I had three steps I needed to complete to prepare the documents necessary for my Egyptian work visa before I could send them to my firm to complete the application process. I had a pile of documents (letters of reference, transcripts, a letter from the Wisconsin bar with my date of admission, etc.) supporting my firm's case that I am uniquely qualified for the job and that an Egyptian couldn't do the same job, the same argument that has to be made in most countries in order to hire a foreigner instead of a national. I had to get a stamp from the US Consulate on an affidavit where I say the info in my pile of documents is true, then I had to get a stamp from the Swiss government "legalizing" my documents (their word, no idea what it means), then another stamp from the Egyptian consulate legalizing (still no idea) the documents.
I had already gone to the US Consulate 2 weeks ago and the consular agent stamped and signed my affidavit stating the documents were true. I brought that packet of documents into the Swiss Chancellerie d'Etat this week and had to conduct the whole transaction in Italian because no one in the whole office spoke any English (the only people who think you can get by with just English in this city are the people who speak French). The woman told me there was a problem.
Normally, they could legalize my documents except that they are supposed to receive a letter from the consulate introducing new consular agents and attesting they have the authority to sign documents on behave of the US, and they did not have such a letter on file for the woman who had signed my stuff. They would not call the consulate to explain the problem and request a letter, and it could not be sent by fax, they needed the original.
Finally, they agreed that if I went back to the consulate (on the other side of the huge hill that is Geneva's Old Town, and up and down which there is no public transportation) in person and returned in person with an original letter authorizing the consular agent, they could legalize my documents.
So I walked, through the hottest weather Geneva has had all year, down the hill back to the US consulate by the lake, where I had to stand in line for 45 minutes behind a couple doing adoption paperwork (talk about bureaucracy!) until the SAME consular agent who had signed my form 2 weeks ago came to the window to help me. I pointed out to her that according to the Swiss government, the affidavit I'd paid 40 francs for was as worthless as if I had signed it myself and she took the phone number of the office back to her desk and chatted with them for some time.
She came back to the window and, I SWEAR TO GOD, she picked up a blank affidavit form...the very same they had just refused to accept her signature on...and wrote, in her own handwriting, "I So and So (names have been changed to protect the annoying) am a US Consular Agent. I am authorized to sign and legalize documents on behalf of the United States Consulate in Geneva." Then she signed and stamped the affidavit...with the EXACT SIGNATURE they had just refused to accept, to authorize her own signature.
I was like "Seriously?" And she shrugged and said that is what the woman at the Chancellerie d'Etat had said to do.
So I trudged back up the hill (stopping for a Starbucks to keep my motivation up and my chances at heat exhaustion down), took another ticket (like at the DMV) and waited in line for another sweaty thirty minutes before ending up at the same window I'd landed at 2 hours before with the same stupid signature on two affidavits now, instead of just one. They happily legalized the form and tucked So and So's signature away in a file for further reference.
Then I took the pile of papers to the Egyptian consulate where they informed me that the same legalization process (applying a stamp and signature) that had taken under a minute at the US and Swiss offices would take until the next day in their office. So I had to go back AGAIN this morning.
But I am now on my way to become a "legalized" Egyptian worker once again.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
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!
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!
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Swiss Miss(ry) Loves Company
Okay, yes, by all rights this should be the name of my new blog but a) I'm sure it is copyrighted and b)I am bad enough at updating this blog so I am not going to create a whole new one.
What's with the cocoa reference you ask? I have been living in Geneva, Switzerland, as of April 1st. How did I get here from Egypt? It all happened extremely quickly in late February when the United Nations Working Group on the use of mercenaries emailed me out of the blue to ask if I'd be interested in a six-month consultancy. I was interested and my supervisor at my law firm told me "You'd be stupid not to take it." So I did take it. Then followed a phone interview and written test, after which I had to endure a four-week period in which I'd been selected for the job but needed UN Admin approval to finalize the offer. Confirmation finally came just ten days before I was expected to start work that I finally had been approved for the job.
So I grabbed up very few of my belongings, arranged for hasty dog-care, sublet my apartment, and got the hell out of Cairo. Five hazy hours later, I jogged to my new office in Geneva to meet my new colleagues for a half an hour before the workday ended at six, yes, SIX (I still can't get over how much earlier that is than law firm hours. When we are held over until six fifteen, we can start rolling our eyes in exasperation...so fun!).
I spent my first week in a hotel in a super-shady neighborhood surrounded by strip bars and, thankfully, lebanese restaurants (hello, inexpensive falafel of questionable hygeinic integrity!). From April 6th to May 2nd, I sublet a cute little one bedroom apartment from a delightful colleague who left me all her stuff and all her food to enjoy while she vacations in Syria. Yep, Syria. In April 2011, this woman went to Syria for VACATION. Hardcore.
