75 Fun Facts About Switzerland You Have No Idea Of

Switzerland has one of the highest recycling rates in the world thanks to making recycling free but requiring every individual bag of trash thrown away to have a ~€1 sticker affixed.

27. Switzerland does not extradite its own citizen, no matter what crime they have committed abroad.

28. Switzerland has completed the construction of the 57 km long Gotthard Base Tunnel, connecting Milan to Zurich.

29. Researchers from the University of Zurich have simulated the formation of our entire Universe with a large supercomputer. A gigantic catalog of about 25 billion virtual galaxies has been generated from 2 trillion digital particles.

30. Zurich was the richest city in the world in 2015 (based on GDP per capita).

In the 1980s, the Swiss government attempted to fight rampant drug usage in Zurich by allowing drug sales and consumption to happen in Platzspitz Park. Addicts numbered up to 20,000 at a time and dealers had open drug markets and stalls and fought violently for control of the park.

32. There is a restaurant in Zurich named Blindekuh restaurant where you eat in the dark and almost all the staff are blind.

33. In the garden of a house in Zurich where Erwin Schrödinger lived in the 1920s, there’s a figure of a cat that can appear either alive or dead, depending on light conditions.

34. Authorities in Zurich, Switzerland created sex "drive-ins" in their red light district as a means to not disturb many of the households surrounding the area.

35. Geneva Steel, in an effort to show the company's importance to the local economy, paid its employees bonuses in $2 bills, which then started showing up in local businesses.

Changing another country's weather is classed as a war crime under the Geneva convention.

37. The Geneva Convention requires POWs to have access to tobacco.

38. According to the Geneva Convention, knowingly firing at a medic wearing clear insignia is a war crime.

39. In 1997, physicists at the University of Geneva sent photons seven miles in opposite directions and demonstrated that interfering with one provoked an instantaneous response in the other.

40. In 2014, a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines plane was headed to Switzerland, but had to be intercepted by French/Italian fighter jets because the Swiss Air force doesn't work on nights and weekends.

The longest reigning empress of Austria (Empress Elisabeth of Austria) was assassinated in 1898 in Geneva. Her assassin initially wanted to kill the Duke of Orleans but missed his chance, and simply decided to kill the next member of the royal family he saw.

42. There is a giant three-legged chair in Geneva, Switzerland dedicated to the opposition of landmines.

43. Kim Jong Un studied in Bern with a fake identity.

44.  If Los Angeles and San Francisco areas combined into a country it would have the 15th biggest economy at $1.2 trillion. Bigger than Sweden and Switzerland combined.

45. The famous Deep Purple song "Smoke on the Water" is about a casino/concert hall on Lake Geneva, Switzerland that burned down during a Frank Zappa show. Deep Purple witnessed the fire (and rescue efforts) from across the street, then wrote a song about the incident.

Swiss cheese is not a product of Switzerland, but rather an American invention mimicking Emmental.

47. There is a bar in Switzerland designed by H.R. Giger, creator of the terrifying life forms and their otherworldly environment in the film classic Alien.

48. Australia, Great Britain, and Switzerland are the only countries to send a team to every Olympic Games since their inception in 1896.

49. Getting a computer to generate a random number is so fiendishly difficult, one of the solutions involves connecting the web to radioactive material located in Switzerland

50. Billionaire Marc Rich was indicted on 65 criminal counts including the biggest tax evasion in history at that time. He fled to Switzerland and remained on the FBI's 10 Most-Wanted for years, narrowly evading FBI capture in Britain, Germany, Finland, & Jamaica.