A New Love

If it were possible to marry cities, I would marry Geneva. I would definitely still have some hot affairs with Paris, since it’s flashy and amazing, but Geneva would hold my eternal, calm, undying love.

Back up, back up, I know. So first off: I’ve been sick for the past week. It was a cough on Halloween, the 31st, turned into a strong cough Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday transferred to a sniffle and a cough, then Thursday calmed down into just a light cough. Still there, not really bothering me, but noticeable. (The friend I was traveling in Italy with also came down with it, but instead of missing a couple days of classes and resting she pushed on… and then got even sicker at the end of it all. So I guess it’s good that I rested.) Anywho, because of this, I wasn’t that excited for the trip… I was kind of thinking, “okay, Geneva’ll be nice, there’s not that much to do, but it’ll be relaxing, hopefully I won’t get sicker… and then PARIS the week after!” So it was kind of a filler trip.

Geneva blew that right out of my mind. Homigod. It started, surprisingly, with the plane ride. We were flying a Swiss airline called Baboo; I had never heard of it before, but it was cheap. We get on our plane, and there’s actually room, and comfort! After we take off, the stewardesses (flight attendant? I don’t know anymore) handed out waterbottles… and then little kabobs… and then tiramisu… and then chocolate. And we’re like, “holy crap! This airline is feeding us for an hour flight and it’s GOOD!” So we were very impressed. Then we land in the airport, which is about two/three miles from downtown, a manageable walk. Yet they have free train tickets to downtown, which is kind of awesome. We had to wait thirty minutes, but we make it there. Then we realize that we don’t have a map, and I have only a vague idea how to get to the hotel… So we sneak into a shop (mind you, let me state that it’s about ten at night) and casually look at the map. Make our way to the hotel in the around 35 degree (1 degree Celsius) weather. And we see the receptionist leaving, despite that it’s 10.55 and they weren’t supposed to close until eleven, and I told them that I’d be arriving a little late. We call her over and she grudgingly lets us in… it was an interesting experience. Even more interesting when we get up to the room and it has a double bed, a single double bed, for two of us. Not awkward, really.

So next day. We get up, we eat breakfast (I love Europe and its included meals!), we go out. And, as I had expected, it’s cold and raining. This I don’t mind so much; I had brought warm clothes, an umbrella, and as everyone knows, I love the rain! “Life,” however, made it less enjoyable, as “Life” kept reminding me constantly that it was cold and raining and Life hates the rain. So anyway, umbrellas above our heads, we go out to explore. Walking along the river, we see a bridge that has an exhibition on walls for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall (today, Nov 9th!). We wander, we pop into shops, we go explore the older part of town. While we’re having fun, we’re also getting wet, and Life makes sure to remind me with cold, wet feet. All this is forgotten as we come out of the buildings to an absolutely breathtaking view of town and mountains… both of us taking pictures and then just staring, taking in the magnificence. After a bit of staring, we remember we’re cold and we head down to a park to play Giant Chess, woohoo! More wandering; more shopping. We end up back at the lake again, and the Fountain is going off, which is pretty cool. At this point it’s around one, I’m hungry and Danita isn’t, so we split up so I can get food and she can find a bank to exchange money.

This is an excellent point to stop and rant about prices. I was very excited for the Suisse Franc, since it’s on a one-to-one ratio with the dollar, as opposed to the Euro, which just keeps getting worse. People had told me that Switzerland was expensive, but I figured it couldn’t be worse than the Euro. I was wrong. It took me twenty minutes to find a place where a single lunch was less than twenty francs; the cheapest I found was an individual (well, rather large individ but still single) pizza for fifteen francs. It was delicious, but my wallet hurt. So yes, stuff is expensive in la Suisse. Ridiculously expensive.