I am still reeling from the availability of pork and alcohol products. Every meal I made in my first month contained an item from each category.
I went back to Egypt in late April to pick up Whiskey and then had to come back to Geneva via New York (think about that trip for a minute) to get him the right veterinary paperwork to come back to Switzerland with me. It was extremely difficult to find a short term furnished rental option that would allow dogs. All the property management companies turned me down and I didn't want to get an unfurnished place for such a short period.
So I went through Glocals, a Geneva craigslist-like classified ad site and found a Swiss lawyer who was subletting a room and advertized for a "dogs-lover person." She had 3 dogs of her own, including a Doberman, (and there were three other people renting rooms as well so a very full house) but she was confident that after a couple weeks, they'd work out a hierarchy among themselves and accept Whiskey into their pack. Well, that never happened and the Doberman kept jumping on Whiskey and putting him in her mouth like a little Whiskey sandwich, not biting down, but just to scare the hell out of him and show him who was boss.
The living situation there was difficult to start with but I thought we'd be able to survive for my remaining five months in Geneva at least. Alas, the situation went downhill rapidly after one of the other renters, an American professor and her 12 year old son moved out and the landlady's son, a smoker (of cigarettes and other things...) moved in. Then the Doberman got sick and had to go on cortizone which made her pee on the floor every day. So the house smelled like smoke and urine all the time. Hygeine tanked and the stress of living with (and cleaning up after) so many inconsiderate people and dogs made the situation untenable.
The landlady was also a bit of an oppressive bully. She would stand around the kitchen while I was cooking and tell me what sponge to use for which pot, which oil to cook with (and I KNOW how to cook, thank you very much), how to arrange each plate and fork in the dishwasher, how many clothes to put in the washer at a time, etc. So the "free access" to the kitchen and laundry wasn't really free. One of the other guys who lived in the apartment actually had all his own pots, a hot plate, and dishes that he kept in his room and just rinsed off in the bathroom sink next to his room so he never had to deal with the constant nagging.
The story of how I moved out is long and complicated and awful, but basically, I gave my notice but my landlady, who, remember, is a lawyer in Geneva, didn't accept it. She wanted to try to get August AND September's rent out of me, despite the fact that she wasn't even legally allowed to sublet anyway and despite the fact that I was moving in part because of pot smoking in the apartment. I think she is used to using her knowledge of Swiss law to bully non-lawyers. I wasn't going to put up with it. I felt that the living situation was not at all what I had agreed to, especially since her son had moved in, and I gave her plenty of time to find a replacement renter but I think she intentionally tried not to find someone new as a way of trying to force me to pay at least for August. Well, I knew what she was up to (she had tried to similarly cheat the American professor when she moved out in June) and since she didn't have a deposit of mine, I just moved out when I told her I would. With the help of my dog park friends, I had found a new place near work and with the help of my work friends, I moved all my stuff that day.
In what turned out to be a few dramatic hours, my landlady threatened to sue me and actually drove to my office, waited for me to come to work, then tried to follow right behind me into the building to sneak in past UN security. I stopped and told the officers she didn't have a badge and she waited in the security office for TWO HOURS, telling them "I am just going to wait here in case she comes out so I can follow her and see where she lives." I think she realized she didn't really have any legal case against me and was just trying to intimidate me. She also wanted to speak to my supervisor (who knew all about the situation and, in fact, gave me her college pots and pans for my new apartment). I talked to the lawyer friend of one of my colleagues and he also said she doesn't have a case and helped me draft an email to get her to quit stalking me (but since saying that outright is illegal in Switzerland, he helped me tell her off in less inflamatory language). She wrote me back a couple nasty emails but I haven't heard from her in a few weeks now. This could mean that she has found another renter and has given up or it could mean she has somehow managed to file a claim and I will get served a summons one of these days. My heart jerks in my chest whenever I see an older skeletal blond lady outside the security gate in the morning but I am so happy in my new place with just Whiskey and my own space and peace and quiet that it was worth all the terror and stress and awkwardness (with the security officers who don't speak English so I eventually had to have a friend explain what was going on) to move out of that situation, even if it is only for a couple months.
