Switzerland is very organised for VFR GA. Every airfield has pilot services mostly with live satellite weather displays - impressive stuff. The two places I have visited (Grenchen and Wangen-Lachen) even have a man dropping in who refills the paper in the laser printer.
They have serious terrain, as you have discovered, and because most spamcans can't do much altitude, and because most pilots don't have an IR, a lot of "canyon flying" goes on as a result, in the canyons but below the cloudbase. I suspect their PPL training is way better than the stuff that goes on in the UK.
Watch out the Swiss ICAIO chart: last time I used it (2004) it had a mixture of feet and metres in elevations - deadly!
A lot of their runways are at significant elevations so you need to know your performance calcs.