Christopher’s Blog

Admittedly, the title has very little to do with the content of this blog entry, which will be the penultimate, I do believe. 

I've just finished my summer internship, in the Service de Presse et de Communication de l'Ambassade de France aux Etats-Unis (Press and Communications Office at the Embassy of France in the USA), and it was a great experience.  I learned a lot, maintained my French abilities (even expanding on what I learned in Swizterland), and became a published author.  Yay!  (If anyone wants to read what I wrote, check out the publication titled "News from France" on the Embassy's Web site: http://www.ambafrance-us.org/publi/index.asp)  All in all, it was a good experience this summer.  The people I worked with were great, the food in the cafeteria was amazing, and I got to call all sorts of random and awesome organizations in order to obtain photos for the aforementioned publication.  It was in this manner that I discovered that Disney is both paranoid and soullless, but that's an entirely different subject, and I don't want to digress too much.

Which brings me back to the title of this entry.  I've been putting off writing any more entries on this blog, because a.) I'm a procrastinating college student, b.) I honestly didn't have the time to put a lot of thought into it, and c.) I still really miss Switzerland, and it's tough to be back here and think about my experiences there, especially during the summer.  When you have a 1 hour 45 minute commute each way to work, you have a lot of time to think (and about 30 minutes to sleep on the Metro in the evenings).  When it comes down to it, this is what I've realized:

I'm hung up on my experiences in Switzerland like some people are hung up on romantic relationships.  It's really hard to get over.  My experiences there have become the benchmark to which I compare almost all the other experiences I have, and that is neither fair nor healthy, I think.  But, it happens.  Part of it was, no doubt, the severely jarring return to my life here in the U.S. - from relative absolute freedom and a number of people to hang out with just a phone call away to a living a life as a slave to the commute, to the Embassy, etc., with no one in my general area with whom I could just randomly meet up.  Granted, some of my friends do live nearby, but none less than 45 minutes away by car (presuming there aren't any traffic problems).  I would also hang out with the other Embassy interns after work sometimes (and they were awesome, don't get me wrong), but I'd always have to leave well before everyone else just because I lived so far away, and couldn't afford to get home at midnight and then have to get up less thansix hours later.  It became frustrating.  Geographically, I also got used to clear air, ridiculously gorgeous scenery everywhere I looked, and no dependence on automobiles or television when living en Suisse.  Coming back to NoVA (Northern Virginia for those of you who aren't familiar with the acronym), I found smoggy air, strip malls and housing developments, hour-long traffic jams on I-95, and nothing much better to do in the evenings with my available time than watching TV, no matter how hard I try to escape it.  Now, you might say that I sound overly harsh on NoVA, and you're probably right.  But this is the problem - my standards are too high, I guess. 

Ok, this entry is rambling - I realize that, and I apologize.  The title.  It's a direct reference to an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and it does relate, I swear.  I wanted to write this entry now because it's been almost three months since I got back from Geneva, and I wanted to share how my perspective had changed.  Clearly, my current perspective on my time in Geneva differs a lot from when I had just returned.  Even though the three months have gone quickly, it's still a long time and a lot of water has passed under the Pont du Mont Blanc since then.  There are certain things that I miss to this day - the trains, the beauty, the multiple languages drifting around the streets on any given day, the cleanliness, etc.  I guess those are the things that I miss most.  Some experiences also stand out from the others - climbing Le Saleve with Matthew and being able to introduce my friends to my adopted country, traveling to Croatia on four days notice (still one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life), that night in Paris, picnics on the shores of Lac Leman, long nights in the HEI library... ok, so many stick out.  This is the problem. I had too memorable of an experience over there.  Sigh...

The people played a large role in that.  Some I still keep in touch with.  Others, well, we lost touch with each other the moment we parted ways.  Life's like that.  There are some that I miss more than others.  But I couldn't have asked for a better group of people with which to be abroad.  Especially compared to the Health Group (Healthies!).  Again, long story.  That's also the primary reason why this summer was tougher than others - I didn't have the opportunity to form friendships like the ones abroad, and my pre-abroad friends were also doing internships and their own things, so it was tough to see them or even talk to them sometimes.  Ah well.  Hopefully that will improve when I move back down to school later this month.  I'll be living with two of my best friends, so that should be a good thing.  ~Fingers crossed~ 

 Today, I sent in my ISP to the Office of International Education down at school.  I think that is the last thing I'll have to do for them relating to my grades from abroad.  In that sense, I guess the door has closed.  I still correspond with my host family from time to time.  I recently learned that my host parents will be doing a tour through Morrocco in October, including part on camel.  They're really excited, and frankly, I would be too if I were them.  I do hope to keep in touch with them, and see them again when I get back to Europe.

When I get back to Europe.  It's not an if.  It's a when.  I will be applying for a Fulbright Scholarship and other programs through which I might end up as a Teaching Assistant for an English class in France.  This would be something I'd do right after I graduate in May.  That's another scary thought.  I have to figure out what to do with my life.  Ick.  Perhaps thats why I reflect on Geneva with so much fondness - I know I'll never get another chance to live like that again, without bills to pay, without a job to maintain, able to jump on a plane and travel for as long as the money holds out, etc.  Perhaps I'm arriving at the point in my life where it's officially impossible to be "carefree!" anymore.  That's life.  Gotta move forward. 

Those last two sentences are pretty much what my host mom said to me when I said I was sad to be leaving Geneva.  Not so succinctly as that, though.  Life happens, always moving forward, she said.  The more we try to hang on to that which is going to end, or has already ended, the harder life becomes.  You've gotta keep moving forward, and not dwell on the past.  Those are some pretty wise ideas (my memory forces me to paraphrase), and I've tried to take them to heart.  It's proved to be easier said than done, though.  I'm sure it will become easier when I get back down to school, though, and I have little time to think about anything than other than what I'm doing five minutes in the future. 

I guess it's on this odd note that my blog comes to an end.  Thanks for reading (if anyone actually reads this besides the one person that I know has an RSS Feed set up for himself).  Go to Geneva if you get the chance.  Definitely go to Switzerland.  I'll give you tips, just ask me.  :~)   And with that, I declare this blog to be officially closed.

My goal with this one is to cover all the small little trips, random activities, and other adventures that I had in my last weeks in Switzerland - essentially everything from when my ISP was turned in on the 27th of April to the day I left on May 8.  It'll be a lot, and it will be random and scattered, but hopefully it will make some sense and follow some kind of chronological order.  I know that I have already forgotten some of the small, little things, but hopefully I can remember enough, because that's one of the reasons I'm doing this - to get it all down, so that I won't forget. 

Ok, so: the ISPs were due on Friday, April 27th, and since I also gave my 30-minute oral presentation on that day, I was completely and totally done with the program on the 27th.  I didn't take any major trips, though, since we had to go see all of the others students present their ISPs from Monday through Thursday of the following week, though only in the mornings.  In the afternoons, we had to take 15-minute ACTFL (American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages) tests in order to gauge our proficiency at French, but they were literally just conversations with the Academic Directors (ADs), so they were nothing at all to worry about.  The point of all this is: we had the afternoons off the week after the ISPs were due. 

But before we get to that week, we have to get through the weekend: the Saturday after I turned in my ISP (the 28th), I got together with a bunch of other students and went to the beach in Rolle, a town right on the lake.  One of the other students had been told by their host parents that the beach in Rolle was the best in the region, so we took their word for it and took the train late in the morning to get to Rolle around noon.  The beach was about a 15 or 20-minute walk from the train station, just on teh other side of the "camping" - Swiss for "trailer park."  Yes, they do have them in Switzerland, but they're still a little nicer than the backwoods trailer parks that spring to mind when you think of trailer parks in the U.S.  In any case, the beach turned out to be rocky (like most beaches on Lac Leman), but there were large grassy areas behind the beach proper, so the nine or so other students and I lay down on the grass, played frisbee, ate the food we brought, and otherwise just chilled at the beach all afternoon.  At one point, the three other guys there and I rented a paddleboat for 30 minutes - you could just take it out on the lake, as long as you didn't go more than 300 meters away from the coast and you had it back on time.  It was fun, with the two Richmond men peddling and the other two lounging in the back.  We almost didn't get it back on time, though - the exchange with Deel (the other Richmond student) was hilarious:

Me: "Deel, how much time do we have left?"

Deel: "A half-hour."

Me: "No, we had a half-hour total."

Deel: "Yeah, so we have a half-hour."

Me: "We've been out here a while already... We left at 3:45.  What time is it now?"

Deel: "4:10."

Me: "And we had a half-hour.  So we have to be back in five minutes??"

Deel: "Oh, shit, yeah!"

That is just a summary - it took a little longer than that to get the point across, but I can't remember exactly what the exchange was.  It was hilarious at the time, though... maybe you had to be there. 

In any case, after an afternoon well-spent at the beach, I caught the 5:15 PM train back to Nyon because I had to be home by 6:30 PM in order to go to dinner at my host brother's apartment with my host parents.  He and his boyfriend have a really nice apartment in Gland (where a bunch of other students in my program lived) and he makes amazing pizzas from scratch.  We got there around 8:00 PM and stayed until just after 11:00 PM, having enjoyed a good evening of pizza, conversation, and Swiss German rock music (including one song that really REALLY plagiarized the music from an American song, though I forget which one it was at this point...). 