Now I am in a little unfurnished studio near my office, only a couple blocks from Lake Geneva and just minutes from a series of parks where I can walk Whiskey and listen to my audiobooks. A couple days a week, I take the dog on the bus back to the dog park to see his friends and get in some dog on dog playtime. With the help of many generous friends, I sleep on an air mattress on borrowed linens with a borrowed comforter. I got a little fridge and hot plate and I can cook on my boss' pots and pans and eat on the dishes a girl at the dog park who is moving in with her boyfriend doesn't need anymore. There were a few months of pretty crappy weather in late June and July but August has been nicer on the whole and the sky is taking on that late summer/early fall deep deep blue, which the lake is happy to reflect. Although I have heard the rest of the year is rainy and cold, this is a beautiful time to be in Geneva and I am really happy in my new place.
Yet another reason I should change the title of the blog...Despite my continued marginal employment with no benefits and no time off, I am just not very miserable these days.
Now that you're all caught up, I leave you with some of my observations about the Swiss and Swiss things:
At 6:30, all the stores close and, except for a handful of loaners drinking beer outside bars (and I mean a handful, like eight in the whole city), everyone disappears. Even the sailboats disappear from the lake although the sun is still out. So the question I haven't been able to answer yet is where on earth do all the Swiss go at night? Home? Really? Everyone? Why?
It is NOT true that you don't need to speak French to live in Geneva. NOT everyone speaks English, in fact, most of the people I need to talk to (grocery stores, bank tellars, post office clerks, property management companies, vet office secretaries, etc.) speak only French, or maybe understand a little Italian or Spanish, which I often have to use. The only people who claim you don't have to speak French to live here are those who SPEAK FRENCH.
The toilet paper is amazing. Soft, strong, and like 400 yards to a roll (possible exageration). Weirdly, it is not divided into squares, but rather small rectangles that observe the "golden" ratio, most pleasing to the eye. Similar shape to postcards but a little wider.
All drying mechanisms in the bathrooms are those weird rolls of cloth towels where you have to pull on the part of the roll showing to get enough to dry your hands and then the roll rolls forward electronically to the next clean space of towel for the next person. However, since ALL bathrooms have these, they are kept in working order and you don't get yards and yards of dirty cloth towel unspooled all over everywhere like you see sometimes in US movie theater bathrooms.
You can pay all your bills at the post office. I find this amazing. You can open a bank account at the post office with no fees and then you can set up bill pay from your bank account automatically like in the US. But even if you don't set up a bank account (no, alas, I do not have a "Swiss bank account" as with paying my law school loans back in the US, it makes more sense to have my checks deposited there) but no one has to use checks to pay other bills like insurance or rent. You get the bill in the mail and you go into the post office with your cash and pay at the counter. They enter the money into the system and tear off part of the bill and stamp it as your receipt. It goes into the post office bank account of the person or company you're paying.
It is hippie Christmas every day in Geneva. This is what we used to call August 14th in Madison when everyone was moving out of their apartments and leaving their amazing furniture on the street. In Geneva, people are always moving in and moving out and, because most people here are insanely rich, they even REDECORATE if you can believe that. No one has big cars or trucks so it is not practical to donate old furniture unless you can get the organization to come collect it. So people leave fairly new couches and desks and chairs outside all the time. I am slowly furnishing my apartment with stuff I find outside (only stuff that can be washed!) and stuff I find on the Glocals website.
Swiss people kiss each other's cheeks THREE times to say hello. As an American (we are a decidedly non-kissy people), I find this excessive. There is NO ONE who I would be so happy to see I would want to kiss them three times.
Seemingly the opposite of being overly kissy, Swiss people are also extremely indirect if they have a problem with someone or something. A friend joked once that if your neighbor doesn't like your dog, they won't say a word to you about it and you won't have a clue there's an issue until the police or the property rental company shows up with a complaint. This is also adverse to my American nature. I prefer to be up front with people and talk through a problem if one exists but that is perceived as really aggressive here. I need to work on curbing my assertiveness and finding more subtle ways to communicate without losing the ability to speak up for when I eventually (insha'allah) go back to the US.
That's all for now! Since the revolution, everyday events have paled in signficance and hardly seem worth reporting but I will try to do better updating the blog even if Mom is the only one reading this. :) Next time I will also post some Geneva pics.
What's with the cocoa reference you ask? I have been living in Geneva, Switzerland, as of April 1st. How did I get here from Egypt? It all happened extremely quickly in late February when the United Nations Working Group on the use of mercenaries emailed me out of the blue to ask if I'd be interested in a six-month consultancy. I was interested and my supervisor at my law firm told me "You'd be stupid not to take it." So I did take it. Then followed a phone interview and written test, after which I had to endure a four-week period in which I'd been selected for the job but needed UN Admin approval to finalize the offer. Confirmation finally came just ten days before I was expected to start work that I finally had been approved for the job.
