La vie en Suisse

As promised, I've rounded up some photos of my life in Switzerland so far. Because everything in Geneva is unbelievably expensive, I spend my weeknights and weekends in the park by Lake Geneva with Whiskey. Because I haven't really done anything touristic, almost all my pictures cute puppy pics. To avoid barraging you with YouTubeworthy levels of Whiskey cuteness, I really had to dig to find some shots representative of my daily life. Without further ado:

The Alps from the airplane as I flew in to Geneva from Cairo:





I swear to God, these guys were playing these things in the airport:





View of Lake Geneva from the apartment I subletted when I first arrived:




Whiskey and I kicking back in the park known as Perle du Lac near Lake Geneva. It is a 24/7 picnic area divided into 4 sections of perfectly manicured grass sloping down to the lakeshore. At the top of the hill there is sometimes live music and tango and the farthest section of grass is home to a free outdoor film series several nights a week.




This was a protest that stopped traffic one of my first weekends in Geneva. On the heels of the Egyptian revolution, this seemed to me to be quintessentially Swiss. The demonstrators marched almost single file and observed traffic signals. You can also see a little of the architecture around the central train station.




This is a famous room (Room XX) in the United Nations where I spent a week in May at an intergovernmental working group that met to discuss the possibility of drafting an international convention to regulate private military and security companies. Unsurprisingly, nothing was decided, but it was cool to be in the room, which features a controversial piece of installation art on the ceiling (this is an extremely detailed article, but just scroll down to the "controversy" section: http://www.designboom.com/contemporary/miquel_barcelo.html). The room is also surrounded by interpreters' booths, and looks almost exactly like the room in the Nicole Kidman/Sean Penn movie "The Interpreter" in which an interpreter that speaks an obscure African dialect accidentally overhears a murder plot on an internal line inside the UN in that dialect and has to go on the run to prevent an assassination. Good movie if you haven't seen it.




This is my office. It is on what we jokingly call the "Malkovich floor" as it is a half-floor between the Ground Floor and the First Floor. You have to take a special staircase to get there. Fortunately, unlike the half-floor in the movie Being John Malkovich, the ceilings in Palais Wilson, where I work, are normally twice as high as normal ceilings so my half-floor is the height of a normal floor and we do not have to walk around bent over like John Cusack's character. Unfortunately, there is no secret tunnel into an actor's brain...at least none that I have found so far... My desk is the one in the middle of the shot that faces out the window.




From my desk, I can see Lake Geneva a stone's throw away. This is relaxing, but also irritating in the summer when relaxed people zoom by on bicycles and water skis while I slave away at my desk.




Switzerland is very dog friendly. If you look closely, there is a cute drawing of a dog on this "WC" sign indicating a designated dog potty area. You can take dogs into most buildings including department stores, H&M, and almost all restaurants and bars. Grocery stores, where dogs are not usually allowed, provides designated hooks, like Wild West hitching posts, where you can tie your dog's leash so they can wait for you while you do your shopping.




Extraneous Whiskey cuteness. Couldn't help it.



That's it for now. Once I get some decent furniture in my apartment, I will post some pics of my little studio. Also, I'll try to get a shot of the outside of Palais Wilson, the building where I work, and which houses the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. As I don't do much of anything in my free time, there is not much to blog about, but I'll keep my eyes open for other Swiss oddities to report.

Until next time!