerland, thanks to the linguistic challenges involved. The people of Romandie are far more likely to read a French paper from Paris than a Swiss one written in German. But even within the German-speaking part, the fractured, parochial nature of Swiss society means that few people in Zurich would read Der Bund, which is published in Bern. Instead, every city and town has its own paper. But sometimes there’s one news story that transc
ends all the divisions. ‘Swiss trains are less punctual!’ was one such headline, and a rather unexpected one at that. It seems like earth-shattering stuff until you read the story itself.
In 2008, Swiss Federal Railways (or SBB;1 there is no English abbreviation) ran 95.8 per cent of trains on time, compared to 95.9 per cent the year before. That’s it. A drop of 0.1 per cent and it becomes a news story. Foreign train companies would be dancing on the rails if they achieved such figures (the UK national figure is 90.6 per cent2), though the definition of ‘on time’ can be even stricter in Switzerland. The European norm of it meaning within five minutes late is widely used, except for the Bern–Zurich main line. There SBB sets itself a three-minute target – and achieves it 92.4 per cent of the time. The rest of the world can only look on in wonder.
Switzerland without its railways would be like America without its freeways, or Britain without its traffic jams. Almost unimaginable. Trains are as much part of the country as flower-decked chalets and bell-jangling cows, so much so that it sometimes feels like railways were invented in the Alps. Just the opposite, in fact.
THE START OF THE LINE
Switzerland was neither first nor particularly fast in building railways, but once it had embraced the train, the country was never the same again. A railway’s ability to conquer mountains, by going either up or under them, had profound effects on all aspects of Swiss life. With journeys taking hours rather than days, valleys were no longer isolated and the country no longer cut in half by the mountains. People started leaving their home towns and moving around, something that is still quite unusual for many Swiss today, let alone 150 years ago. More importantly, this landlocked country could access the outside world more quickly than ever, providing the raw materials that Switzerland lacked and a means of exporting the finished goods. The downside was that some Swiss industries, such as textiles, couldn’t compete with cheap imports and suffered. The bonus was that, connected to the once-distant ports, Switzerland became a more effective trading nation. Without the railways there might never have been a Swiss chocolate industry. What a thought!
The lasting effects of this can still be seen. Train lines reach into almost every corner of the country, so that a rail map of Switzerland looks like a lesson in the blood circulatory system. The main east–west and north–south arteries feed all the regional lines, which branch off into ever smaller local lines going down valleys and up hillsides. Dozens of private lines operate not against each other and SBB, but together to provide a unified, viable network. Like almost every part of Swiss society, the railways are a master class in communication and cooperation. And it clearly works. Annually, the Swiss travel an average of 2258 kilometres per person by rail,3 by far the highest in the world, and almost three times as high as the British figure.
The funny thing is that this modern paragon of train usage is the exact opposite of how the railway system began in Switzerland. Unlike the British and Germans, who went full-steam ahead in the mid-nineteenth century, the Swiss were rather slow to embrace the new technology. It wasn’t only that they were being unduly cautious, as is their wont, but also that plans couldn’t be agreed because of cantonal quarrels over rights and permits to build the lines. As a result the first station in Switzerland opened in 1845, two years before the first line, a quirk of history made possible because it was the French who built the station in Basel as a terminus for their Alsace line. The Swiss cantons carried on squabbling and nine years later there was still only one short line, running the 30 kilometres between Baden and Zurich.4
No one back then would have dared to think that 150 years later the Swiss rail network would become one of the most used and most famous in the world; it looked like the train would never leave the station. But private companies took up the challenge and laid the lines, dug the tunnels and built the bridges that would conquer the Alps. Ironically enough, once the Swiss realised what an asset the railways were, they nationalised them. A referendum in 1898 approved the creation of the Swiss Federal Railways.5 British Rail wouldn’t be born for another 50 years, only to be abolished within another 50. Britain may have invented the railway, but it doesn’t know how to run one. That’s a role the Swiss have taken on with relish.
A less obvious effect of the railways was to help develop Switzerland as a tourist destination. For foreign visitors, the advent of the train meant they could reach the far-off mountainous country without spending a fortune in time or money. For the Swiss, trains not only helped them conquer their landscape, but provided a new source of income. For them, the railways became inextricably linked with tourism.
