Weblog of xuefei

Switzerland is a small and beautiful country. From primary school, we know that this is a country with meagre resources. But to be sustainable, people developed very good technology in the watch movement. So Swiss watch is world best.

We only know Omega and Tissout or Cartier, but in fact the number one watch in Switzerland is Patek Philipine, and then it's Rolex and Omega. The reason is that Patek's production is hand made and the number of watches are limited.

Rare goods are expensive. So whenever we look at one which we like, the price will be more than one thousand. And the Patek's lowest one will be nearly ten thousand and the highest one might be one million Franc.

With one million Franc, we can buy a house. It's a bit embarrasing. But on the other hand, we like to buy a watch. So we like to enjoy the service of the first world.

Occasionally, I feel I don't like to go in because we don't have enough money to buy any. It's just kind of window shopping.

Then we feel like it's good that many people start to talk about China, but China is really still a developing country. Quite a few people get richer and richer, but majority still very poor compared the price here.

We simply feel it's difficult to buy things. So I think to be sustainable, I will just buy some chocolate, Swiss knife and a watch for my mother and myself.

I don't have a watch. Due to be in a hurry, I didn't bring my watch with me. So I don't have a watch, I don't have a knife. And I just bought a knife for myself. It's really sharp.

Talking about World Economic Forum, I feel it's a rich people's club. Its members are all rich multinational companies. So rich people get together in Geneva every year. This is a good place to get together. Swiss people is really smart. They are mostly trilingal. So maybe really like LEAD International executive Simon said, if you know three linguage, you are trilingual and two, bilingual, and if you only know English, you are sure English or American.

This is a place for the rich people and it looks so rich in many ways. Although the field is not far away, it is very beautiful and people are mostly bilingual or trilingual.

I know Walter in RNZI spoke 7 languages. It's nice to know more culture in other countries.

It will broaden our outlook. Anyway, I feel we need to make more efforts and waste no time for anything bad. 

Today we went to the Red Cross Museum and an exhibition on war.

Then we went to Ariana. It was very good.

We also went to the Victoria Hall for youth ochestra.

It was really fantastic.

 

Finally we went to Lausanne.

We took the train from Geneva gare to Lausanne because it is faster and it was raining.

We went to the Olympic museum first. It is a very building park by the lake. Even though, there is rain, it is still very interesting.

Then we had a sandwich and walked back and up to the old town center. The cathedral is very beautiful. The own town is similar to the old town in Stockholm. The narrow street up in the hill was all built with stones. I'm sure in the evening it also shines because they put marble stone in the middle.

There are many layers of buildings in the city center. It's an old city, but very pretty too.

We went to the biggest cathedral which is somewhat under reparation. We walked through the alleys and streets. It's a sense of history and culture.

Then we went to the museum of art, history, geology and archeology as well as an exhibition of Alice Bally's works. Alice's work was done in early 19th century and it mainly depicts the life and women in those days in Lausanne.

The day goes quickly, but it is very fruitful because we finally arrived there and had a good visit.

In fact last week we went to cycling and thought we could go there by bike because I heard it only took more than half an hour. In fact, this morning with only one stop, we arrived there by 35 minutes. But when we came back, we took one hour.

By miscalculation and stop for lunch, we couldn't make it by bike. Let alone, we have ended up in the express way which was forbidden. We tried to come back but it was hard at the beginning. So we went on. But some kind hearted people called the police and when we stopped and found our way back already, the police arrived.

They asked my passport and asked if we could speak English. I spoke both English and French and explained the situation. One police said we should follow the blue sign, but not green sign because green sign means express way, fast highway. The other police said we in principle should be fined or punished in some ways, but considering that we were the first time to bicycling in Geneva, we are forgiven, but we must know the rules.

We promised to go back by bike track through the field and thank them for their care.

We rode five hours bikes for the day and came back facing the sunlight. It was a wonderful day and it was a not bad experience seeing Swiss police. It was also impressive that many people hooted us and showed that we were against the rules. Knowing that we were wrong, but I didn't know what was the way out. Only when we arrived at the parking place, did we know that we could have a small path to go to the field road for cycling.

Geneva is really a great city. Nice people, nice drivers and nice police.

We have graduated from LEAD INTERNATIONAL and formally become one of the LEAD fellows.

LEAD International has 1600 fellow members around the world and they are in different posts in their own country. Some are ministers and some are managers or senators and NGO program officers.

We graduated on the last day of the LEAD Geneva week which fell on October 14th.

We had a press conference about career development. People from IUCN, UN and other two places came to talk about their careers and it is always good to hear personal career path.

After that we had the graduation ceremony and I represented my fellow scholars and gave a speech about how I ended up here and what I learnt here.

We wrapped up a wonderful LEAD week in Geneva.

 

Recently I always receive an email which says whatever certificate I like, it will sell as long as I spend some money.

Long time ago many people receive emails about asking your credit card number and give you some money from African leaders' inheritance.

These internet rubbish needs a censorship to clean up. Otherwise it is not just annoying, but also waste our time.

I think those who send this should be ethical too.

It's not something fake and unethical will do. Our aim is to build an ethical, sustainable and clean world, but not something filled with fake, cheap and incredibility.

 

As we know WTO is world trade organization. It came from GATT. And WTO official believes after Seattle protests, it works fairly good.

It not only works with governments but also works with NGOs.

The WTO secretariet is based in Geneva and there is 160 people. They got 100 million franc funds and their workload is a lot.

Although it's about trade, it has a lot of politics in it.

Mr Kuiten says it is something necessary but nobody is very happy about sort of thing.

For example agricultural subsidies, other countries want EU to lift their heavy subsidies to their farmers, but politicians there can't do it easily.

Today we 11 scholars went to World Conservation Union to have half a day course at the headquarters in Gland, Geneva.

Head of Communication of IUCN-Union Mondial de Conservation. gave us a brief introduction about the structure, the staff number and income which is about 100 million Franc a year.

IUCN was established in 1948 after UNESCO was established. And after that they kicked off the WWF.

Through sixty more years of work, IUCN has more than 1000 members and it has a statue for its legitimate and transparent governance. The decision-making method is through voting, but it need consensus for a joint policy.

A couple of successful stories for IUCN includes the investigation on western whales which only numbered about 120 in eastern Russia sponsored by Shell. Another thing is to hold World Conservation Conference in Bangkok in 2004 bringing government, business and NGOS together.

The organization boasts  10 thousand of experts and scientists in conservation and biodiversity.

Bill Jackson from Australia  also talked about how the leadership worked and the importance  of biodiversity. 

Biodiversity is closed related to human well-being from water, air to food and housing. Nothing seems to be able to live alone.

In the end, an American Scientist gave a very good panorama about the world.

He said human society is facing language crisis because there are now 7000 languages in the world, but due to globalization, only few languages are well spoken and about 40 percent of the languages will disappear in 100 years. That will be very bad to bio-diversity and conservation.

Over consumption will be a big problem because then the resources are easy to be used up.

He got an interesting picture about a cow pulls car which symbolizes lack of oil.

He said if mankind can't take measures soon, there will be a lot of unexpeced disasters.

The last picture he showed was the one similar to the day after tomorrow.