The next day, I went hiking with my host parents in the mountains behind the city of Montreux.  After my adventures on la Saleve (see the last post), I was a little leery of hiking at the tops of the big mountains, but they assured me that the path we were going to take would be really easy and not at all dangerous.  We took the autoroute until we were past Lausanne, and then we got off and took the backroads through the vineyards of the Swiss Riviera (as the area between Lausanne and Montreux along Lac Leman is called).  The towns there were beautiful and old, and the vineyards were built into the hillsides using vast systems of terraces that were absolutely breathtaking.  The Swiss are best known for their white wines (Chablais from Valais, for example), but at that point, the wine could have been crappy and I wouldn't have cared because it was just that cool-looking. 

We started up into the hills behind Montreux and the roads quickly became very narrow and extremely serpentine as we headed up towards the top of the mountains, which I think were still technically the "pre-Alps."  The Swiss refusal of guardrails again made me a little nervous, and it was necessary to honk the horn every time you went around a blind corner because the roads were only wide enough for one car to pass at a time - there were little pull-offs every so often that were used to pass oncoming vehicles.  The area we were in was actually right around the train line that my friends and I had taken from Montreux to Interlaken, and we saw the same train both while driving up and while returning. 

We got to a parking lot at the top of the hills, and started our hike along a path that was actually a road for Jeeps.  The road was built when the Swiss constructed avalanche barriers on the sides of the mountains - large metal frames that stick out from the mountains at 90 degree angles in order to support the snow in the winter and help to prevent large avalanches.  The walk was very easy and the views were amazing - both on and off the mountain.  There were large snails, the largest I've ever seen, everywhere on the path.  These were the kinds of snails that the French use for food from time to time - les escargots.  As we proceeded, the path began to narrow, though, especially after we got past the point where the avalanche barriers stopped, thus losing the road.  The path went from Jeep-sized to, well, a couple feet wide, and then a foot wide.  From there it would kind of momentarily disappear and then come back - it was quite an adventure - especially the area when we had to walk across the snow that still stayed on the mountain.  It was a little slippery, notably for me since I was the heaviest member of the group.  I was getting really, really nervous by this point, because while the hill wasn't a sheer cliff like on la Saleve, it was still a really steep grassy grade, and it was a LONG way down to the valley, perhaps 400 meters.  I was also a little unnerved by the woman who came back in the opposite direction because there was another large patch of snow across the path, and she didn't want to cross it because she was hiking alone.  That instilled some very dramatic images in my mind.  When we got to that patch of snow, I finally spoke up and said that I needed to stop because I was simply getting too stressed and freaked out (though truthfully I had been stressed for a while before that, but too proud to say anything).  My host mom was also a little leery of traversing the next patch of snow, since it was much bigger than the former.  They saw I was pretty freaked out, and they were really nice and supportive and got me back across the first snowfall to where the path widened a little bit, and that's where we stopped to eat the picnic lunch we had brought with us. 

It was good we turned back when we did because it was starting to cloud over really quickly.  The weather on the radio had said that the atmosphere over the mountains was really unstable that day and called for rain the late afternoon.  I wasn't prepared for the instability that they described, though, and watching the clouds develop was absolutely amazing - it was like someone had hit a fast-forward button.  The clouds erupted like mushrooms and just boiled and grew exponentially, and it was moving ridiculously fast.  It was incredible.  We finished lunch and headed back down, and once we got back to the road-like part of the trail, I was absolutely fine.  We got back to the car after stopping to check out a refuge (a building maintained by a hiking club that is always unlocked so that hikers can stay overnight in the mountains if they're doing multiple-day hikes), and right as we walked into the parking lot, it started to sprinkle.    

On the way back down the hill, we stopped at a little rock-climbing wall that had been prepared on a section of rockface and watched people practice their skills - including 6- or 7-year olds.  It was pretty amazing, though not at all my kind of outdoors activity.  On our drive back, we drove through the wine country again and it was still beautiful, even in the clouds.  We hopped on the autoroute after getting stuck in a traffic jam on a back road, and it started to drizzle rather steadily.  The contrast between when we entered a tunnel and when we exited it, however, was astounding: when we entered, there was steady drizzle.  When we came out, there was hail, wind, heavy rain, thunder and lightning - essentially a massive storm.  It slowed traffic down a little bit and lasted until we were on the other side of Lausanne.  When we got home, though, it was sunny at our house.  If what I understand is true, the other end of the lake is always a lot more unstable weatherwise because of the mountains and also the lake itself... perhaps kind of like lake-effect snow off of the Great Lakes, though that specific phenomenon doesn't happen off of Lac Leman. 

So that was the weekend after the ISP - a very good and very entertaining time to follow a very stressful and almost miserable week.  The hiking stress was a good thing in retrospect, and it felt good to be able to say that I had pushed my limits regarding the vertigo/fear of heights.  I think I'm ready to call it vertigo, because there were a few moments that I looked out at the other mountains and valleys, and my eyes did some weird things with depth of field that was kind of disconcerting.  In any case, I lived, and I'm better for the experience.  My host mom was really understanding about the fact that, as she pointed out, they had been doing this all their lives, and it wasn't my "habitude" - something I was used to.  She was certain that if I had two more months, I would be completely over it.  She cited the example of the friend with whom my host dad climbed Mont Blanc (the tallest mountain in Europe) who had been even more afraid of heights than I was before he trained for Mont Blanc - which he climbed without any problem.  So, it is possible!

The majority of the following week was spent doing little things in the afternoon - I spent one afternoon souvenir shopping for friends and family and taking my ACTFL exam.  One afternoon, a group of us went to Gland after the ISP presentations to go to a Vietnamese restaraunt and then go to the beach in Gland, which was much rockier, shadier, and secluded, but still had a lot of charm.  The rocks there were also INCREDIBLE skipping stones, and I was able to consistently get more than five skips.  While walking to the beach (a little hike from the main area of Gland), we also passed something my host dad had mentioned a long time before - the toblerones.  These are cement anti-tank fortifications that the Swiss built during World War II to help fend off a feared (and planned) Nazi invasion.  Since it would have been impossible to defend Geneva, the Swiss Army built a solid line of anti-tank fortifications stretching from the lakeshore in Gland to the town of Begnins, at the base of the Jura Mountains.  They would fight a holding action there and then retreat up into the "Reduit National," the massive system of fortifications that the Swiss constructed in the Alps.  From there, they would fight a guerilla war against the Nazis in a terrain where tanks or airplanes would be useless.  I already knew all this, but it was really cool to see the actual fortifications that still stand to this day.

The two other weekday afternoons were very relaxed and non-stressful.  The ISP presentations in the morning were hit-or-miss, with some being really good and others being...well... not (specifically one that everyone in the program would immediately identify just by the description I just gave).  Thursday evening, there was an aperitif (essentially a combinations of drinks and appetizers) at a little restaurant in Nyon for all of the students and their host families, and that was fun, if sometimes awkward.  Some host families didn't come, so there were a number of student "orphans," but it was rather awkward in that the host families didn't know each other, so we were having to try to introduce them, and yeah.  It was just not the most comfortable social experience.  Aftewards, I stayed in Nyon with a bunch of other students and hung out at the Chateau and a bar in Nyon until the last train of the evening at 10:53 PM.  A good time was had by all (though some students had far too good a time if you know what I mean...). 

We had made plans to go to Yvoire, France, the next morning.  It's a medieval town across the lake that we had heard was really cool, and ferries run regularly from Nyon to Yvoire.  The plan had been to meet at 8:30 AM in Nyon in order to buy lunch at Migros before heading over on the 9:30 ferry.  Well, of the 8 or so students who had said they would be there, only one other student was there when I reached the gare in Nyon.  We didn't quite know what to do, so we started calling people with limited success.  We managed to piece together that a bunch of students had stayed the night at the apartment of one of the students who lived in Nyon, so we went over to his place and knocked on the guest bedroom window, much to the surprise of the two students who had been sharing it.  There were a total of three students at that apartment, so we got them rallied and going and eventually got everyone coordinated to meet for the 11:20 ferry across the lake. 

The ferry ride was nice, though a little chilly from time to time, and Yvoire itself was a very nice old, medieval town.  We had lunch there, and in the process, I managed to cut my finger slightly with my brand new Swiss Army knife, so I started going into shops asking if anyone had a band-aid.  The first shop - a convenience store - provided me with a paper towel and the guy gave me a weird look.  The second shop had nothing and told me that the nearest pharmacy was a 2-km hike away, but referred me across the street to a restaurant, where a very nice woman rinsed my finger in alcohol and then put a band-aid on it.  In return, I thanked her a lot and bought a cone of gelato.  The French people in Yvoire are very nice and accomodating, fyi.  We lingered in Yvoire for a couple hours and then took the mid-afternoon ferry back to Nyon.  There, I chilled in the apartment of the student who hosted the previous night's sleepover before meeting everyone else in the group for a ferry to Geneva that was organized by our ADs.  They paid for it, and we all clamored aboard for the hour-long ride down the lake to Geneve, where we had a group dinner at the same Italian restaurant on Rue de Lausanne that we had eaten at during Orientation.  We racked up a hefty bill - CHF 1600.00 (I peeked).  It was also awkward in that their credit card was denied, but we were on the way out the door by that point, after having said the first in a long series of goodbyes since some students were leaving on Saturday.

