Mes Histoires de Suisse

Sorry, but this post was delayed by the last couple of weeks of paper writing insanity. In case you've missed them, here are my Facebook albums from Switzerland:
Switzerland - June 21, 2007
Switzerland - June 22, 2007
Switzerland - June 23, 2007
Switzerland - June 24, 2007

Without further ado, my tales of Switzerland...

Wednesday, June 20
Today was basically a travel day. Our class had a charter bus for the whole trip. Our driver, Pierre, was the stereotypical jolly fat man (better than the stereotypical bitter fat man) who didn't say much, mainly because he only speaks French. Whenever he did speak, he was usually chuckling too. Our ride to Geneva was very scenic but somewhat spoiled for me by a sore throat and slight headache that had begun the night before and were worsening today. At a rest area just inside the Swiss border, I got some cough drops in the rest area but was unsuccessful in finding any Tylonel-like medicine (the German labels on everything didn't help matters).

When we did arrive at our hostel (the John Knox Center), we were all too tired to go into the city, but since we had brought a couple of bottles of wine with us, we hatched a new plan: We would take the bottles of wine to a grassy area outside our hostel, sit, drink, and take in the sights and sounds of the Geneva countryside (the John Knox Center is about a ten minute drive outside of downtown Geneva). But oh no! No one brought a bottle opener! What would we do? Over dinner, we (and by "we", I mean Manuel) were obsessed with how we were going to get our wine bottles open. "Well, we're in Switzerland, so someone must have a Swiss army knife," we joked. Perhaps we could ask the kitchen staff? We vascillated back and forth, until finally, Manuel got up and went to the kitchen, asking them if they could help us out. They could, so Manuel went to fetch the wine. Upon his return, wine bottles in hand, Manuel made for the kitchen. Pierre, who had quietly been eating his dinner with us the whole time, saw Manuel with his precious cargo and now understood our discussion. He reached into his pocket and withdrew...

Wait for it...

a Swiss army knife! At that point, we lost it and started rolling with laughter, ashamed at ourselves for not thinking to ask him in the first place. Manuel took note and reversed course, bringing the wine bottles to Pierre, who happily uncorked the bottles for us. We took the wine onto a grassy knoll outside the center overlooking a wheat field. We drank, talked, and listened to the chorus of cowbells, a sound with which we would become intimately familiar over the next few days. Afterwards, we retreated to our respective rooms for bed. Unfortunately, huge thunderstorms that night that stopped and started again at least four times (I was counting) allowed me only a few hours of sleep.

Thursday, June 21
My sore throat was getting worse, but there wasn't much to be done about it, so I used the cough drops as needed and moved on. The day mostly consisted of visits to various UN organizations, beginning with the UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR). The speakers were decent but a little too specialized to keep my attention (for example, one talked about the refugee situation in just the Caucasus Mountains area). For lunch, we walked over to the World Metereological Organization, which I thought we were connecting to human rights somehow, but no, we were just going there because it has a relatively cheap cafeteria and an amazing view of Lake Geneva. We had some time to kill before the next set of speakers, so we took a leisurely stroll through a park that was on the way to our next destination, Palais Wilson. While it was the original site of the League of Nations, it is now the headquarters for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The first speaker was of great interest to me, mainly because he had recently been to Darfur as a UN observer, and he hinted at his frustration over being powerless to interfere in that terrible situation. The others weren't particularly memorable.

That night, we had a pizza dinner at Restaurant du Club Nautique de Versoix on Lake Geneva. Although swimming had been on the agenda, it was scrapped because the weather was too mild for a swim. Instead, we went back into Geneva searching for some ice cream. During our search, we witnessed some people run past us, but we didn't think anything of it. We found a place that was serving ice cream, but we passed on it because we thought we could do better. Shortly afterwards, the same group of people as before came back running the other way. However, what we thought was a playful chase turned suddenly serious when we noticed that one of them was bleeding from the face. They ran past, and we kept moving forward, now with a trail of blood to lead us to the scene of the crime: a large blood splatter with glass intermixed. I hadn't been a witness to such violence since high school, and the last time I saw a blood trail, it had been due to someone's nosebleed; but we all treated the situation as due to chance, and not indicative of the general nature of Geneva, and we continued with our evening. As it turned out, we had no luck in our quest for ice cream, so we instead stopped at a cafe for drinks. By the time those were done, it was around midnight, so it was back to the center we went.

