10 fun facts about Switzerland

Day 3,109, 03:37 • Published in North Macedonia North Macedonia • by iMackata

Hello

I decided that every day i will write fun facts about some country, so today choice is Switzerland and i choos this country because it really inspring contry and love people that leave there, because thay are open minded people and don't judge about anything in the world, at least i am speaking about people i have met.

1. The Swiss enjoy a leisurely drink. The Swiss downed 56.5 litres of beer and 36 litres of wine per person. A lot of the latter is homegrown, only about 2 percent of Swiss wine leaves the country. So maybe thats why they are that friendly 😛

2. Chocolate is a major Swiss export – just 18 Swiss chocolate companies made 172,376 tonnes of chocolate in 2012 !!!

3. CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) is the world's largest particle physics laboratory – based in Geneva and straddling the Swiss/French border. Physicists won the 2013 Nobel prize in physics for their work on the theory of the Higgs boson, one of the building blocks of the universe, which was finally discovered at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in 2012.

4. One of the most surprising thing that happend to me in Switzerland was the random tram parties, once we were driving in one tram and some random students entered with speekers and stuff and they made a party in the tram, it was unusual for me so i asked my friend is this legal and he said to me yes until they dont brake something. So keep it in your mind, you can organize free tram parties there ! 😃

5. Switzerland has more than 1,500 lakes, and one is never more than 10 miles (16 km) from a lake within the country’s borders.

6. The personal bodyguards of the Pope are called the Swiss Guard, and they really come from Switzerland. They are recruited from the Catholic cantons of Switzerland. They wear the same particular uniforms that they did the day it was started in the 16th century.

7. The Rolex Company invented the first waterproof watch in Switzerland in 1927.

8. In Switzerland, it is legal to use and grow marijuana, but it is against the law to sell it. The country also has one of the highest rates of cannabis use in the world. It’s estimated that about 600,000 users smoke through 100 tons of hash and marijuana each year.

9. The Nestlé Company, started by Swiss businessman Henri Nestlé in 1867, buys up almost ten percent of the world’s coffee and cacao bean crops by itself annually. It also created Nescafe, the world’s first instant coffee in 1938.

10. In 1891, Karl Elsener invented the Swiss Army Knife after finding out the army’s knives were actually made in Germany. He wanted to create a knife that could have multiple uses and was made in Switzerland. There are over 400 different models of the Swiss Army Knife, and designs today can include an altimeter, barometer, and a computer USB memory card. It has been nicknamed “The World’s Smallest Toolbox.