Banque Cantonale Vaudoise

While pottering about today I noticed a coupled of islands with the initials "BCV". I last tried to access these (unsuccessfully) some months ago - but they are open now**. In my RL world BCV is an acronym for Business Continuity Volumes, something techie in the world of data centre storage. So I was half-expecting to find another IT company - perhaps with a walk-in SAN, where you could surf on a disk drive, fly down some fibre optic cable... or somesuch nonsense. In the event, BCV turned out to be Banque Cantonale Vaudoise, a Swiss bank. "Founded in 1845, BCV is a banking group offering a full range of retail,private and corporate banking services -concentrating most of its general banking business in the Canton of Vaud."

The primary BCV island is solely for the bank itself, while BCV island 2 seems to be given over to various Swiss companies. The whole place is rather intensely green, with the occasional pale blue - part of the bank's branding. The main building is rather nicely made, and contains a gallery along with the usual information displays one might expect. Next door is a rather odd auditorium that took some getting into and aside from a funny little, black office, that is about it for the main island. A causeway links the two islands (so I guess that makes it only 1 island really), in the middle of which is curvy, shiny, faintly-mushroomy sculpture. The second island is split into a variety of plots, none of which particularly grabbed my attention. There are a few fun items here: you can fly a UFO (hitting Page-Up to make it hop upwards); be fired from a cannon or be catapulted off a water slide. There may be other hidden pleasures, but I didn't spot them.

While Blogger sorts out the issues with images, I will post up another Flickr set - only 3 pictures tho.



** VeeJay points out in comments that he was here back in July. My, how time flies! I coulda sworn it was more recently than that when I tried to get in. Oh well.