So back to business. I had a grand old time wandering around, and as I’m crossing a street into a park I hear these two guys talking in (I thought) Irish accents, one calling the other a wimp. I laughed and moved on. As I’m just looking over the lake admiring the beauty, a couple of foreign-looking guys ask me to take their picture, and I agree. They put their arms around each other, and I’m like, “aww, cute.” After I hand them back their camera, they start asking me questions and I’m answering, and then he asked if I spoke English. I hesitantly answered yes, (I can’t pull the whole French student thing because I have a fairly clear American accent in my French that Genevians can easily spot) and he switched to even worse English, saying he wanted to practice. But he keeps asking me things like what the name of the area was, what the lake was called, where I’m from, scolding me if I slip into French. After a bit, I insist that I need to go meet my friend (which is true) and manage to pull away. As I’m walking, I see the two “Irish” guys sitting on a park bench. One smirks at me and is like, “hey. I heard you laughing at our conversation earlier.” So we get into casual, nice conversation, which is fine. Turns out one’s German and one’s Italian, they just happen to speak English with Irish accents, and they were exchange students in Geneva. They started asking if I wanted to go get a coffee, and while I was tempted, I did have the whole “meeting up with roommate” thing. I moved on to the Floral Clock to meet up with roommate, and a nice English couple asks me to take their picture. I do this for several people, and then there’s the Foreign Guys again! I take their picture and the one I was talking to before goes back to the questions… what was my name, what hotel was I staying at, we should meet up again and do something. (Joelle, Hotel Riviera, non merci, my friend and I are going to a play tonight – all clearly lies). It got creepy, since these guys are in at least their forties, so I insisted that I saw my friend and needed to go. Thankfully they backed off and Danita came to save the day!

The rest of the day was just spent meandering, lots of shopping; I bought a cute purple hat. Then we headed back to the hotel around seven, maybe. We had a TV, which was amazing! We watched Looney Tunes, some random movies, Mot de Passe (Password in French), and a showing of different marching bands around the world. It was pretty cool. At some point we got hungry and went down to the receptionist if she knew of any good restaurants around the area. Surprisingly enough, she didn’t. Couldn’t even name one. So we went and wandered in the cold, finally gave up and found a kebab restaurant and bought a dinner for eighteen francs, brought it back. It was… pretty terrible. But we ate it anyway. I zonked out to sleep pretty early, wanting to be ready for the next day.

The next day brought BLUE SKIES! At least a little. We got up, ate breakfast, and headed out. We found very quickly that everything was closed… and while I had really wanted to go up in the mountains, that didn’t seem like a possibility. So we wandered. Once the skies had lightened up a bit, I was hit by just how much gorgeous fall foliage there was. I mean seriously, I’ve got hundreds of pictures of this stuff. So beautiful… why can’t we have this back in California? Anyway, we walked along the other side of the lake, saw a marching band of different countries, sat on a park bench for a couple hours just watching the world go by and enjoying the warm sun. Fell in love with the city in the mean time, and decided that it’s not a life goal, it’s a life necessity to come back and live here. When the warm sun left, we had to move on, walking through a park filled with gorgeousness. We made our way up through the park to the UN building, which was closed but still cool, and we passed buildings like UNICEF, OMM, etc. etc. Then we went to the Red Cross Museum, which was insanely cool. I feel like it broadened my horizons a lot on healthcare and wartime care and such. By this time, we were up in the hills around downtown, and as we walked farther from that and closer to the airport, the surroundings went from French to Swiss, which was really neat. At some point, we got a view of the mountains on the other side of Geneva, and were just in shock by how awesome they were. I was also reminded of how much I miss living around mountains… damn you, Bordeaux, for not having any.

So we get back to the airport nice and early. I watched the sunset over the mountains, we got a light dinner. The flight back was much less picturesque than the first… takeoff I felt like we didn’t have enough thrust so my “I hate flying” fears had kicked in, the food wasn’t as good as the first time… not a bad experience, but just different. We land in Bordeaux, and we’re like, “…oh. Bordeaux.” Compared to the amazingness of Geneva (what with how clean it was, how clear the water was, not much smoking, fresh air, beautiful landscapes, etc) Bordeaux was just… meh. But I’m going to Paris on Friday! So, woohoo! And now I need to stretch because my legs are killing me. Fun.

I had a dream where I got home and wanted Jamba Juice but my sister didn’t. Sad.