Friday, June 22
Whereas Thursday was the UN day, today was non-governmental organization (NGO) day. We visited 2 NGOs: the World Organization against Torture (WOT, one letter away from the cooler acronym of WOOT) and the Center On Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE). At WOT, a guy who reminded me of Egon from Ghostbusters lectured to us about WOT's role in fighting torture. Essentially, they collect information about situations where people are being tortured from NGOs that are "on the ground", so to speak, and they take whatever actions they can with that information, normally consisting of filing complaints to various UN bodies. It must be frustrating to do work that only has an impact in preventing future torture from happening but does nothing to stop tortures happening at the moment. Personally, I would prefer to be involved in something with a little more immediacy, although I recognize the difficulty of that preference in practice, and it's still good work, especially given that they're working off of an annual budget of about one million dollars. As for COHRE, once we got into their offices, which were just a set of apartments that had been converted into offices, we went back outside to a café next door for a "meeting". Throughout the day, the more informal and less grandiose nature of NGOs as compared to the UN was rather striking, due to differences such as what I just mentioned. They're humbler because they have to be: They're constantly constrained by their budgets (even more so than the UN, which itself has a budget comparable to that of the NYPD, which only has to manage one city while the UN has operations throughout the world); they don't have the respect that the UN (generally) has; and they're still in their infancy, exploring new techniques and kind of making things up as they go along.

We also went to the Red Cross Museum, which a friend of mine at Lehigh had told me was great and a must-see. Fortunately, I didn't have to go out of my way to see it, because it was part of our trip's agenda. We had lunch there (I found out when I was almost done that I was eating ostrich... that made me a little upset) and spent about two hours rushing through a number of great exhibits. The place was full of history, and two hours simply couldn't do it justice; it covered the events that led to the Red Cross's creation, its involvement through the World Wars, all the way up to modern-day activities. A nice audio guide came with the price of admission, and I was reminded of how much I liked well-made museums.

That afternoon, we were supposed to see one more NGO, but at the beginning of the trip, it had canceled so the rest of the day was free. We headed back to the John Knox Center to figure out what we should do. We ended up splitting into two groups (although some of us stayed at the center to get work done) and agreed to meet up later that night. I went with Manuel and Anna back into Geneva. We found a church (St. Pierre Cathedral, famous for having been frequented by John Calvin) and paid to go to the top (only 4 Swiss Francs, which is somewhere between 2 and 3 euros). Up there, we had a great view of the city (included in these pictures), and it was obscenely pleasant. Once we forced ourselves down from there, we walked towards the Rhone River and got some ice cream (finally). Manuel and I went past the Jet d'Eau (huge fountain, also in these pictures) and got very wet in a matter of seconds, like being in the Splash Zone after Shamu has just finished a jump. We then took a public transportation boat to the other side of the river and walked from there across the Pont du Mont Blanc to wait for the other group, who were bringing with them some friends they knew in Geneva. Once we all met up, we began exploring the city during the Fete de la Musique, a Europe-wide (at least Western Europe) celebration of all types of music. We found a Jewish folk music group, a couple of drumming groups (we almost got crushed trying to get through the crowded alley for one of the groups), a rock band, and a woman singer/male guitarist duo. By the end of it, my voice was practically dead from the festivities and the continuing sore throat, but it did allow me to do a cool sexy bass voice that's normally impossible and that gave the ladies in my group a good chuckle. I aim to please. :-)

