Sexy people

I apologise if you read this thinking there will be pictures of semi-naked Swiss people. You will be disappointed. I write instead of the Zurich-wide (which pretty much means the tiny centre of Zurich) public holiday that I happily experienced on Monday. It basically involves burning a snowman. I kid you not. And Zurich gets at least a half-day off their tax-evading jobs to celebrate this somewhat pyromaniac festive tradition. Excellent.

The festival is called 'Sechseläuten' (or in Zurituusch 'Sächsilüüte'), which sounds very much like Sexy leute; sexy people, but actually means 'the six o' clock ringing of the bells'. However, unless you consider people dressed as medieval knights sexy, there were not many sexy people involved in the annual burning of the snowman. Instead, people dress up according to their 'Zunfte;' their guilds. So the bakers dress as bakers. And they carry bread around their neck. Lots of horses are involved, and the costume Zurchers parade around the city centre, making a lot of noise and throwing a lot of flowers. This Monday there was a fantastic atmosphere; helped by particularly warm weather and relatively cheap beer. The whole of Kanton Zurich flocked to see the snowman burn.

You can look on Wikipedia for a more in depth definition, but it all comes down to waving goodbye to winter and welcoming summer. According to fable, the length of time it takes for the snowman's head to explode determines how good a summer is ahead. Apparently this year, it took around 13 minutes to explode (and all the Swiss people were standing ready with ear plugs, or with fingers in ears for the noise; see a previous post about the Swiss and their obsession with ear plugs)... so the summer will not be fantastic.

However, considering this is is a tradition dating back to 1904, and we're making judgement based on a papier mache figure, I'm not too worried!

Extra trivia: the snowman is named Böögg, which is apparently a cognate of Bogey... are there any other countries in the world that take a day off to burn the bogeyman? Isn't culture a wonderful thing!