Bulagirl's blog - December 2006

Today is Sylvester or New Year's Eve, 31st Dec. 2006

The end of another colourful, frightful, fruitful or whatever 'suffix' you prefer to add to your list of adjectives to describe your year. Positive or negative, some of us have survived up till now. As for James Brown, Saddam Hussein, Gerald Ford, and many more who never made it rich or poor whether by natural causes or otherwise, it is the end ..but their legacies live on

MAY THEIR SOULS REST IN PEACE

Saddam death draws mixed reactions. For details and other stories check out www.swissinfo.org 

JAMES AND GERALD.

How the soul king and his funky president made the president feel good. For more go to www.bbcnews.com.  

Saturday the 30th 2006

The Godfather of Soul, James Brown, will be laid to rest in Atlanta, Georgia….For more details go to www.undercover.com.au 

Born in 1937, Saddam Hussein was today executed in Iraq for his crimes against humanity

Swiss business reading crest of a wave. Read more - www.swissinfo.org 

Friday 29th Dec 2006

2 days to Sylvester and it's very foggy this morning.

Charities confident to repeat bumper year. Read more on www.swissinfo.org 

Thursday the 28th of Dec.2007

Frosch returns to Giswil after we dropped him off at Lucerne. This city is just lovely, cute old buildings. But it was rather cold - one could not sit outside in one of those various 'trottoir cafés'.

Strong medicine: Check out www.züricheconomy.com  for more on this topic.

Wednesday, 27th Dec.2007

We took another trip to the mountains today just for some sun and bobsleighing.and to getaway for a while from the cold and gloom of Zürich.

What is critical is the small amount of snow in the mountains. I mean Amden is about 1200 meters above sea level. And in this clip (900 KB) entire slopes are plain green.

For some sporting news with Roger Federer. Federer sets targets for 2007.For more details go to www.realswitzerland.com 

Tuesday, 26 Dec 2006

Damn! Another cold bleak morning. Yeah, Boxing day and still no snow here in Zürich but only in the mountains. My two male household members have gone bobsleighing, skiing or whatever. Hope it's a smooth ride with the new kit and no foliage to catch the sleigh. and cause bodily catastrophe.

On the 25th day of Dec. 2006 the Godfather Of Soul, The Hardest Working Man in Show; Soul Brother No1; Mr. Dynamite-James Brown was not a modest man, yet he more than earned the many colourful sobriquets with which…..read more www.worldcelebrity.com 

Godfather of soul dies at 73. Singer James Brown who influenced rap, funk and disco, had been hospitalized with pneumonia. Check out www.washingtonpost.com  

Sunday, 24th, Xmas Eve

Rather quiet. In the evening we prepare a delicious meal, consisting of pork filet in veal-stuffed dough, a fine sauce béarnaise and some vegis. Here the clip of the preparation (2.4 MB)

Or see here how Bulaman talks instead of devouring the beautiful dish.

Saturday, 23rd Dec. 2006

"Frosch" comes home today, but only for Xmas, not good news, but anyway, that will account for a tight 4day schedule. A small clip of our deco inside the flat here (1.5 MB).

It´s Friday 22nd Dec. 2006

A lot of working bees take their Xmas break from today, usually for 10 days ,give or take, like yours truly. Well, as for the Xmas break-up parties all went according to plan, or did it? Great to see your loved ones come home in one piece and with a work-mate tagging along just for the heck of it Yeah, just to make sure a war doesn't erupt. I've seen all that before!!

Tonight, we make a few pictures from our Christmas illumination. The small camera can even produce some low-res movies. Click here to view the clip.

It's Thursday, 21 December 2006. Four days to Christmas, and it comes with the usual pre-Xmas-Hype of gift-buying, looking for the best turkey to grace your dinner table and the list goes on. I have decided to just stay home and glue myself to whatever screen there is. Be it the computer, TV or curtain screen. And play recluse for a while. But behind this so-called screen, the brain still has to function somehow.

Tougher naturalisation laws come under fire: The authors of a study on Swiss naturalisation policy have called for the country's strict legislation, to be brought more into line with European Union norms. Historians from Berne University conclude in their report, "integration and exclusion", that Swiss laws are far too restrictive and outdated. ... read more

Vodaphone sells Swiss mobile stake for $1.8b: Vodaphone has further slimmed down in Europe by selling its 25% stake in the operator Swisscom Mobile. The disposal follows the company's recent exit from Belgium and comes a year after the ...read more

Thrifty IKEA billionaire still loves a bargain: He is being using the same desk chair for 32 years, travels on Swiss trains using his senior discount card and does the grocery shopping at an own-label supermarket chain ...read more

I might be into reading fictions and watching movies of mild to moderate ghoulish standings but real-life killing is definitely out of my books. Jack the Ripper (was never apprehended), the Yorkshire Ripper (Peter Sutcliffe) and now the Ipswich Ripper or is it Rippers. All had one thing in common, ghastly sick human beings ...read more

