Geneva Pictures

Now, the original idea was to go visit Dave and Joey in Grenoble, where they’ve been living and working this past year. I’d emailed them and invited myself to spend a weekend with them and since they are good and sweet and friendly people they immediately accepted and the plan was I’d spend a couple of days in Grenoble with them and it would all be very nice. In fact I planned much of the trip around the fact that I had friends in France…in fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I decided, when beginning to think about going on a trip at all, to go to France at all because they were there. Also because of the whole speaking French, a little, thing. And then I thought that since Grenoble is nearish the Alps and hey, Italy is right over the aforementioned Alps, I’d just go there too. Anyway, that was the plan.

But Dave and Joey, it transpired, had different ideas. They’ve got some inordinately huge amount of vacation time and they up and decided that they wanted an actual vacation on some of that vacation time, and would I like to go to Switzerland, perhaps? And so we did.

And here they are, in Geneva, about an hour and a half after we arrived and finally found an epicerie from whence to procure our lunches. Aren’t they cute?

We weren’t exactly sure what to do once we finally did get there. The first day we got to the incomprehensible train station and just sort of walked around for a while (with our full packs on, no less) until we hit a major body of water.

Unfortunately this picture doesn’t show the “water fountain” for which Geneva is famous. It’s a huge giant fountain in the middle of the lake and it is comprised of water, yes, but “water fountain” doesn’t quite cut it. You’ll just have to use your imagination.

We meandered around after consuming a lunch that involved a rotisserie chicken eaten by Dave and Joey with their bare hands (again, did I get a picture of that? No!) and stumbled onto what became our favorite aspect of Geneva, the lovely (and free!) Jardin Botanique. We ended up going there every day because Geneva is the most expensive city in the most expensive country in Europe and there were many free things to do there. I got pictures of pretty much none of them, of course.

Except here! Here’s a nice carousel for you, in its scarily baroque glory. We really liked the scented garden and the science museum and the little zoo with its flamingos and various flavors of mountain goat and imaginative chickens. We also discovered it’s swan nesting season in Switzerland, apparently, because we saw a ton of swans and swan nests with swan eggs on them. We checked on a certain nest every day:

Our second day there we went to a wonderful (and free!) Natural History Museum which involves, I promise you, a two headed turtle named, of course, Janus. No picture, what were you thinking? I promise you there was one and that it was wonderful and that you should make it a point to stop by and see it the next time you are in Geneva. That museum was wonderful even without the two-headed turtle, and I have to tell you that it was pretty exciting for me in my quest to speak as much French as possible, that I could read all the signage about leaf-nosed bats and cassowaries and pumas and so forth…in French! How great is that?

Dave and Joey are on this crazy Paleo diet, which has a lot to do with why they dismembered a rotisserie chicken with their bare hands, although Joey assures me that normally they sit at a table and use silverware. You eat what the cavemen ate, I think is the idea, and so no bread or cheese or other dairy for them. Let me repeat that for those of you who are having as hard a time as I did with that concept: No bread or cheese when living in France. We would go to the store for our lunch or dinner or something and I would be throwing all sorts of artery-clogging dairy and pork products into my basket, along with as many baguettes as I could comfortably carry, and they’d be hemming and hawing over by the dried fruits and nuts. I’d say it’s no way to live but then I have to remember the morning in our hotel when I was doing some desultory yoga poses, you know, just to get the kinks out, and there was Joey, dropping down for a quick hundred push-ups. Of course, those of you who know Joey know that this is normal behavior for her and may actually be wondering if she wasn’t feeling well that day, as she didn’t do two hundred as usual. But still.

So here I am, unrepentant with my carbs. One of the best things, I have to tell you, about both France and Switzerland, was that people really did just tuck a wrapped baguette in their bags…just like I’m doing here! One of the other best things is that I saw no low-carb advertising anywhere whatsoever for two whole weeks.

It was very very cold and windy in Geneva. See? Here we are, shivering lavishly.

And to wind up, here’s a lovely shot of Dave and Joey and the lake. I think they’re watching windsurfers here. Aren’t they cute, there in the distance? Awwwww…

Not pictured in this entry:

— Going to a play and understanding about 80% of the French, much to my delight.

— The look of surprise on my face when one of the actors in the play chased another actor around with a roll of masking tape.

— The look of surprise on my face while perusing the exhibit of antique gynecological instruments at the Science Museum.

–Me sitting in the reading area of the aforementioned Science Museum and taking fifteen minutes to read ten pages in a kids’ science magazine.

–Trying to find a big fat book in Geneva’s foreign-language bookshop because I’d given Mom my other book of the two I brought along in Paris and I thought I’d be doing a lot of reading in Como.

–The clothesline I strung up in the living room of our hotel suite for that extra-trashy hotel lifestyle look.

–The extremely long dinner we had in Grenoble. At least four hours, and it involved a hailstorm, too.

–The fruit market I went to one morning while Dave and Joey were out running ten or twenty miles before sunrise. One vendor gave me some cherries which I totally ate even though I don’t even much like cherries, and another complimented me on my French, saying, as several people did on the trip, “You speak French well! For an American.” There were several stall selling roasted chicken and I contemplated bringing one back for my Paleo friends but brought back three grapefruits, instead, because my love for the French word for “grapefruit” knows no bounds. It’s “pamplemousse.” Say it with me: “pamplemousse.” Ah, pamplemousse. I love you so.

Tomorrow I’ll post all three of my Italy pictures and then we’ll be done, and it will be back to your regularly scheduled program of whining, babbling, and complaining. I should go on trips more often, yes?