Everything you need to know about skiing and other Alpine winter sports
The Daily Torygraph finds socialism even in enclaves of the wealthy, where the Swiss have decided that people working in Switzerland should comply with local Swiss labour laws – and that includes the minimum wage.
Parsimonious UK tour operators have baulked at paying so much as the minimum wage such that some have pulled out of letting chalets in the country altogether.
You can read all about it here.
TOP TIP: Look out for some good chalet deals.
Well, if you understand that title, you probably would be interested to hear that our companion web site, Swiss Winter Sports, is now available in Dutch at www.SwissWinterSports.nl. I toyed with calling it the more vernacular “Zwitserse Wintersport”, but decided to stick with the same branding as far as possible.
The site features both the NL suffix and Dutch language text. It also has road distances from the Netherlands and content on the top bar specifically targetted for Dutch winter sports enthusiasts. Some of the minor resorts on the English-language site have been dropped to keep a focus, as it is unlikely somebody planning a visit to Switzerland from Holland would be interested in a resort with just a couple of surface lifts. The site is a work in progress and the translations are largely machine-generated, so I would be interested in finding a native Dutch speaker to review the text for me. If you know of somebody, please get them to get in touch with me and quote a price.
Although English is widely spoken in most major ski resorts, often the more rustic restaurants, family-run hire shops and even front-of-office ski school staff do not speak it. And isn’t it appropriate to at least make an attempt to speak in the language of your hosts? And what if you want to fraternise with the locals?
Summer is a good time to decide both your target winter sports destination and also to brush up on the local lingo in good time. If you want to learn a language, I’m a great fan of the Michel Thomas system. You can do it in the car or on the train, in fact just about anywhere you can listen to it and without the need to read a book or follow the text in a book.
For those who don’t want to learn the language, but could do with some useful phrases, I will provide some in French, German and Italian in the next few weeks.
A few of my friends are doing a spot of summer skiing in Tignes and putting up annoying pictures of them enjoying themselves on Facebook. However I am not one for summer skiing – it just doesn’t seem right! And the nearest winter slopes are a long way away.
However that isn’t to say I am not thinking of where I will be skiing this Winter. My wife has already booked somewhere near Pizol, and I am getting a dribble of press releases ahead of the new season.
One of the more interesting press releases was from Seilbahnen Schweiz aka Remontées Mécaniques Suisses aka Funivie Svizzere aka Funiculars Svizras aka Swiss Cable Cars Association. They have put together an interactive site here where you can zoom in on the cable cars in Switzerland and click a link to take you to the home page of the respective operator.