On yet another cold rather dreary morning the 20th of December 2006. Oh, my goodness they've re-opened Nukulau island to the public Great! Now I can check out the popular picnic-spot once I return to Fiji. Just wanna look out for footprints on the beach of fame or should I say something which rhymes with fame but starts with 'sh'. www.fijitimes.com

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As for my Indian bhaiyas and bhainis in Fiji, and anybody else for that matter, read this excerpt from .. www.hindustantimes.com

Indian tourist traffic to Switzerland to grow 35%. A booming economy, higher-spending and longer holiday breaks have seen a sharp rise in the number of Indian tourists heading for scenic Swiss locale spanning alpine mountains, icy glaciers and blue water lakes Though Switzerland has been a preferred destination for Indians during summers, it has of late emerged as a favourite among globe-trotting Indians

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For movie lovers, 'The Untouchables' is a recommended must-see movie. In a nut-shell, it's about a French woman who goes to India in search of the father she never knew. Has it hit the Fiji big screens yet or the video shop outlets? Well, you know, the original or the ‘pirated' version, whatever!!.. www.euronews.net 

Let’s breeze into the court room for some high profile legal proceedings

The trial in a Swiss court of Pakistan's ex PM Ms Benazir Bhutto will figure in a meeting of the Central Executive Committee and Federal Council of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) in London

Ms Benazir is proceeding to Geneva to appear in a Swiss court in connection with money laundering case on Nov.22th.

This will be her second appearance. Not only government circles but many analysts believe that the verdict in the case will decide the political fate of the PPP chairperson.

For the past, Ms Benazir is taking the case very seriously. However,her spouse Asif Zardari hasn't appeared before the court because of his illness.

By the time she would preside over the high level PPP meeting in the British capital, she would brief PPP leaders about the court proceedings.

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Police in Zürich announced that they have shut down a drug ring that between 2002-2005 made 61 deliveries of Ecstasy to the US to Maine and NY. Each delivery involved a cyclist hiding 20,000 pills in his cycling pants. The runners were all Swiss except one Italian, aged 21-46. Most were unemployed or were drug-dependent…. www.genevalunch.com 

Finally, in the evening, I am finished with the lighting for Christmas. So we are really the first in our house that have the lights lit. Bet, that from tomorrow on there will be much more window and balconies illuminated. However, don't be fooled about the picture here - it was taken the next morning at 5am!

Today is Tuesday the 19th of December 2006. As I look outside the window, dawn has broken on a cold -2° degrees morning. Just looking back in hindsight to 2004,at about this time when I first stepped off the plane in Kloten (that is where the airport is located) it was all snow-covered and looked surreal, mind you that was my first encounter with snow Yeah, from the warmth of the tropics to the arms of blustery winter. not that I'm complaining .it was just so different and surprisingly I was taken aback that my body could tolerate the temperature contrasts. Of course, that was 2years ago, now you could say, I'm immune to it all.

As of now, no snow yet. Why? You´ve guessed it, of course, the global warming effects In Fiji it is the not enough water problem here it is the `not enough snow´ situation thus a decline in winter sports and other related difficulties. As.it affects us all in one way or another read this excerpt about Switzerland -www.greenpeace.org 

Today 85% of Switzerland´s 230 ski-resorts are 'snow-reliable'. This is likely to drop to 63% between 2030 and 2050, and it could possibly drop to a further 44%. The potential annual cost of climate change in Switzerland is of such magnitude that it can't be ignored. Research in Canada, the US, Australia, NZ Austria, Switzerland, France and Scotland all say the same thing: global warming will affect the winter tourism industry: According to the National Climatic Data Centre in the US, the global combined average land and sea temperatures were the warmest on record for September-November 2004. That’s bad news for winter-sports. A UN report states the obvious. 'Climate change is a severe threat to snow-related sports such as skiing, snow-boarding and cross–country skiing. It's not just less snow, fewer glaciers and warmer temperatures that are problems-climate change brings with it unpredictable weather events and melting snow which can cause landslides.

In 1999 the "avalanche winter" in Switzerland damaged 20 ski-lifts, 11chair-lifts, 4 cable rail-ways and 1 funicular, costing up to US$130 million. Researchers in Zürich also say that huge swathes of ice needed to support plant and life in the mountains have already disappeared, causing other dangers such as rock-slides (which obviously aren't exactly a tourist attraction). Just got me thinking here maybe it's time for sand-boarding or better still gooey mud-boarding. Yeah, used to do a bit of the latter as a kid back home in Fiji when it rained but minus the board of course with bare feet and vulnerability to all sorts of feet-torturing disasters. The Kulukulu sand-hills in Sigatoka could be great for sand-boarding if not all then just part of it. Just a thought. And maybe hold local and then international competitions there. As the world seems to be hotting up, literally, maybe its not a bad idea after all, i.e. after all local protocol has been taken care of. No snow, no problem, sand never melts - www.sandboard.com

16 December 2006

Hopefully I will soon find time to start with this blog

At the moment I am more concerned with my family members and friends in Fiji. They have not suffered yet, but clearly are in a state of wait-and-see.

If I won't be able to post more here before Christmas: I wish everyone in Fiji a joyous festive season. May God bless you all!