Saturday, the same student who hosted the previous night's sleepover threw a dinner party at his apartment, so I went to help during the afternoon with the preparations.  Nine students were invited and it went really well - he served raclettes, and made some incredible hors d'oeuvres.  After dinner, we were all feeling a little sick to our stomachs because of the sheer volume of cheese we had all eaten (raclettes is essentially melted cheese put over pickles, onions, potatoes, or meat), and the majority of students crashed into a food coma.  I was still feeling ok, and felt better moving than just sitting and feeling the cheese settle in my stomach, so I helped the host with clean-up.  We then all watched Little Miss Sunshine and then went to bed - four of us stayed at his apartment that night. 

The next day, I got up early and went home, taking a brief nap and then starting my day.  Essentially, I met up with two other students and bummed around Geneva and Nyon that day.  Not much to tell - there had been a marathon in Geneva, and so some of the main roads were closed and there were all kinds of free things available - granola bars, shampoo, CHF 30.00 to use at Migros's sports store... the weather was beautiful, and we sat on the rocks that jutted out into the lake for a while, then went to Old Town and got gelato on the Bourg-de-Four.  It was just a very chill, pleasant afternoon.

Monday, the day before we left, the group of us decided to have one last group event, and so we all met at the Gare Cornavin in Geneva for a picnic by the lake, in the same place where we had done it previously.  It was good, but bittersweet.  Oh, but on the way in, when my train arrived, the student I was with and I saw, literally, about a hundred riot cops in the train station in full armor, but they were just standing around.  We couldn't figure out why they were there - the only reason we could come up with was the fact that Nicolas Sarkozy had just won the French presidential elections the day before and they were afraid a riot would break out in Geneva as had happened in some French cities.  That didn't make any sense, though, because the Swiss don't riot.  They just don't.  My host father later explained that they were probably practicing for the Euro 2008 Soccer Championship, which Switzerland is co-hosting with Austria.  That made sense to me, because I had read in the paper the week before how the Swiss police had practiced storming a train car in Lausanne. 

The picnic went well, and then we wandered Geneva one last time, doing some last minute souvenir shopping and a little clothing shopping for those students who were traveling around Europe for a while instead of immediately leaving for the U.S.  Then, I went home for my last meal with my homestay family (my host mom put on a really good spread of food, including roast beef, lentils, salad, rosti-like potatoes, and red currant ice cream) and then finished my packing. 

I didn't have to pack all that much because I had already sent two boxes of material back to the States - I determined that mailing the stuff would be cheaper than paying baggage overage charges on two bags with two airlines.  Mailing the boxes, though, turned out to be much more difficult than I anticipated.  I had decided to use the post office in Trelex, one of the towns along the route of the Little Red Train, because the post office was immediately next to the train station, and that would have prevented me from having to take the boxes all teh way to Nyon or Geneva.  So, I took an earlier train one morning the week before I left and got off in Trelex, and filled out all the paperwork to get my boxes through customs.  The gentleman behind the glass gave me the total postage of CHF 136.00, and I pulled out my Visa, only to find out the hard way that La Poste doesn't take Visa - they only take their own credit cards.  I also only had CHF 10.00 on me.  And, unlike most post offices in Switzerland, La Poste in Trelex doesn't have an ATM.  I was royally screwed.  He started to describe how to get to the ATMs in Genolier or at a gas station near the autoroute (which was closer than Genolier), but then I stopped him and pointed out that I didn't have a car.  I tried to call the student who lived in Trelex to see if she had enough cash to cover me, but she didn't pick up her phone.  Luckily, there was an English-speaking man behind me in line who offered to drive me down to the gas station (about 2 km away) and then said I could hitchhike back. 

It was the only option on the table, so I left my backpack as collateral at the post office and hopped in the guy's minivan.  He dropped me at the gas station, and I got my money, and then decided to just run back to Trelex.  It was a little bit of a run - it took about 15 minutes - but I managed to make it back, pay, and still make the next Little Red Train to get to Geneva on time.   I was out of breath for a while, but it was an adventure if nothing else.  That guy who gave me a ride was also a godsend.  Yay for kind, non-sketchy Swiss people!   When I mentioned this story to our homestay coordinator at the aperitif that night, her jaw dropped so hard that I thought it was going to fall off and she proceeded to give me a little lecture about accepting rides from strangers, but I felt perfectly justified, and it was safe, so yeah.  I got my boxes mailed, and that made packing a  lot easier. 

In the morning, my host mom gave me a ride down to the Nyon train station so that I didn't have to lug my bags on the Little Red Train.  The weather was patchy, with rain here and sun there.  There was a massive rainbow that stretched across the entire valley and the lake and the mountains... it was incredible.  Switzerland didn't make it easy to leave - not at all.  But I got to the train, and we said our goodbyes, and from there, it was a train to the aeroport, a plane to Paris, a plane to New York-JFK, and a plane to Dulles in DC.  An uneventful trip.

So that chronicles my last days in Switzerland, but I'm not done yet.  Look for a couple more postings recounting more academic things.  Thanks for putting up with my long travelogue-style postings to this point, but we're getting into the home stretch, so stick with me.  You won't regret it.  :~)    

Ok, so technically I'm back in the United States now.  I didn't post for a while because I was concentrating on trying to have the best possible time and squeeze as much experience into my last days there as possible.  So, now I'm going to backtrack and try to get this all down on "paper" before I forget it all, starting with the weekend of April 20, when my friends came to visit Geneva. (You might have already noticed, but the pictures from this weekend have been up for a week or two, I just didn't get around to actually writing a post about it.  But anyway...)

Matthew was coming from Turkey and Meg from Italy, and they both descended upon Geneva (literally - they flew in) on the Thursday preceding that weekend, Matthew around 1:00 PM and Meg around 6:30 PM.  I had been frantically working on my ISP up until about noon on Thursday, when I left the U.N. Library and went to the Aeroport to pick up Matthew, who was flying in from Ankara, via Munich.   I happily collected him outside of baggage claim, especially since we hadn't seen each other since before I left for la Suisse.  We hopped a bus back to downtown and I showed him around my city, getting lunch at Manor (which was a little overwhelming for him at first, but it was for me when I first ate there, so I empathized) and then heading over to the Jet d'Eau, where we lingered for a while.  I had never been out there while it was running - my only other trip out there was during Orientation when there was ice all over the Pier and Allison and I thought we were going to fall in and die.  This was more fun, and Matthew took a lot of photos, being the photog/fotog that he is.  After leaving the Jet d'Eau, we headed up into Old Town and got gelato at one of the cafes on the Bourg-de-Four, the big square at the top of Old Town.  Afterwards, we stopped by the Cathedral, which we climbed and then sat in for a while and chatted, enjoying the simplicity of the decoration - essentially the Protestant-ness.  I still think that the Cathedral St.-Pierre in Geneva is amongst my favorite churches in Europe (that I saw), though of course, I'm probably biased.  We talked for a long time in the Cathedral and then decided it was time to get Meg at the Aeroport, so we went over there and waited for her flight from Rome. 

We made comedically appropriate signs and waited for her outside of the baggage claim/customs area.  After she came through and we all hugged and what not, we went straight to the train station at the airport, from which we could hop a train directly to Nyon.  I had hoped that she would be a little faster through door so that we could take one of the really sleek, new, sexy ICN trains, but alas, we ended up on one of the normal InterRegios.  Meg and I, if you don't know us, are ridiculously competitive with one another, and when I was in Italy, I had really been talking up the SBB CFF FFS (the Swiss trains) to the detriment of TrenItalia.  She didn't take this kindly, so I wanted to prove it. Though I didn't get the chance right off the bat, rest assured, I got her in the end.  :~) 

Actually, on the train, we immediately launched into a large debate in which Meg took great offense to my opinions on Italy that I have posted on this blog.  It was a very intense, heated debate, in which we settled on the fact that the Italian way of living is simply not compatible with my way of living and my style of life and that Meg loved  the Italian style.  We got back to Nyon and then transferred onto the Little Red Train and headed back to my house, where my host mom had prepared a dinner for us.  My host mom really went above and beyond anything I expected her to do for us - she was incredibly helpful.  The dinner was really good, and we managed to stay in French about 95% of the time, which I think impressed my host parents.  They also appreciated the gifts that Meg and Matthew had brought.

After dinner, we planned out our Friday, which was going to be very well-traveled.  My host mom had bought CHF 35.00 Carte Journalieres from two towns in Vaud for the three of us to us.  Each commune (town) has two of these to sell per day, and given the fact that we were trying to find them less than a week in advance, we were extremely lucky that my host mom was able to find them - two in Trelex and one in Gland.  With these passes, it is possible to travel anywhere in Switzerland on any bus, train, or boat for a 24-hour period.  They're incredibly convenient and they're an extremely good value if you can find them.  We planned out our trip and left early on Friday morning.

We took the LRT down to Nyon around 8:00 AM and got a train in Nyon that went away from Geneva, around the Lac Leman to the town of Montreux, world-famous for its Jazz Festival.  In Montreux, we got on the GoldenPass Panoramic Train that went up from Montreux through the Alps, leaving Swiss Romandy and entering the Swiss German region, changing trains at a town called Zweissimen.  From here, we took a less panoramic (but still great) train to Interlaken.  The train ride was amazing, because the panoramic train was almost entirely covered in glass, so you could see everywhere, and since the weather was beautiful that day, we could see everything: amazing mountains (the Alps), fields, cows (Meg! Vaches!), waterfalls, everything.  I had never been through this part of Switzerland, so it was new for me, too. 

