A Weekend in Grisons

Last week I spent a few days in Switzerland. I went to Zürich on Thursday to meet up with a few people, having a pleasant chat with Beat Döbeli about his 30 year old PKM system Biblionetz, and a nice dinner with long time open data friend André Golliez, who chairs the Swiss Data Alliance. The next day, after mining the Orell Füssli book store for new publications by Swiss authors, I took a train to nearby Thalwil on the lake shore. This was the starting point for a weekend hanging out and hiking with two friends who live in Switzerland, in the Arosa region above Chur, in the Canton Grisons. The area is old, settled since neolithic times, and Chur was the Roman provincial capital already in 15 BC, and still is the cantonal capital two millennia on. My friends and I go back much less than that, but still we’re slowly and steadily nearing 40 years of friendship. The Arosa valley historically must have been very much an isolated and hard to reach place. Even now Arosa feels remote, at the…