I was on my way to work today and as usual grabbed the best free daily paper in Switzerland, 20 Minuten. You may have heard Liz and I talk about it a bit. The publication is a cross between USA Today, People and www.thesuperficial.com, meaning that it lacks any investigative depth, has lots of pictures and essentially devotes half of its content to gossip-related articles. Perfect reading material for someone learning beginner German (aka us), plus it has Sudoku. So anyway back to the story, I was flipping through and noticed that there was an article about Bill O'Reilly. I was somewhat surprised as most Swiss have no idea who he is, but I figured that they would be ripping on him for some one-off conservative quote. Turns out he vacationed near Interlaken and had only positive things to say. The whole article from 20 Minuten (in German) is here with a video (in English) of the Factor (yes, Fair and Balanced).
For those of you who don't want to watch Bill or practice your German, he said the following:
"I was in Switzerland last week, and I did not see any litter on the street. Let me repeat: I drove hundreds of miles. There was no litter anywhere. Switzerland is the cleanest country in the world. And I went there to look at the Swiss environmental approach. The place is stunning. There are 7.5 — there are 12.5, I should say, million people living in Switzerland, 22 percent foreign-born, but apparently they are all green. Income taxes top out at about 40 percent, just about like here. There are a number of other taxes, like here. But very little poverty, not like here. Only three percent of Swiss citizens are on welfare. So the country works, and our leaders should be studying it. Switzerland is No. 1 in the world, and it shows."
He might be skewing the facts just a little, but I venture to say that even Liz agrees with Bill this time!
In other news, the latest Forbes rankings on the most expensive cities in the world put Zurich at number 6. If you have talked to my father lately, then I don't think that you need Forbes to remind you, but if you want more info you can see it here.
1 comment:
Well, Joe, Grandpa E. is really excited about your blog entry! He wanted to know if you'd seen the show, but I told him you were out of town this week and probably hadn't seen it yet. Imagine my surprise when I saw the title of your latest entry! I called Grandpa and he is going to check it out right away! Great minds think alike!
Love,
Momma D.
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