TRAINING THE TOURISTS
A trip to Switzerland became an achievable ideal for many middle-class Victorians in Britain. It was this explosion in British visitors that kick-started the Swiss tourist industry, not least because the tourists brought money, and still do. With around eight million visitors arriving in Switzerland every year, tourism is a big earner and a big employer; nowhere is the current economic crisis more visible than in the empty beds and bars in Swiss resorts. The one saving grace has been that the Swiss are the country’s best customer, spending almost twice as much as foreign tourists. But back in the nineteenth century it wasn’t only about the money. Hotels sprang up, paddle steamers were launched and locals became guides, all to satisfy Mr and Mrs Smith from Surrey. And with the construction of Europe’s first cogwheel railway up Rigi, trains began to climb every mountain so that the Brits wouldn’t have to. The Swiss Alps became a modern tourist attraction.
At 1797 metres high, Rigi is not the tallest, the steepest or even the most beautiful mountain, but it’s been pulling in the crowds ever since visitors have been coming to Switzerland. Not for the mountain itself, but for the views. The ‘Queen of the Mountains’ sits like an island at the heart of Switzerland, surrounded on almost every side by the waters of Lakes Lucerne and Zug (see map of Lake Lucerne on page 30). Its 360° panorama includes the whole sweep of the Alps, from Säntis in the east to the Bernese Oberland out west. For tourists of past centuries watching the sunrise from the top of Rigi was the high point, in every sense, of a trip to Switzerland. Mark Twain wrote about it, Thomas Cook’s first tour group walked up for it, and Queen Victoria had the luxury of being carried up in a sedan chair. These days finding human donkeys might be hard, but you can still walk the walk if you have four hours to spare. Better yet, catch the steamboat from Lucerne to Vitznau and ride up on a piece of history.
The little red train clambers up past the last few houses, on through the ranks of fir trees, then the flower-strewn meadows and finally over the rocky slopes at the top. This gentle half-hour ride has been wowing people since 21 May 1871, so I am by far from being the first, or the last, to drink in the views of the shimmering lakes with their mountain backdrop. And I’m certainly not the only one to overlook the revolutionary technology going on beneath my feet: a cogwheel railway with a toothed track. It was this that made the conquest of Rigi possible, though the first railway didn’t actually make it all the way to the summit. The technology wasn’t lacking, but the political system in Switzerland was.
Sometimes the Swiss forget they are a nation continually in search of consensus and let cantonal pride overrule common sense. Rigi is a good example. It straddles the border between Cantons Lucerne and Schwyz, and each canton granted the concessionary rights to a different company. So that first line from Vitznau, in Canton Lucerne, could only go up as far as the border, some way short of the summit. On the other side of the mountain, a second line coming up from Goldau, in Canton Schwyz, wasn’t completed until 1875, though the company did at least finish the top section two years earlier.6 As daft as that sounds, that meant it could earn money from its Lucerne rivals by charging them to use the tracks from the border up to the summit. Not so daft, after all. The two lines merged in the 1990s, but even today both serve the summit with their differently coloured trains: red for the Lucerne side, blue for Schwyz.
The Rigi railway started a
Swiss craze for building one up anything that was big enough to hold it. In the following 40 years, mountains all over Switzerland succumbed to the might of iron and steam. These days it probably wouldn’t be allowed on environmental grounds, but green was not a nineteenth-century colour, so up those lines went. Across Lake Lucerne from Rigi, craggy Pilatus hosts the world’s steepest railway, opened in 1889 with a maximum gradient of 48 per cent;7 over on Brienzer Rothorn is Switzerland’s last steam mountain train, which has been puffing up the hill since 1892;8 and topping them all is the ride up inside the Eiger to Europe’s highest railway station, completed in 1912. If you build it, they will come. And come they did, and still do, in their thousands. Without the tourists, the mountain railways may never have been built, and would certainly not survive today. But without those railways fewer tourists might come to Switzerland, and those who did would spend much less money. A relationship benefiting both parties – and thank goodness for that. I’d hate to have to walk up all those mountains to get the best views. It’s not as if I’m Swiss.
AN INTEGRATED NETWORK
Gravity-defying mountain trains might be the most famous part of the Swiss railway network, but they actually make up only 150 of the 5000 kilometres of lines nationally.9 Trains are the workhorses of the Swiss economy, transporting not just tourists and commuters but cargo as well. An impressive 63 per cent of transalpine heavy goods vehicles travel by rail through Switzerland, twice as much as in neighbouring Austria.10 Loading those mammoth trucks on to trains means less pollution, less traffic and less noise, so everyone wins. But the wonder of the Swiss railway system is not the cargo routes through the mountains, or the big-name rides, such as the Glacier Express, or even the intercity lines packed with the customers. The wonder of the Swiss transport network is the local services.