In Interlaken, we checked out the train schedule and found out how to get to our target destination: Grindelwald.  We had an hour to kill in Interlaken, so we stopped at the local Coop (a supermarket chain, the main rival to Migros) and got a lunch which we then ate, though we saved some for the train to Grindelwald.  We also explored the town a little bit, but we discovered that you don't really go to Interlaken for Interlaken, you go for the things to do around it: hiking, paragliding, boating, rafting, etc.  There were still five-star hotels and what not, though. 

The train to Grindelwald was slower than the rest, but the scenery was amazing, especially a great waterfall that was easily several hundred meters high (see photos).  From Grindelwald, we decided to hike to a glacier that came down really low into the valley.  Over the course of the hike, we saw beautiful fields, got scared by a dog who startled us from a window, waited (happily) for Matthew to take a lot of pictures, played in an Alpine stream (or more specifically, next to one), and scrambled over the remains of an avalanche that served a bridge over the stream for us (since we had long since abandoned the path to get to the stream).  It was a great time.

We hiked up to the glacier, just to find that it was no longer there.  The effects of global warming have manifested themselves very strongly in Switzerland, and this specific glacier, which used to be very low, now rests only at the top of the mountain.  The owner of a restaurant near the glacier gave Meg a brochure that had a picture of the glacier from the 1980s, and the contrast was staggering.  I got a picture of the two things next to each other: brochure photo and reality.  Several hundred meters of glacier are now just gone. 

We hiked down to the train and got back to Interlaken around dinnertime, so we grabbed food from Coop again (a cheap and flexible alternative to restaurant dining) and then got on a train to Bern, from where we would return to Nyon.  I was excited because we finally got to ride on one of the posh InterCity trains, and this one was a double-decker, which I had never been on before, and let me tell you, it was posh.   We were also essentially alone in our car, so we could be loud and not have to worry, which was a plus.  The train ride around the lakes surrounding Interlaken was beautiful as the sun set, and we got to Bern around 8:30 PM. 

We only had an hour layover in Bern, so I showed Matthew and Meg the Palais de Parlement and the Cathedral, and we walked around the old part of the city before returning to the gare for another double-decker InterCity train to Lausanne.  On this one, Meg finally showed her fatigue and passed out completely, and after stopping in Fribourg, the train got to Lausanne, and we debarked to connect to an InterRegion to Nyon, where we arrived just before midnight. 

We had to pay for the Little Red Train to get home, since it was after midnight and the Carte Journalieres didn't work anymore, but all things considered, those things were a STEAL!  CHF 35.00 per person for the travel we did that day was obscene... that amount of traveling on a normal day would easily surpass CHF 200.00 per person - just to get to Montreux is CHF 40.00 round-trip.  I made sure to thank my host mom again, and repeatedly.  It was also a relief to get back into Suisse Romande (the French part) again, because it's more stressful to travel where you can't speak the language. 

Saturday, we got up a little later (though still early by American college student standards) and went into Geneva in order to take a tour of the UN headquarters there.  It was rather underwhelming, and I could have easily told them everything the tour guide said.  They didn't even have lights on in some places - a very Swiss thing.  No one's there on Saturday, so why have lights on for the thirty or so tourists that come through every hour?  It also might be that the U.N. is so underfunded that they don't have the money to keep the lights on over the weekend.  You think I'm kidding, right now, but I'm not. 

After that, we relaxed in a park right near the U.N. and then played in the fountains outside the front gate of the Palais des Nations.  These fountains were new and they are ridiculously fun to play in - just a plaza with fountains coming out of the ground that change patterns and power and volume and you can run or bike through them.  We spent a lot of time there, actually.  After that, we went back downtown and got lunch at Istanbul 2, which Matthew approved of to my relief, and then went over towards the Jet d'Eau and Old Town since Meg hadn't seen them yet.  They were both really tired by the time we got to the top of Old Town - really tired - so we hung out for a while in the playground overlooking Plainpalais and the Parc des Bastions.  We eventually went down into the park, taking in the diverse crowd and playing chess on the oversized boards near the entrance to the park.  I had the confidence to play Meg (who's a beginner, but shows promise, at chess) but I would never play any of the old men who literally spend all day there. 

We got dinner at a Moroccan restaruant on the Rive Gauche before heading back to the gare and returning to Nyon to meet up with Ben, the guy with whom I had travelled to Croatia, France, and Italy.  We loitered around the chateau in Nyon and the ruins before ending up playing on a playground near the water.  We caught the second-to-last train back to my house and ended up just crashing out when we got home - especially Matthew. 

The next day, Sunday, was rather slow as Meg got her stuff ready to go.  My host family was kind enough to drive us all to the aeroport and wait with us until Meg went through security because after she left, Matthew, my host parents, and I continued on to hike up La Saleve, the mountain closest to Geneva.  Technically, this mountain is in France, but it is maintained by a Swiss hiking society, and the majority of those who hike it are Swiss.  It was a really good, steep hike, and from where we started to the top was around a 600-meter difference in elevation.  The top of la Saleve is a prime launching point for paragliders (paraponters en francais) and so there were a constant cloud of them around the mountain.  It was really cool as we went up and eventually were hiking and looking down on the paragliders... (see photos).  The top was covered in a grassy plain, from which you could have a 360-degree view of the region, with the French Alps on one side (though Mont Blanc was shrouded in clouds that day), the Rhone Valley on another side, Geneva on a third, and Lac Leman on the last.  It was amazing, and we sat in the grass on the top to eat a picnic lunch that my host mother had packed and watch the paragliders take off.  I will paraglide at some point - I have been inspired to do so, and had I had another few weeks in Geneva, I know I would have done it.  Oh well...

The trip down was much more interesting.  I know that I have a fear of heights (ironically, given my own personal height), but on the way up, it hadn't really played that much of a role.  However, in all hiking, it is much easier to go up than to come down.  We made a loop at the top of la Saleve, going down a different way than we came up, and in order to loop back, we had to take a route that literally had us walking across the sheer rockface that is the Geneva side of the mountain.  It was pretty ridiculous - the path was sometimes as wide as your average dining room table with a sheer drop of 300-400 meters off of the side.  No railing, and only occasionally was there a wire attached to the mountain that you could hold on to.  It was difficult for me to get through, though the fact that Matthew was there helped because I didn't want to embarass myself in front of my friend in my own country.  I did have to tell him to stop with the snide comments, though, because they were, in all honesty, not helping.  I got almost pathetic at times, but I got through it - with the help of a hiking pole that we had joked before leaving the house were only used by old men.  Oh well.  I always knew I was an old man at heart. 

We got down to the car around 5:00 PM (following the sound of the rooster that was constantly crowing outside of the house near the parking lot - if I had to live with that thing, we'd have been eating chicken for dinner within a week) and both Matthew and I completely passed out in the car on teh way home.  I know we passed back into Switzerland without going through the massive customs checkpoint on the highway though - Matthew and I had both brought our passports just in case we got stopped, but we didn't.  We got back and had a light dinner before Matthew and I watched some TV on my computer (well, I watched and he passed out) and then we went to bed. 

The next morning (Monday), we got up and went back into Geneva, bumming around until Matthew's plane.  We got lunch again at Istanbul 2 and other than that, the only major event of note is that three guys tried to pickpocket us.  I know this because it was the same way someone successfully managed to pickpocket my host father a few weeks earlier.  With Matthew's large backbacking backpack and our English, we were clearly not from Geneva, and thus seemed to make easy targets, so they came up to us asking if we had a lighter, which we did not, and said so, and kept walking.  Then they started pawing at Matthew as if to get his attention saying "C'mon man..." (in French), but I definitely saw a hand going towards his pocket, so I grabbed his arm, pulled him away from them and essentially told them to frak off.  That was the first time anything like that had ever happened to me in Geneva, though I had heard it does happen from time to time.  Oh well - they didn't get anything.  Matthew's wallet wasn't even in his pocket, anyway, so take that pickpocketers.  I got Matthew to the aeroport a couple hours before his flight, and then after parting, went back to work, furiously trying to finish my ISP on time (which was the Friday following that Monday). 

I was really glad that my friends were able to visit because it was so great to see them, but I also wanted to show someone Geneva and Switzerland.  I wanted someone to be able to understand how beautiful it was, why I wanted to stay there forever, why I fell in love with the country so much.  It's one thing to read about it and to see pictures, but to truly understand it, you have to go there.  And in a way, showing them Switzerland made me appreciate it more, too.  I guess this all probably sounds corny and cliche, but oh well - it is how it is.  My host family was also amazing both in welcoming my friends into their house (Meg, Matthew, and I all slept in the finished attic where there are mattresses laid out), feeding them, and providing for us the Carte Journalieres and taking us to la Saleve.  I really couldn't thank them enough, especially after Matthew tried to thank them for all they did, and the response from my host mother was, "Well, we didn't do it for you, we did it for Chris because he's so nice."  That's kind of a backhanded sentence, both reproaching Matthew and complimenting me, and to this day, I haven't quite deciphered all the meanings in it, but in any case, I couldn't thank them, enough.

Ok, so that's one post down, and several to go.  There will be a big one to cover the varied activities of the last week and a half, another to chronicle the ISP process, and another review of the program in general.   All this and more as Christopher's blog continues (with much greater frequency) to its eventual decline...

