They're back home & maybe the Röstigraben has become smaller

Okay, one last entry on soccer, since our boys are back home since yesterday :-) It ain't "Swiss o'clock" anymore now....check out that huge jersey behind our soccer team (at Zurich airport) ! Haha...the newspapers are filled with analyses on the team's performance, and there are two camps: The over-enthusiastic ones believing that we'll win Euro 2008 (the team's coach, Köbi Kuhn, belongs to that camp of course), and the other camp that highly doubts that scenario will happen. I think stretched goals are fine, but if you don't reach them, you're just more disappointed in the end. If you ask me, I just wish them all the best for the future, and hope that the general enthusiasm they've created about them over here won't disappear once the World Championships are over. One thing is highly interesting: Never before have I read and heard things like "Hopp Suisse!" and "La Nati" in the French speaking part of Switzerland before!! Usually, it's only been "Hopp Schwiiz!" in Swiss German. It's cool to see that les Romands are becoming fond of our national soccer team too now :-) And they even like Köbi Kuhn in the meantime! Maybe he's become a national hero for the whole country, LOL. Don't think the people in Western Switzerland even knew his name before. Maybe the Röstigraben has just become a little smaller? Smile.

"The Röstigraben, from the name of the national Swiss-German potato dish Rösti that originated in the Canton of Bern, is a political expression in Switzerland referring to the difference in mentality between Swiss Germans and the French-speaking Romands and the latent conflicts between the German-speaking majority and the French minority." (Wikipedia)

Apparently it's become very popular among tabloid journalists here to use the suffix "-graben" for all kinds of linguistic and geographical or other imaginary (usually just for fun) borders in Switzerland (You know, kind of like it's become popular to add "-gate" to something that politicians screw up LOL). Some examples (also from Wikipedia):

- Polentagraben (Italian speaking Switzerland vs. the rest of Switzerland) ;
- Bratwurstgraben (Eastern Switzerland vs. the rest of Switzerland).