on the way to meet my friend i got a phone call, a call that i had hoped would happen, and while crossing the kornhaus bridge i was having a rather pleasant chat with an architect a few kilometers away. i looked down the bridge and i could not believe my eyes, the river aare had jumped over the river bed, the path that i usually jog on was flooded, but worse, so are all the cellars in the lower part of bern next to the river, the area usually called the "matte." i really do not know why this would have surprised me. during the day i got two emails that ought to have alerted me. one was from a friend in the usa that sent me several photos with a title "it's a crazy world," it included images of the fires in portugal and the flooded matte. now, fires and floods happen regularly on both of those places, so i thought nothing of it. the second email was from the technical director of the karate dojo, and she tells us that the dojo is flooded and the water is almost up to the window sill. i read that, acknowledged the consequence that on tuesday and wednesday there would be no training, and kept going. well, the matte floods every once in a while, and than is always when i am glad that i have my place a few meters higher. yes, i went through my news aggregator yesterday, but swiss newspapers have yet to discover rss feeds, and i rely mostly on the international press, and had seen nothing of what was going on. that is not entirely true, i had basically failed to realize that the town in which i live is flooded in spite of the fact that i had all the information available. oblivious to all, she continues. duh.
on another note, it seems to me that if a few swiss residents in the lower part of the helvetic capital get their cellars flooded, the rest of the world, and europe do not particularly care. i saw no obvious mention of it in the bbc, nyt, the guardian or the ft. swiss irrelevancy goes rather well with swiss modesty, one could call it swiss neutrality.
update 24.08.2005: BBC NEWS | Europe | Floods sweep across Switzerland: Floods sweep across Switzerland
Le Monde.fr : La Suisse, l'Autriche, l'Allemagne et la Bulgarie sous les eaux: La Suisse, l'Autriche, l'Allemagne et la Bulgarie sous les eaux
(look at dateline)
Technorati Tags: bern, berne, matte, puppy, switzerland