I'm back!  And yes, I'm alive and I survived the ISP process, though just barely.  There was one night that I was up 'til 4 AM, but really, that wasn't too bad.  And I didn't eat dinner with my homestay family from Monday through Wednesday.  Oh well... 

However, I'll discuss the ISP, and much more, later.  First, I need to recount my voyage to Nice, Monaco, Genoa, and Cinque Terre before I completely forget all of it.  Pardon me if it's a little hazy from time to time, but the trip was a couple weeks ago (Thurdsay to Tuesday spanning Easter weekend, actually...). 

SO!  This trip was originally two separate trips: I really wanted to go to Nice and Monaco, and my friend Ben had plans to meet friends of his in Italy.  As it turned out, though, there was some miscommunication and Ben's friends ended up going to Italy (Genoa specifically) a few days later than planned, but Ben already had the non-refundable train tickets.  So, we decided to combine trips into one long, massive, whirlwind tour of the Mediterranean coast.  We actually decided this before we went to Croatia, but it worked out well that we got along great and didn't want to kill each other after spending essentially two weeks with each other every waking minute of every day (with a brief break on the Wednesday between returning from Croatia and heading to Nice).  A girl, Maria (see the Geneva Auto Show entry), came with us on this trip, while Allison (the girl who accompanied us to Croatia) went to Sarajevo for a week with another student.  (You think that's exotic?  Well, another girl went alone to Sarajevo for a few days - on short notice - for her ISP, and a guy went to Kosovo for a few days for his ISP.  Do the AD's know this?  Well, they will soon, since we've all turned in our ISPs. That will be interesting...)

We took the train from Geneva to Nice on that Thursday (the 5th of April), taking a "TER" train from Geneva to a town called Valence (in France), where we transferred onto a TGV.  Ben and I were sitting together the entire time, but Maria had different reservations on the TGV, and ended up sitting at the other end of the train.  Oh well.  Things happen, I guess.  We passed the time (it was a six-hour trip) by playing cards and watching Scrubs on Ben's iPOD.  It was pretty entertaining.  The views, though, took up a lot of our time, though, especially once we started traveling along the coast (all the way from Marseille to Nice).  It was breathtaking to say the least.  The water was shades of blue that I never knew existed in real life, and the mountains right by the water were craggy and magnificent, with little houses built all over them.  I could definitely see myself living in one of them. 

We got to Nice around 6:00 PM and, after finding Maria, we worked our way to our hostel, the Villa St. Exupery.  Now, this hostel was listed among the top in the world according to Lonely Planet in 2005, so we had pretty high expectations.  And in most ways, they were met.  However, we also learned what happens when a hostel is too nice.  To get to the hostel, we had to walk to a bus stop from the train station and then take the bus up onto one of the many hills that stands immediately behind downtown Nice (to clarify: there's the ocean, and then Nice, and then a bunch of hills... Nice is in the region known as the "Maritime Alps").  We had written directions, but when we got off the bus, we realized that there were two Americans walking back to the hostel was well, and they knew where it was, so we followed them. 

The hostel itself was very, very nice.  It was large - many rooms built for 10-13 people.  It was run by...well, I'm not sure, but almost everyone we interacted with was either Australian or American.  The hostel used to be a monastery, and the chapel had been converted into a bar/Internet cafe/restaurant where breakfast was served in the morning, you could buy dinner at night, and there were 1 euro drinks.  What we found, though, was that a hostel this nice serves to... distract less outgoing travelers from actually knowing where they are.  We asked two Americans who we met, one girl from Arkansas and a guy whose home state I can't remember, what there was to do in Nice.  They both responded (separately, mind you) that they weren't really sure... they didn't get out of the hostel much.

Pardon me while I rant here, but what the frak??  You're in NICE!  in FRANCE!  and you DON'T LEAVE THE HOSTEL??  Granted, it was a nice, well-run hostel, but it was completely filled with Americans, British, and Australians... you're not experiencing France at all!  It was essentially a high-end American college dorm!  The hostel, in my opinion, should be a place where you sleep, and maybe get breakfast.  In this case, check your e-mail.  But you don't stay there all day long.  At least go down to the beach!  Or go to Cannes!  Or Monaco!  Sigh... this trip really taught me how not to be a stupid/ignorant tourist, mostly by the examples of others being such tourists.  In any case, we refused to be like that, so we left the hostel and went down to the city to find dinner.

We ate at a restaurant, and it was very nice.  I can't remember what it was, though. I think it was a local-cuisine restaurant.  In any case, it was cool, and then we walked along the beach for a while.  The beach in Nice is rocky, and not to be walked on barefoot, but still very entertaining.  The sound of the water pulling and pushing at the rocks with each wave was spectacular, but impossible to put into words.  It was kind of like a whoosh followed by a rattle.  But yeah, we walked the beach and then tried to figure out the bus system to make it back to the hostel.  The bus system was completely different at night (night buses...woot!)  and thus only ran about once an hour.  We found the bus stop where we could take the proper bus from, but there were some creepy drunk guys there who started harassing us (specifically Maria) so we walked up to the next stop on the line.  It took a while, and we were all tired and getting cranky, but we got back to the hostel and went to bed around midnight.

The next day was our big travel day:  we got breakfast at the hostel and wandered through the Nice market a little bit, and then we got on a bus and headed to a town called Eze, an old medieval town that was recommended by the people at the hostel.  We took a bus to get there, and we found that it was very nice, very picturesque...very expensive, and very touristy.  Literally, I don't think anyone really lived there, it was just a tourist stop.  We wandered through it, and then decided to continue on to Monaco (which was the final destination of the day).  We went back to the bus stop just to discover that there wasn't another bus for an hour.  So... we sought out lunch (it was about noon) and ended up getting a pizza each from a little pizzeria a little bit up the road.  Tourist Tip #2: Don't eat hamburgers and hot dogs while in France!  Granted, they were 14- and 15-year olds, but the adults with them shouldn't suggest that.... sigh.   We people-watched and ate pizza for an hour, and then hopped on the bus to get to Monaco. 

Monaco was surreal, sort of.  The bus dropped us off right by the world-famous Monte Carlo casino, and Ben and I had already decided to try our luck at a casino in Monaco.  The Monte Carlo was closed until 3 PM and we didn't want to wait, so we went into the one across the street (which, unlike the Monte Carlo, didn't have an entrance fee).  We each decided that we would play 10 euros on the slots, and we each proceeded to lose 10 euros within about five minutes.  But, hey, we lost it in Monaco, right?  Essentially, Ben and I both paid 10 euro to have the right to say, in a snotty accent, "I gambled in Monaco..."

The rest of the day, we just wandered around Monaco, taking in the richness.  It's very, very small, essentially two coves and two peninsulas, but very, very rich.  Yay for being a tax haven!  We wandered around the casinos (one one of the peninsulas) before walking down through the harbor and then up onto the other peninsula (which houses the Monagesque Old Town and the Royal Palace).  The harbor, though, was absolutely insane.  There were yachts there the likes of which I had never imagined.  The highlight was the Lady Moira, a massive yacht with: a speedboat tucked in the side, a helipad on top, at least five decks, at least 7 people on the boat's staff, and an Aston-Martin parked outside.  It was by far the biggest yacht in the harbor that day.  It was after passing the Lady Moira that the three of us started to pretend to be very rich, talking loudly about how it wasn't big enough for us and, oh my, why would anyone ever get a Ferrari in that color?  That's the last one I would get... but maybe they couldn't afford anything better."  We had dressed up a little nicely to go Monaco (I was in a polo shirt and khakis), but we still got some very strange looks, especially from the owner of the Ferrari we were degrading.  Hehe. 

We wandered up to the Old Town and it was nice, but not actually that different from the rest of the Old Towns I've seen. There was one thing we saw, though, that completely blew us away just for its surreality.  There was a school, immediately at the bottom of the cliffs, and this school had a soccer field that was literally, right above the Mediterranean.  See the pictures.  There were students playing soccer in pristine white uniforms, and we decided that it was a British school, since all the game-related yelling we heard was in English.  There were all of the school stereotypes - the kids playing, the girls holding court on the bleachers, the kid getting mocked for having made a bad move.  We had to try and figure out, though, how much of a skewed sense of reality these kids had - they're playing soccer in one of the most pristine, rich places in teh world.  Did they grow up there?  Had they ever seen a slum?  How sheltered are they?  What have they experience that wasn't rich?  It just made us all think.....

After checking out the Royal Palace (from the outside) we tried to find someplace to eat dinner, but failed, and we ended up deciding to go back to Nice to eat dinner.  Instead of the bus, we took the train, and it was a very quick trip.  We were tired, and ended up eating at a Cambodian restaurant in Nice right near the train station.  It was good, but meh... I wasn't that enthusiastic. 

The next day, we just bummed around Nice.  We wandered up to the top of the hill overlooking Nice right by the water (where the old chateau used to be), and it was beautiful to look down on the city.  We wandered the market, and a book market that was incredible and at which I almost caught a book vendor in a horrible overpricing scam.  Note to vendors:  never leave an Amazon.com printout which lists the price of the book at 35 euros if you intend on charging 100 euros.  I pointed it out in the process of trying to negotiate him down - thinking that if I could get him under 50 euros, I'd have to buy it, and it was a really cool book.  He came up with a bunch of reasons why his book was better and different than the ones listed on the printout, and he would only come down to 80 euros, so I walked away.  Oh well... that was amongst my first experiences in negotiating a price with someone, though.

