Sanjeev Bhuttan, co-found of Spordy
A new website has been launched in Switzerland, with the aim of bringing sports enthusiasts together in a single, dedicated online community.
Called Spordy, the new online platform offers a range of services focusing on health and fitness for amateur sports enthusiasts, professional trainers and sports coaches, as well as sports clubs in Switzerland. These include:
- Find a buddy: A great way to connect with people to practice sport or for general fitness purposes.
- Find a trainer (coming soon): A quick way to find fitness trainers or sports coaches based on a user's location and purpose.
- Find a club: A handy tool for researching information about local sports and fitness clubs in Switzerland.
- Groups: A useful service, enabling members to join or create any sporting group of their interest. Within the groups, members can post group activities, have discussions, and post photos.
- Events: Lots of information on sporting events where people can see at a glance which events are happening in Switzerland.
- Members' blog: A helpful platform where members can discuss anything and everything to do with health, fitness and sports. From nutritional tips to the best skiing resorts in Europe, Spordy actively encourages members to engage in such discussions.
If you are looking for an interesting activity to do with family and friends at the weekend, then a trip to La Maison du Gruyère may be just what you had in mind.
Every Sunday between the 21 December 2014 and 29 March 2015, this popular cheese-making dairy (fromagerie) in Pringy, famous for producing Gruyère AOP, will demonstrate how cheese can be made using a wood-burning fire located within one of its outbulidings, the Chalet de la Confrérie. The public will have a chance to see all steps in the production process, right from the moment milk is poured into a cauldron, through to its final transformation into cheese more than two hours later.
Taking place between 12h30 and 15h00, the free demonstration will also provide visitors, both young and old, with a wonderful opportunity to taste “le petit lait”, “le cailler”, and the delicious Gruyère AOP cheese in its most popular forms: doux, mi-salé and salé. In very cold weather conditions, the cheese-making process may not be able to take place, so you are advised to ring the dairy before leaving home to check.
There are many services in this region designed to help expats integrate within their local communities – indeed many of them are listed in our Know-it-all passport guidebook! Networking groups, for example, provide a wonderful opportunity for people to meet others and make the most of their time living in this region as expats.
One networking organization, which is benefiting from the global popularity of social media platforms is InterNations. Set up in 2007 with the sole aim of making life easier for expats, InterNations now claims to be the largest expat social media platform in the world. With 1.4 million users, InterNations communities can be found in 390 cities across more than 195 countries – with 9 cities in Switzerland, including Geneva (about 15,000 members) and Lausanne (about 5,600 members). France also has a number of communities of which the two closest are in Lyon and Grenoble.
The best way to capture what InterNations does for expats is to give a brief overview of the services it provides for its members:
Couldn’t get enough of the summer? How about extending the holiday feeling by organizing a party with friends, family or colleagues? For many, that's easier said than done! Where can you go to find a different, fun and memorable venue? How do you go about booking the most appropriate, reliable and mouthwatering caterer? How do you pep up the event with an original animation or special decoration ?
These, and many more overwhelming questions, were raised by two entrepreneurial friends, Valérie Overdick and Katja Dutruy, when tasked with organizing a birthday party last year. This revealing experience convinced them both of the need to create a website that facilitates the organization of small to medium events. Their challenge was to make organizing an event fun and easy. Persuaded that sharing experiences, addresses and tips would save time and lead to a successful party, they set about collating many addresses, which would offer party organizers a large variety of options for all budgets. A year later, www.partybooker.ch was launched!
A new casual soccer league has been set up in Lausanne to help raise money for street kids around the world. Called StreetSoccer-Lausanne, the new league was created by Glyn Atherton, a local soccer enthusiast inspired by the many fund-raising events, which took place in Rio throughout the recent World Cup in Brazil.
Explaining why he decided to set up the league, Glyn told knowitall.ch, “My step-daughter enjoys having a kick about with me and I wanted to find a way for her to enjoy soccer with other kids but without it being too serious. As I got to thinking more about it, I realized we could also use the opportunity to raise funds for the world’s street kids at the same time. The idea of forming a fun and casual soccer league for charity was quickly born.”