Saturday, June 23
This was when I split up from my class, as they were taking a boat trip and bus ride back to Strasbourg. My plan was to meet my friend, Luke, (who I know from Lehigh and lives in Switzerland) in either Berne at noon (capital of Switzerland, a fact unknown to me until I researched this trip) or his town of Lotzwil at 6 pm. My voice had healed enough for me to call Luke, but I had no luck getting in touch with him via phone in Geneva. I went to the train station and tried calling him again, this time with success. I was relieved; I really didn't want to have to rely on the e-mails I had sent him in the previous days, to which he hadn't gotten a chance to respond. We agreed to meet at the train station in Berne at 1:30 pm. When I got there, I had time to kill, and I was hungry, so I ordered a "hot dog" at the station. I had a difficult time ordering it, as Berne is in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, and I don't know a lick of German. I ended up getting a frankfurter in hard bread, and my potato wedges were seasoned, even though I wanted them plain. Still, it was fairly tasty, and I finished it just in time to meet Luke. He was an excellent tour guide, showing me around Berne and asking for input the entire time. We started by going to the Einstein museum there, which was poorly organized but contained lots of information. We didn't linger too long because I wanted to see other things too, well aware of my limited time.

We zipped past a cathedral (the Munster of Berne) and over to a gaming store that Luke wanted to show me (he knows me too well :-P ). Finally, after weeks of searching, here was a store that had D&D books. I knew D&D was a part of the gaming culture in Europe, and I had been looking for proof; this was it. After Luke bought a few games, we went over to the Zytglogge, Berne's famous clock tower, but we missed its hourly display by a few minutes. It was a little after 5 pm, and we noticed that everything was closing. Well, surely, Berne's Barengraben (bear pit), with the bears that symbolize Berne would be open. We took a bus over and found even the bears had gone into their caves for the night. We weren't left with many other options, so we took the train to Lotzwil, where Luke lives. There, I met Luke's exceedingly nice and generous mother. Her English wasn't perfect, but it was at least as good as my host mother's, even though Luke had told me otherwise. When she asked whether I was tired, I told her about my throat and headache (an escalation of my illness that had blossomed that day), and in response, she gave me a pill for my headache, a lozenge for the throat, and tea and cookies. I felt like I was in a spa, or one of those places you go to recuperate after you've been sick a long time (I think there's a word for it, it's mostly a European practice, I can't think of the word right now). We had an excellent dinner, and I spent the rest of the evening on Luke's computer (I think Luke let me stay in his room, another example of their hospitality).

Sunday, June 24
And it was almost time for my excursion to come to an end. I slept until 8 or so, did some more Internet browsing until I was hungry, and then gorged myself on a breakfast replete with bread, butter, jam, ham, and honey (easily the best meal I had in Europe). I packed and headed out at about 2 pm. Luke went with me to the first station past Lotzwil, as he was off to visit his girlfriend. At that station, we quickly said our goodbyes and split ways so that I could run to catch my train; it left within a minute after I entered it. I would have made it back without incident, except that I took the wrong train at the next station. What happened was, a train came on the same track as mine mere minutes before mine was scheduled to leave, and I assumed it must have been mine. I quickly realized my mistake upon entering the train, but right before I could step off, the doors closed, and short of pulling the emergency brake (I refrained because it wasn't that serious), there was nothing I could do. I had to backtrack, and the train schedule was such that I was delayed a couple of hours, but I made it back to Strasbourg a little before 7 pm.

What struck me the most that day, more so than the day I arrived in Switzerland, was just how beautiful the country is. Everything the train passed looked like something off of a postcard; I couldn't get over how picturesque it all was. Despite my illness, which dissipated a few days after the Switzerland trip, Switzerland was my favorite country to visit during my 6 weeks in Europe. Admittedly, I was busy with homework most of the time in France, and I only spent a weekend in Germany, but even controlling for those differences, I think that if I could only choose one of those countries to visit again (and I knew French, German, and Swiss German equally well), I would choose Switzerland.

I have one more post to close out my European odyssey, and as it's already written (you'll find out why when you read it), it should be up within the next couple of days.