We spent much of the afternoon on the beach, just enjoying it, having bought lunch at the market which we then ate on the rocky beach.  Maria wanted to go Sephora, a makeup store, much to Ben's and my disappointment.  We let her lead in the efforts to find it, which she eventually did - just within the time limit we had set for the search. After her stop there, we wandered back towards the beach and just loitered there for the rest of the evening until dinner, which we had at a Nicoise restaurant in Old Town that was very good.  After that, we did something.... I can't remember what, though.  Then we went back to the hostel and got a good night's sleep before the train to Genoa the next morning.

 The next morning, we got to the train station just in time to make the train to Genoa, leaving the French train system, the SNCF, for the Italian train system, Trenitalia.  I have no personal grudge against Trenitalia, but I must say that I prefer the Swiss trains, then the French trains, and then the Italian trains.  Oh well.  The train ride from Nice to Genoa was relatively uneventful, though we did stop for a long time at the first station in Italy - no one knew why.  We got to Genoa, the Piazza Principe station, and then tried to figure out how to get to the hostel. 

Did I forget to mention that we arrived in Italy on Easter Sunday?  Yeah... we did.  In retrospect, that might have been a bad idea, since everything was closed.  EVERYTHING.  Easter in one of the most Catholic countries in the world will have that effect.  However, the buses were still running from time to time, and we had to take two to get to the hostel.  Ben had booked this one, and I had booked the one in Nice.  We got on the first bus and rode to the first station where we could transfer to our other bus.  This was where we started running into problems.  We looked at the schedule, which wasn't very logically laid out, which, added to teh fact that it was all in Italian, didn't really help.  It was definitely the right bus, and we were going to the terminus.  At one point, we mentioned the name of the terminus, Piazza Constanza, and the old man sitting on the bench started talking to us and pointing over towards an old hotel across the square.  None of us spoke Italian, and he only spoke Italian, so we had very little idea what he was saying.  I thought I saw another bus stop over there, but then he got on the next bus that came, and we kind of forgot about it.  Then, our bus came, and we got on just to realize that we were actually going in the wrong direction.  The other terminus, the train station Brignole, was just a few minutes away, so we just rode it all the way around, getting a couple strange looks from the driver.  It turned out the old man had been pointing to the other bus stop, which was the bus going in the correct direction, to Piazza Constanza.  How nice of him... if only we'd been able to understand!

The hostel turned out to be a thirty-minute bus ride up into the hills, a lot of loops and turns and climbing and horseshoe curves, but eventually we found it...to be closed.  This hostel closes in the afternoon, and despite the fact that they told Ben they'd open at 2:30 PM, it didn't open 'til 3:30 PM.  We waited there, and eventually moved in, with Ben and I staying in men's room and Maria in a women's room one floor down.  We met back at the desk a few minutes later, and Maria came with a girl whom she had met in her room - a Czech girl name Jana (pronounced "Yah-nah").  Jana is an au pair in Rome, and she hates it, so she travels a lot on weekends when her services are not required and happened to be alone in Genoa, so she joined us for the day. 

The four of us got on the bus and rode the 30-minute ride down the hill.  Most everything was closed, except things around the marina, which Ben said reminded him a lot of Baltimore.  They even have a massive aquarium.  It was really touristy, though, and pretty expensive, so we thought we'd give Genoa's Old Town a shot - normally a pretty good bet.  This Old Town, though, was actually kind of crappy - very dirty, and sometimes feeling rather unsafe.  We wandered and eventually found a small chapel, where we decided to bust out the map and find our way back to civilization.  We checked out the cathedral, which was actually pretty cool, because we walked in on the end of an Easter mass, and since Genoa is a city in Italy, it had its own archbishop and lots of other men with pointy hats.  There were lots of other tourists there, and it was pretty cool in general, with singing and lots of incense.  After it ended, we left and found the ducal palace, which had a large market in the front of it with FREE SAMPLES!  This was the first time I had seen free samples in a market, and it was very tasty - olive oil, wine, cheese, cookies, breads...  We then went up and found a main square with a huge fountain that was momentarily entertaining, and after this, we thought we'd wander down to the marina to try and find dinner, but it was still really expensive.  We wandered some more, and the only thing we could find that wasn't expensive and that was open was a pizzeria.  It was good.  I ate an entire pizza... all of it, and it was massive.  And it was good. 

After dinner, we wandered around down by the docks - though it wasn't as sketchy as that just sounded.  There was actually a massive market down in the marina earlier in the day where we had gotten gelato and the girls had looked at all the clothing, but we ended up just sitting on a bench amongst all the yachts chatting until we decided that we should get back to the hostel before the buses stopped running.  We ended up waiting at the bus stop for forty minutes, though, and eventually got back to the hostel rather frustrated and tired, but alive.

The next morning, we were going to try and make the 9:15 train to an Italian national park called Cinque Terre - five towns built right on the coast that are supposed to be absolutely beautiful.  We were trying for the 9:15 train because two of my friends, Meg and Matthew, were actually in Cinque Terre as well, and before my cell phone minutes ran out (damn roaming in France!) and I lost all communication with them, I had suggested we would be on that train, and I knew that they were in the town of Riomaggiore.  I had no way of knowing if I would find them there, but I figured, why not give it a try to follow the plan that we had almost created?  We left the hostel at 8:30, but we didn't realize that it was Easter Monday, which is just as much a holiday in Italy as Easter Sunday.  We waited a few minutes at the bus stop (the four of us, as Jana was leaving as well, though to Bologna, I think) when the SAME OLD MAN showed up at that bus stop.  It was the same old man who had appeared in Genoa on the first day, but whom we couldn't understand.  This time, though, we had someone with us who spoke Italian - Jana.  And he told us through her that the bus wasn't coming for forty minutes, so we wouldn't be getting to the station until at least 10:00 AM.  There was another option, however... we could walk, since Piazza Principe was only a fifteen minute walk straight down the hill.   The bus is so long because it has to take the roads, but on foot, we can take the stairs!  He showed us where to go, walking us to the top of the stairs himself, telling us about how he was a sailor in WWII, and how he thought "Stalin wasn't that bad" to Maria when she said she was Russian.  We left him at the top of the stairs and started the descent.  And, lo and behold, fifteen minutes later, we were walking down the final stairs to Piazza Principe, with ten minutes left to buy our tickets and make the train, which was RIDICULOUSLY crowded due to the fact that all of the Italians who didn't have to work were going to Cinque Terre as well. 

The train ride was two hours, and it was very warm and crowded.  I had to sit separately because it was too crowded when we got on the train to find three places together, even though it was a double-decker train.  It was ok, though, and I napped a little on the way to Riomaggiore.  We didn't really eat breakfast, so that helped with the entire "sleeping" thing.  We got to Riomaggiore, and Meg and Matthew were not there (they were in another town, I found out a couple weeks later), but we wandered and tried our best to get away from the hordes of American and British tourists.  We got some lunch at a pizzeria (again - limited cheap options) and then, once our initial hunger was satiated and we were less cranky and desperate, we got more food and wandered all the way up to the old fortress/castle to eat, where fewer tourists ventured.  It was also at that point that we decided to speak French amongst ourselves if there were others around, just so we wouldn't stick out AS fast.  It was interesting, because an Italian guy actually struck up a brief conversation with us, where we were mostly ignored when we spoke English.  'Twas an interesting contrast. 

After lunch, we waded back down into the hordes of tourists and paid for access to a pathway on which we could walk to the other villages - Riomaggiore being at the end of the line of the five.  So, we walked from Riomaggiore to another one... and ended up at Corniglia.  The landscape was spectacular - cliffs, amazingly colored water, great trees, beautiful rocks with beautiful people sunning themselves over beautiful water... very nice.   But too many tourists.  It kind of made me long for the relatively tourist-free Croatia.  Or at least fewer obvious tourists.    

We got as far as Corniglia when Ben got in touch with his friends he was originally going to be in Italy with.  They were arriving that evening in the first town outside Cinque Terre, La Spezia.  Long story short, we ended up going to meet them and have dinner (at a pizzeria... it was all that was open, and we all cried a little inside at the sight of more pizza) before hopping back on a train to return to Genoa (a two-hour train ride).  This was the one time that the chronic late-ness of Trenitalia served us well... there was such a line to buy tickets that if it had been on time, we would have missed it, but since it was ten minutes late, we were fine.  I even asked the people in front of us in line (Italians who spoke French) if we could cut in front of them (Pardonnez-moi, mais pourrais-je aller devant vous? Notre train part en cinq minutes.. ) and they kindly obliged.  We got back to Genoa and the hostel without incident and yeah. So there.

In the morning, we hopped a train to Milan, where we stopped for an hour and a half, and then we continued on to Geneva.  In Milan, all we did was get food, at a kebab place because it WASN'T PIZZA.  It was very good kebab, and Ben scored some  major amusement and multicultural points by talking to the Egyptians that ran it in Arabic.  Their faces were hilarious, and they couldn't believe that an American (they asked) of Hungarian descent (again, they asked) learned to speak Arabic in the U.S. (the most shocking part).  It was cool, and we got better service because of it.  We also got approached by a Gypsy in Milan as we were eating outside, and I gave her a piece of my orange, but no money.  She seemed happy to get anything - she was playing to a rough crowd in the three of us.