So I grabbed up very few of my belongings, arranged for hasty dog-care, sublet my apartment, and got the hell out of Cairo. Five hazy hours later, I jogged to my new office in Geneva to meet my new colleagues for a half an hour before the workday ended at six, yes, SIX (I still can't get over how much earlier that is than law firm hours. When we are held over until six fifteen, we can start rolling our eyes in exasperation...so fun!).
I spent my first week in a hotel in a super-shady neighborhood surrounded by strip bars and, thankfully, lebanese restaurants (hello, inexpensive falafel of questionable hygeinic integrity!). From April 6th to May 2nd, I sublet a cute little one bedroom apartment from a delightful colleague who left me all her stuff and all her food to enjoy while she vacations in Syria. Yep, Syria. In April 2011, this woman went to Syria for VACATION. Hardcore.
I am still reeling from the availability of pork and alcohol products. Every meal I made in my first month contained an item from each category.
I went back to Egypt in late April to pick up Whiskey and then had to come back to Geneva via New York (think about that trip for a minute) to get him the right veterinary paperwork to come back to Switzerland with me. It was extremely difficult to find a short term furnished rental option that would allow dogs. All the property management companies turned me down and I didn't want to get an unfurnished place for such a short period.
So I went through Glocals, a Geneva craigslist-like classified ad site and found a Swiss lawyer who was subletting a room and advertized for a "dogs-lover person." She had 3 dogs of her own, including a Doberman, (and there were three other people renting rooms as well so a very full house) but she was confident that after a couple weeks, they'd work out a hierarchy among themselves and accept Whiskey into their pack. Well, that never happened and the Doberman kept jumping on Whiskey and putting him in her mouth like a little Whiskey sandwich, not biting down, but just to scare the hell out of him and show him who was boss.
The living situation there was difficult to start with but I thought we'd be able to survive for my remaining five months in Geneva at least. Alas, the situation went downhill rapidly after one of the other renters, an American professor and her 12 year old son moved out and the landlady's son, a smoker (of cigarettes and other things...) moved in. Then the Doberman got sick and had to go on cortizone which made her pee on the floor every day. So the house smelled like smoke and urine all the time. Hygeine tanked and the stress of living with (and cleaning up after) so many inconsiderate people and dogs made the situation untenable.
The landlady was also a bit of an oppressive bully. She would stand around the kitchen while I was cooking and tell me what sponge to use for which pot, which oil to cook with (and I KNOW how to cook, thank you very much), how to arrange each plate and fork in the dishwasher, how many clothes to put in the washer at a time, etc. So the "free access" to the kitchen and laundry wasn't really free. One of the other guys who lived in the apartment actually had all his own pots, a hot plate, and dishes that he kept in his room and just rinsed off in the bathroom sink next to his room so he never had to deal with the constant nagging.
The story of how I moved out is long and complicated and awful, but basically, I gave my notice but my landlady, who, remember, is a lawyer in Geneva, didn't accept it. She wanted to try to get August AND September's rent out of me, despite the fact that she wasn't even legally allowed to sublet anyway and despite the fact that I was moving in part because of pot smoking in the apartment. I think she is used to using her knowledge of Swiss law to bully non-lawyers. I wasn't going to put up with it. I felt that the living situation was not at all what I had agreed to, especially since her son had moved in, and I gave her plenty of time to find a replacement renter but I think she intentionally tried not to find someone new as a way of trying to force me to pay at least for August. Well, I knew what she was up to (she had tried to similarly cheat the American professor when she moved out in June) and since she didn't have a deposit of mine, I just moved out when I told her I would. With the help of my dog park friends, I had found a new place near work and with the help of my work friends, I moved all my stuff that day.
In what turned out to be a few dramatic hours, my landlady threatened to sue me and actually drove to my office, waited for me to come to work, then tried to follow right behind me into the building to sneak in past UN security. I stopped and told the officers she didn't have a badge and she waited in the security office for TWO HOURS, telling them "I am just going to wait here in case she comes out so I can follow her and see where she lives." I think she realized she didn't really have any legal case against me and was just trying to intimidate me. She also wanted to speak to my supervisor (who knew all about the situation and, in fact, gave me her college pots and pans for my new apartment). I talked to the lawyer friend of one of my colleagues and he also said she doesn't have a case and helped me draft an email to get her to quit stalking me (but since saying that outright is illegal in Switzerland, he helped me tell her off in less inflamatory language). She wrote me back a couple nasty emails but I haven't heard from her in a few weeks now. This could mean that she has found another renter and has given up or it could mean she has somehow managed to file a claim and I will get served a summons one of these days. My heart jerks in my chest whenever I see an older skeletal blond lady outside the security gate in the morning but I am so happy in my new place with just Whiskey and my own space and peace and quiet that it was worth all the terror and stress and awkwardness (with the security officers who don't speak English so I eventually had to have a friend explain what was going on) to move out of that situation, even if it is only for a couple months.
