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Guest Blogs

Knowitall.ch often invites local experts in their field to contribute to their own blogs on our site. This means not only you will benefit from the useful recommendations that we make on our News pages, but you can also profit from some of the great advice and tips that these experts have to make on their favorite subjects. Whilst each of these bloggers has been recommended to us at some point during the evolution of Know-it-all passport and  knowitall.ch, obviously we are not able to test out all the suggestions they make on their blogs, nor do we necessarily agree with all their opinions.  So if you do find one of their tips useful (or not!), do let us know!

To make these blogs more accessible to you, we have now decided to group them altogether in one section, entitled Guest Blogs, accessible from our main menu bar.  We will also post the most recent blogs on the home page of our site in the right hand column.

We are still building up this area of the site, and are looking for bloggers in a number of sections, including Your Home, Travel, and Leisure, so if you feel you have a useful contribution to make in either of these areas, and have the time to submit blog entries approximately every month, then please get in touch!

xmasblog sunita

Last minute shopping rush, office parties, wrapping up gifts as well as financial year. Yep, you have guessed it… this month’s blog is dedicated to the festive period, how to be serene instead of being mean and how to be calmer to avoid all the drama.

However the words of wisdom below are not mine but come from a talented ensemble of people from varying backgrounds and professions. They have taken time out of their busy schedule to give their wonderful advice on what’s worked for them during the holiday season.

So enjoy this last installment from Walk The Talk for 2013 and please let me take this opportunity to wish you all peace and joy this holiday Season and a New Year of health and happiness and Prosperity

Sunita xx

hiba blog2

By Hiba Giacoletto, Healthwise

Have you ever eaten a full meal, but still felt there was something missing? You are physically full but not satisfied and you go on a wild rampage in search of something sweet or salty to give you that hit you didn’t get from your meal.

What if the simple solution were simply to add more umami to your meal?

Umami elevates the taste intensity of a dish. It’s your regular meal, on steroids. And this is very important since taking full pleasure in what you are eating actually increases nutrient absorption in the body while stopping you from overeating or having cravings later on.

vegetable sidedish

By Hiba Giacoletto, Healthwise

This is a tasty and healthy addition to any main dish. Choose root vegetable such as sweet potatoes, carrots, parsnips, black salsify, Jerusalem artichoke, celery root, beets, potatoes etc. Most of these vegetables are currently in season and you can use them without even knowing their names! You can also add squash or pumpkin and roughly chop a few onions to add more taste. Roasting these vegetables is a great way of bringing out their natural sweetness and giving them a more complex flavor that even people who don't normally eat vegetables will like!

lacvert3

We’re so excited that winter is here! While waiting for the ski season to start in earnest, we are getting out into the mountains for some hikes and snowshoeing. From the picturesque village of Servoz in Arve Valley on the way to Chamonix, there are many well-marked snowshoeing trails to explore for all levels, from family to more experienced hikers.

We recently tried one to the protected Lac Vert, named after the bright green colour of the lake. It is said to be the classic walk of "Chirves" (Servoz inhabitants). It climbs from the river valley up into towards the high mountain pasture chalets of Ayères, under the wall of Fiz.  

career scc

Image courtesy of Master isolated images / freedigitalphotos.net

By Diana Ritchie, Spouse Career Center and Swiss Career Connections

It reminds me of the saying, what do you want to do when you grow up?  We all know that when we grow up we will work, but do we all know that we get to choose what we do when we grow up?  As a student I didn’t.  I studied Economics at university because my father was a successful business man and wanted his children to study commerce.Well I did not get into the faculty of commerce at McGill University and since I liked and did well in Economics in my final year of High School in Toronto, I took the next best thing, a BA in Economics.  My real first job out of University was selling Life Insurance and I was very good at it and I enjoyed it because I was good at sales.  Was this my dream job? No, but it had aspects of what I enjoy, a flexible job, meeting new people, helping people and being creative.  

Statistics show different figures but in summary about 80% of people in the Western world do not like their jobs.   Jobs as we know them today are a legacy from the industrial revolution and the terms they used have stayed with us to the present; terms such as compensation (meaning payment for your time at work), labour (referring to staff) and Human resources (similar to natural resources).  Work historically was not meant to be enjoyable and even today we work so we have money to do what we enjoy.  What if our job was what we enjoyed?  I sometimes hear people say, “Why should I be paid for doing something I enjoy?” I would like to believe that we are coming around to the idea that work does not need to be hard and unpleasant, that getting paid to do something we like and enjoy is the norm and that employers (and many are starting to realize this) are responsible to their employees to ensure that they are happy and enjoying their job.  Evidence of this is the ratings on the best employer published by Forbes, CNN, Guardian, etc.