We got back to Geneva around 5:00 PM after a good, long train ride that allowed us to see the beautiful valleys in the Swiss Canton of Valais, between Vaud and Italy.  Valais really was beautiful.... but I still prefer the Vaudois region around Lac Leman/Lake Geneva.  I'm a water person.   Grindelwald gave Vaud a run for its money, though, but that's for another post.

So yes, I guess this covers my trip to Nice, Monaco, Genoa, and Cinque Terre.  Ben and I have decided that Italy needs to be done like a surgical strike - select a target city, get in, and get out before we become so frustrated that we are ready to scream.  It's just not my style of living, the Italian style.  It's great, but I guess it's too laid back for me.  They let too many things go for my personal tastes, though I know there are some people who love that.  Nice was perhaps my favorite destination, but I'd give it about five years before I go back.  They're building a tram system throughout the city, and I'm sure it will be very nice when they're done, but right now, it's just a lot construction, and it could be prettier, to be honest.  Both cities, we found, also had a cleanliness problem when it came to canine excrement.  It was everywhere.  Some places were like minefields, and we had to announce to each other, "Merde on the left" or such other warnings.  It was manageable, though, but an odd coincidence in all the cities on this trip. 

The language element resulted in a lot of amusement, because some people seemed honestly surprised to hear us transition from speaking English amongst ourselves to speaking French amongst ourselves... one older man at a crosswalk actually turned around to look at us with a relatively confused look on his face.   I also learned from observation how people look when they think that talking louder in English will help them get a point across to someone who doesn't speak English.  You'll look like a fool, so don't do that.  There was a girl on a night bus, an American, who was trying to figure out where to get off for her hostel by talking to the bus driver, who didn't speak English, and she didn't speak any French.   It was kind of sad, so I offered to help her, but it turned out that she needed to go near the train station, and the next stop was the closest to it, so I told her how to walk from the bus stop to the train station.  However, she was being stupid in so many ways:  a.) she was a girl, maybe 19 years old, attractive, traveling alone at night b.) in a strange city c.) in which she doesn't speak the language d.) and in which she doesn't have a map or know how to get around and, finally, d.) she had no idea where her hostel was.  Now, that combination just seems to be asking for trouble, in my opinion (not to offend any of you feminists out there).  Oh well... I'm sure she got back safely, but still... she's taking a lot of risks there. 

So, in a direct comparison of the two weekends - the one in Croatia and this weekend - I think I honestly preferred the weekend in Croatia.  Even though I could speak and communicate with people in Nice and in Monaco, there were SO many tourists that it was almost overwhelming and it became really difficult to actually find out what France was like.  This was most extremely exemplified by the other people at the hostel who didn't leave; they just stayed sheltered in the walls of the hostel with the other Americans, British, and Australians.  These places were also much more expensive than Croatia, but that's to be expected.  They actually weren't that much more expensive than Geneva, so I really can't complain.  But I was spoiled by the prices in Croatia, and I hadn't gotten over it yet. 

But I ramble.  Truth be told, this has taken me all day to write - I started around 11 AM this morning and finished at 12:38 AM this evening.  I did take several breaks - notably to go to the beach on Lac Leman in a town called Rolle with a bunch of other students for the entire afternoon, and it was great.  The water was a little chilly, but we played frisbee and rented a paddleboat for a half-an-hour.  All in all, a good day.  And then I went with my host parents to my host brother's apartment for dinner, and it was really good.  Homemade pizza and tiramisu.  Very nice. 

So, I can scratch this one off the list.  Now, just entire about when Meg and Matthew visited and about the ISP/all other academics this semester.  Those will be coming soon.   But there is now another huge entry and a lot of new pictures - all for your enjoyment.  Please, enjoy them, and keep your eyes peeled.  The postings will be coming like wildfire now.    

Ok, so here's the deal:

I know that some of you who are avid readers of the blog are wondering, "Why the frak hasn't Chris posted in so long?  Is he ok?  Did he make it back from France and Italy?  Was he kidnapped by the French mafia?  Did he eat so much Italian escargot that he choked to death?  Did he just completely switch the national adjectives on those two last sentences to frak with my head?  And what about... Naomi? 

Well, long story short (by my standards), I did make it back from my last voyage outside of Switzerland relatively unharmed, though pretty tired.  Nice and Genoa are both great cities that I want to give second chances to later in life (Nice because they're building a tram system that has torn up a lot of the streets in downtown and Genoa because, well, Italy on Easter weekend might have been a  bad idea in retrospect).  Monaco is surreal.  Cinque Terre can feel like a tourist trap but still is naturally gorgeous.  Milan is... a transportation hub as far as I'm concerned, because I've only ever spent time there on layovers.  You'll get to hear all about these and more, but........ later.

I am currently in a mad dash to work on my Independent Study Project (ISP).  This massive paper is the culmination of my semester here.  I've finally settled on a subject, but so as not to jinx it, I'm not going to post it here.  I'll let you know when I can't possibly change it anymore.  This is all due (along with a 30-minute oral presentation) on April 27th - aka next Friday.  Let the countdown begin.  And, to add more stress, but also more awesomeness and excitement, my two fellow bloggers-in-crime will be paying me a visit next weekend.  That's right, Meg and Matthew will be here, live, in Geneva.  I know I'm excited, and I can tell you are, too!

So essentially, I'm going to put all of you out there on a holding pattern.  I know I promised a nice, long, academic summary entry. That will be coming.  As will my entry on the Nice-Genoa trip.  And all of the photos I took there.  And an entry about this coming weekend.  And an entry about my rush to finish my ISP and my ensuing mental breakdown (haha...just kidding!.... hahah.....hah...hah.....meh...).  But, later.  Now, I'm going to cover my ass here and say that the earliest you'll see any of these is after the 27th of April.  My goal with that statement is to set expectations low.  Very low.  If you're lucky, I'll at least get the Nice-Genoa entry up before then (and before I forget everything that happened on that trip).  But, I make no promises.  Perhaps you'll be in for a nice surprise. 

Speaking of nice surprises, I'd like to give a special congratulatory mention to my sister.  So as not to ruin the surprise for anyone, I won't mention specifics, but congratulations!  (You know what you did...)

And, in a hard turn to the left, I am going to momentarily become a children's literature blogger.  So I heard something about this book "Fair Has Nothing To Do With It" that will be on shelves near you this week (it's on Amazon now), and it's getting GREAT reviews.  It's a middle grade novel, but it's enjoyable to all ages, regardless of ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, religion, or shoe size.  You should really buy a copy, especially if you work in a library and are reading this...and, if I may add, from a completely objective point of view, the book is astounding. Here ends the plug for my Mom's book, but please, do not let the fact that my Mom is the author dissuade you in any way from trusting me on this one. 

Ok, so here's where we stand:  no more guaranteed entries until April 27th, though you might get one here or there, such as a hint of mad desperation, which, if it happens, will be about 3:00 AM on the 27th I would expect - Geneva time, of course.  Thanks for hanging with me through this blogoliterary drought (can I copyright that word?), and it'll be worth it in the end, I swear. 

Wish me luck...

Ok, so this will be long, but in all honesty, I think one of the most interesting posts I've written.  I realize I haven't written in a while, but last week was a lot of academic wrapping up - I will be posting a long post summarizing my academic experiences when I get a chance to breathe - but also consisted of a lot of decision-making and wavering which finally resulted in my decision to travel to Croatia with two other students.  It was, I think, the most spontaneous thing I have ever done in my entire life, and for once, my spontanaeity paid off.  The trip was one of the most incredible I think I have taken, and Croatia now has a special place in my memory. 

I had heard that Croatia was a really great place to visit - the tourism industry has been booming, and the cities along the Dalmatian Coast (on the Adriatic Sea, directly across from Italy), especially Dubrovnik, are renowned for their beauty.  Croatia is also in one of the more infamous European regions, the Balkans, and fought a bloody war in order to secede from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992, and there are definitely still signs of that war throughout the countryside.  However, before I get into that too much, let's jump back to the decision to go.

One student, Ben, is doing his Independent Study Project on Croatian accession to the European Union - it's widely regarded as the next state to join.  As a result, he set up some interviews at two places in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, including the EU delegation there, and got permission from the ADs to go.  He put out an open invititation to join him, and I took him up on it, then backed off, thinking, "Maybe this is too expensive..." and "Is this really worth the effort and the travel?", but then, after hearing him discuss his plans with another student who signed up to with him, I realized that this was something I really wanted to do.  After wavering and thinking, I finally consulted a very wise woman in the form of my sister, and after our conversation, I decided to go.  I could afford it, and I was positive I would regret not going.  Even if it was horrible, at least I would have had the experience.  So, I took the plunge and bought the Alitalia airline tickets - nonrefundable.  I was in for keeps.

This all happened on Sunday, March 25.  Fast forward four days later, to that Thursday, and I was on the way to the Geneva International Airport with Ben and the other student, Alison, in order to catch our Alitalia flight to Milan, where we would then connect to Zagreb.  The plan was to be in Zagreb Thursday night, and then after Ben's meeting on Friday morning, take the train down to Split, a major city on the Dalmatian Coast.  We would spend two days there, returning Sunday afternoon to Zagreb so Ben could have his other meeting on Monday afternoon.  Tuesday, we'd fly Alitalia back to Geneva, with our flight leaving Zagreb at 6:30 AM.  I know, I know, it's early, but it was the cheapest, for understandable reasons. 