Now I am in a little unfurnished studio near my office, only a couple blocks from Lake Geneva and just minutes from a series of parks where I can walk Whiskey and listen to my audiobooks. A couple days a week, I take the dog on the bus back to the dog park to see his friends and get in some dog on dog playtime. With the help of many generous friends, I sleep on an air mattress on borrowed linens with a borrowed comforter. I got a little fridge and hot plate and I can cook on my boss' pots and pans and eat on the dishes a girl at the dog park who is moving in with her boyfriend doesn't need anymore. There were a few months of pretty crappy weather in late June and July but August has been nicer on the whole and the sky is taking on that late summer/early fall deep deep blue, which the lake is happy to reflect. Although I have heard the rest of the year is rainy and cold, this is a beautiful time to be in Geneva and I am really happy in my new place.
Yet another reason I should change the title of the blog...Despite my continued marginal employment with no benefits and no time off, I am just not very miserable these days.
Now that you're all caught up, I leave you with some of my observations about the Swiss and Swiss things:
At 6:30, all the stores close and, except for a handful of loaners drinking beer outside bars (and I mean a handful, like eight in the whole city), everyone disappears. Even the sailboats disappear from the lake although the sun is still out. So the question I haven't been able to answer yet is where on earth do all the Swiss go at night? Home? Really? Everyone? Why?
It is NOT true that you don't need to speak French to live in Geneva. NOT everyone speaks English, in fact, most of the people I need to talk to (grocery stores, bank tellars, post office clerks, property management companies, vet office secretaries, etc.) speak only French, or maybe understand a little Italian or Spanish, which I often have to use. The only people who claim you don't have to speak French to live here are those who SPEAK FRENCH.
The toilet paper is amazing. Soft, strong, and like 400 yards to a roll (possible exageration). Weirdly, it is not divided into squares, but rather small rectangles that observe the "golden" ratio, most pleasing to the eye. Similar shape to postcards but a little wider.
All drying mechanisms in the bathrooms are those weird rolls of cloth towels where you have to pull on the part of the roll showing to get enough to dry your hands and then the roll rolls forward electronically to the next clean space of towel for the next person. However, since ALL bathrooms have these, they are kept in working order and you don't get yards and yards of dirty cloth towel unspooled all over everywhere like you see sometimes in US movie theater bathrooms.
You can pay all your bills at the post office. I find this amazing. You can open a bank account at the post office with no fees and then you can set up bill pay from your bank account automatically like in the US. But even if you don't set up a bank account (no, alas, I do not have a "Swiss bank account" as with paying my law school loans back in the US, it makes more sense to have my checks deposited there) but no one has to use checks to pay other bills like insurance or rent. You get the bill in the mail and you go into the post office with your cash and pay at the counter. They enter the money into the system and tear off part of the bill and stamp it as your receipt. It goes into the post office bank account of the person or company you're paying.
It is hippie Christmas every day in Geneva. This is what we used to call August 14th in Madison when everyone was moving out of their apartments and leaving their amazing furniture on the street. In Geneva, people are always moving in and moving out and, because most people here are insanely rich, they even REDECORATE if you can believe that. No one has big cars or trucks so it is not practical to donate old furniture unless you can get the organization to come collect it. So people leave fairly new couches and desks and chairs outside all the time. I am slowly furnishing my apartment with stuff I find outside (only stuff that can be washed!) and stuff I find on the Glocals website.
Swiss people kiss each other's cheeks THREE times to say hello. As an American (we are a decidedly non-kissy people), I find this excessive. There is NO ONE who I would be so happy to see I would want to kiss them three times.
Seemingly the opposite of being overly kissy, Swiss people are also extremely indirect if they have a problem with someone or something. A friend joked once that if your neighbor doesn't like your dog, they won't say a word to you about it and you won't have a clue there's an issue until the police or the property rental company shows up with a complaint. This is also adverse to my American nature. I prefer to be up front with people and talk through a problem if one exists but that is perceived as really aggressive here. I need to work on curbing my assertiveness and finding more subtle ways to communicate without losing the ability to speak up for when I eventually (insha'allah) go back to the US.
That's all for now! Since the revolution, everyday events have paled in signficance and hardly seem worth reporting but I will try to do better updating the blog even if Mom is the only one reading this. :) Next time I will also post some Geneva pics.
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