We got to the Geneva airport and checked in our luggage, with no problems. We arrived about two and a half hours before our flight was scheduled to board, so we chilled outside of security for a while, when, about an hour before boarding time, Ben checked to see if our flight had been assigned a gate.  However, our flight had been labeled "Annule" - for those who don't speak French, that means "CANCELLED."  This posed a problem.  We went down to the Alitalia desk, managing to beat the crowd of people who were also trying to get to Milan, and after quietly calming Ben down - he's a stressful traveler - managed to arrange ourselves seats on a different flight to Zagreb that night: we'd leave Geneva an hour later and fly to Zurich on SwissAir, and then from Zurich we would fly on Croatian Airlines to Zagreb, arriving about 10:00 PM.  In all reality, it probably worked out better.  Alitalia has issues.  This wouldn't be the first time they screwed us on this trip.  My opinion of Italy has not improved.  Sigh.... 

The flight from Geneva to Zurich was fine, and we managed to make our connection despite being about twenty minutes late.  The flight from Zurich to Zagreb was on a small turboprop aircraft (my first time on one of these), but it wasn't nearly as bad as I had been led to believe they could be.  We arrived without issues, and our baggage even managed to find us, too !  (We were truly shocked - I thank the Swiss ground crew at Geneva... I think that if we had been stuck in Milan and this had happened, we would never have seen our baggage again.  Again, see later events...)  We had been reviewing basic Croatian vocabulary ("Hvala" - thank you, "Dobor dan" - hello, etc. - Ben knew a whole lot more than Alison or I did) and managed to find out how to get on the bus from the Zagreb airport to the main bus terminal.  I also got a second stamp in my passport, finally!!!  I don't know why that excites me so much, but stamps are cool, and thanks to the EU entire "open border" thing, I have only had one so far, and that was from when I arrived in France from the U.S.  Now I have France and Croatia.  Woot!

Zagreb doesn't make a great first impression at night - it's pretty much orange streetlights illuminating the post-Communist architechure that makes up the suburbs and the outer parts of the city.  We got to the Autobusni Kolodvor (bus station) and followed the directions on our hostel reservations on how to take the tram to the hostel.  We figured out which way to go, and got on the first tram #6 that came by.  This tram seemed to be built in the '60s, but it had character, so we liked it. We also liked that there weren't any police on it to check for tickets, because we didn't have a clue how to buy them, and at 10:30 PM, not much is open and there aren't really places to ask.  We only had to go two stops, so it wasn't a problem.  We then followed the walking directions, and besides being scared out of my wits by a barking dog that lay in wait for us behind his fence, we found the hostel without problems.  It was really really nice, and the proprietors were extremely kind and helpful.  We couldn't have asked for a better place to stay. 

The next morning, we finally got to see what Zagreb was like, and even though it was cloudy, it was beautiful.  The post-Communist architechture (I don't know if that's the proper term, but in using it, I am describing architechture without much character, but with a lot of cement and squareness) isn't the most attractive stuff, but the contrast between that type of construction and the Viennese-type architecture around the train station is very striking.  Even on a cloudy day, it was beautiful.  There was also a long, perhaps 3/4-mile stretch of wall along the tram route that was completely covered in graffiti, but it was actually beautiful.  This was graffiti that bordered on legitimate art.  I don't know if it was organized or not, but it was really cool.  Ben found the building where his meeting was going to take place, so we left him there and Alison and I took an hour and explored.  I don't think we looked at a map in order to pick a direction one time while we were in Zagreb, and I liked that.   We found the Croatian equivalent of Times Square, a large square with lots of trams and massive billboards, outdoor cafes, and the start of the massive market that took over a large portion of a few blocks. 

In this market, there were ridiculous amounts of fruit and flowers, in addition to crafts and some obviously touristy vendors.  I forgot to mention that the exchange rate for Croatia is great - the Croatian currency (the "kuna") is about 20 American cents.  5 kuna = $1.00.  And everything is really cheap.  So, Alison and I got some fruit - I got a HUGE apple for $0.20.  We explored the market for a while, ending up by the base of the catheral in Zagreb, and then went and picked up Ben.  After getting him, we returned to the market and then went to a restaurant that our hostel-owners had recommended to us for good Croatian food.  It was right across the square from the front doors of the cathedral, tucked away a little bit, and it was AMAZING.  We all had huge meals of very high quality for the equivalent of about $10.00.  Best.... deal.... ever. 

I forgot to mention that we had dumped our baggage in a locker in the train station before Ben's meeting and we had bought train tickets to Split for later in the afternoon.  The price wasn't bad - about $30.00 for a six-hour train ride.  After lunch, we wove our way back to the station and caught our train.  This is where the other side of Croatia showed itself a little.

The train itself was great, it a little loud.  It was what was outside the windows that was most interesting, though.  We essentially traveled through about a third of the country to get to Split, and once we were out of the Zagreb metropolitan area, the country changed completely, and the signs of the aforementioned war started to show.  The landscape was absolutely beautiful, with lush, massive forests covering the hilly and mountainous terrain for the first half of the voyage, and receding in the second half to leave nothing but rocky plains, hills, and mountains with a thin layer of scrub and vegetation.  It was barren, but beautiful at the same time.  Also, through the mountains, the scenery became very spectral because of the low clouds that occasionally overtook the train, leaving nothing but mist outside the window, with the occasional glance at the valley below or the forest above. 

The most haunting part of this spectral setting, though, were the buildings that still bore the scars of the war from 15 years ago.  There were buildings that were reduced to four walls without a roof, small little structures along the side of the rails in the middle of nowhere that were pockmarked with bullet holes and in which the windows were all broken out.  There were the villages in which only half of the buildings looked inhabitable - the rest were in some state of disarray or destruction.  Sometimes it was difficult to tell whether the conditions of these buildings were simply due to neglect or natural aging as you'll sometimes see in rural settings, but there were others that were clearly bombed out.  The most haunting sight I saw was a cluster of eight or nine buildings around a small road near the train tracks in a valley that were completely abandoned - there wasn't one intact building among them.  I found myself what happened to the inhabitants - were they killed?  Did they flee and never return?  At the same time, I tried not to think about it too much...

We arrived in Split after dark, around 9:30 PM.  After some confusion, we found our hostel pretty quickly, though we did try and enter the wrong gate at first, on the wrong street.  Luckily, there was a kind man who recognized the address we were trying to get to and pointed us down to the next street - he didn't speak a word of English.  The hostel was, again, very nice - www.hostelworld.com provides very nice accomodations.  We were the only three people in a room designed for six and we simply crashed there for the night, putting off any exploration until the morning.

We got up early, leaving the hostel around 8:30 AM, and found out about ferry tickets down by the train station and ferry port.  Split is a major ferry hub, from where you can take ferries to any other city on the Dalmatian Coast, to any of the dozens of islands off the coast, or across the Adriatic to Italy.  It isn't prime tourist season yet, so our options were limited, but we bought tickets for the 11:00 AM ferry to Supetar, on the island of Brac, because we had heard that the islands were an absolute must-see.  After the ticket-buying, we hit up the market for breakfast. 

The market in Split was about the same size as the one in Zagreb, but with fewer flowers, more fruit, and bread.  In fact, it was in this market that I found the "Four-Kuna Massive Piece of Bread" as we dubbed it.  This bread was about the length of my fore-arm and delicious and cost only 4 kuna, or $0.80.  It was great, especially when dipped in the local honey that we purchased, because honey is a Croatian specialty.  We also got fruit and found a place to sit at a cafe just inside Diocletian's Palace.  This is an old, OLD palace (think Roman era) that has been fully integrated into Split's old town... it's absolutely incredible. (UN plug - this palace is a UNESCO World Heritage Site!)  Alison and Ben got coffee while I got orange juice - the waitress had no problem that we brought our own food since we were sitting outside.  After breakfast, I ran back to the hostel to get my Swiss Army knife (always useful for lunch-prepping purposes) while Alison and Ben got cheese and then we met up and headed down to the ferry.

It was actually possible to see the island, Brac, and the village, Supetar, from Split - but it was a long way.  The ferry ride took about a half an hour to cross the strait beftween the mainland and the island, but it was a beautiful day, and even the complete omnipresence of German tourists and the cold wind didn't dampen our spirits.  The island got more beautiful the closer we got, and by the time we got there, we were really excited.  We saw a place where it was possible to rent scooters - we thought, hey, we could see a lot of the island that way!   However, it turned out that you had to present a driver's license in order to rent them, and I was the only one of the three of us who had mine on me.  Alison hadn't brought hers from the States and Ben's was pickpocketed along with his wallet in Paris.  We wandered the town for a little while, walking through the residential areas, and then decided that there must be somewhere in the town that rents bikes.  We stopped in a tourism office right by the ferry port and the woman directed us across the town to a rental place.   Side Note:  It was here that I picked up a guide that informed me that marble from Brac has been used all around the world in famous buildings, including the White House in Washington, DC. 

The bike rental was pretty cheap - just 60 kuna ($12.00) for the day, so we each got a bike and set off out of the town.  It was beautiful - the entire island was covered in old, ancient, rocky fences and olive groves, with flowers blooming everywhere and the sun making the water glisten down on the Adriatic.  We biked past the first town and then were about to pass the second (about an hour and a half after having gotten the bikes) when a problem cropped up with Alison's - the chain was grinding on a metal plate that was slightly bent out of shape.  We couldn't fix it ourselves, but we were right above a town called Sutivan on the corner of the island, so w