A long overdue update from Geneva

So I haven't written anything in a couple of weeks. There's no real rhyme or reason to it; it's mostly that I haven't really had a lot about which to write, and I haven't really found a lot of time in which to write. I have the bad habit of being far too verbose when I write, as I feel the need to include every little detail, and this takes quite a bit of time, so I usually have to set aside at least an hour to do one of these blog posts, and that takes a bit of motivation as well. And if there is one thing that I have been lacking in Geneva, it has been motivation.

As I've told some of the people with whom I've been in contact over the past few weeks, life here hasn't always been particularly great. There haven't been a lot of big, really crappy things that have happened, just a large number of smaller nuisances that have built up and gotten me really frustrated and really irritated. I've been sick off and on since I've been here; I have had trouble sleeping on these awful beds since day one; some of the people here really get under my skin; we have to provide our own food half of the time (and food here is RIDICULOUSLY expensive - Paris was relatively affordable by comparison); the weather was mostly gloomy and crappy until this past week; my one professor, who is also the assistant program director, has been pretty unpleasant towards me much of the time - although she has gotten better in the last week or so as well; and so on.

I'm also not particularly pleased with my internship to date. I had high expectations, since I am working for the International Commission of Jurists, which is a fairly large and very well-respected international law organization. I had hoped to do some interesting work on one topic or another, but I was not really hoping to get involved in the field where I ended up - corporate issues. My supervisor, Carlos, is a Peruvian lawyer who focuses on corporations who violate human rights. The task that he gave for me - researching instances in which corporations, NGOs, and other stakeholders cooperated to form an independent investigation into accusations that the corporation violated human rights - seemed interesting enough to me, as I love to do research. He told me that there were two reports that would be the models for me, one involving Mercedes-Benz in Argentina and the other involving Del Monte and the Swiss grocery store chain Migros. I was supposed to read and summarize the reports, then look for others along these lines and do the same. It seemed like a decent enough task, but I have gotten very disenchanted with it since. I have read and summarized at least 10 reports for him, but he told me that they weren't what he was looking for. I have utilized all the channels that I can logically think of, from Google to B-W's Ohio Link databases, and have pretty much come up completely empty. I don't really try that much anymore at work; I just more or less mess around on the internet and pretend to work.

Carlos is also a pretty strict supervisor. He is a nice enough guy, but he comes across as very strict. When I tried to negotiate what hours I would work, he replied to my email and told me that I was supposed to work every Friday that I didn't have the Eurail Pass, with no exceptions. He also checks up on me and presses me to find out what I've done. He asked me to write a summary of the reports that I had read and meet with him to discuss it on Friday two weeks ago. I figured that meant that he would come find me when he wanted to meet, which he didn't do, so when it was time for me to leave and I saw that he was still working at his desk, I left. When I came in the next Wednesday, he confronted me at my desk and asked me why I hadn't met with him on Friday. I explained that it was a misunderstanding and I thought he would find me; he didn't seem to think this was a suitable answer and looked at me with a pressing stare, as though miscommunications don't exist outside of the US. I gave him my report Wednesday at about 11, and waited for him to finish reading it so I could meet with him. I kept looking into this office periodically to see if he was done, but he still wasn't finished when I finally went in to meet him at 5. He told me that I had done a pretty good job with the summary, but that I hadn't found what he was looking for and I needed to do more. He also pressed me to finish the Mercedes-Benz report, which is 125 pages and extremely dry. I agreed that I would do this, but I had pretty much given up on this project by this point. Fortunately he did tell me that if I didn't think it was going anywhere, I could let him know at some point and he would try to get a new assignment for me. I plan on doing so.

The little things about life that you take for granted back home have also gotten on my nerves. Things close very early in Geneva. Stores and some food places close as early as 5pm, and most of them are completely closed on Sundays. It's next to impossible to find a decent cup of coffee for less than CHF 4; it costs about CHF 7 to get something from Starbucks. I did laundry two weeks ago and ended up washing my dress socks for the first time. This was a mistake, as they bled horribly the white clothes that I had in the machine, and when Ashley washed her clothes after me, the dye also bled into her white clothes, turning them a lovely light gray. I also made the mistake of drying one of my sweaters in the unfamiliar dryer, which promptly shrunk it to half its original size.

Overall, these things were really starting to weigh on me, and I am sure that I have been in a rather unpleasant mood for much of the time I have been here. I have been homesick a lot, and I really miss Cleveland. People say that you never appreciate something until it's gone. Well, I've appreciated Cleveland for a while now, but now I just miss it like hell.

With all of this building up, we figured that change of scenery might do us some good. We were originally going to go to the small city of Lausanne on Lake Geneva a couple of weeks ago. A group of us had sworn that the UNIRESO (the overarching public transportation company in the area) website had said we could get a supplement to our Geneva bus pass and catch a bus there for about CHF 10. Unfortunately, when Ashley and I got to the airport train station at about 8:00 Saturday morning, we were informed that there was no such bus, and that it would cost CHF 42 to catch a train to Lausanne. Seeing as we could reserve train tickets for Lausanne online for CHF 18, we decided to go ahead and scrap this trip, leaving us with another delightful Genevan weekend.

We decided to head to a flea market at Plainpalais with a couple of people from our group that afternoon. A cold rain was falling, which I had grown to expect here, and it drove most of the vendors from setting up shop. Geneva supposedly has some really nice open air markets on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and this was one of the things we had yet to see in the city. We've already been to the UN, walked around Old Town - twice, seen the Cathedrals Saint-Pierre & Notre Dame (the latter is a small Catholic cathedral near Gare Cornavin, while the former is the main church that was Calvin's home turf and the center of the French-Swiss Reformation), seen the Parc de Bastions & the Wall of Reformation, been to the Musee d'Art & d'Histoire, listened to a presentation at the UN High Commission for Refugees for our Human Rights class, walked down the major shopping street - the Rue de la Confederation - three times, seen Jet d'eau a number of times, and explored parts of the Pregny and Grand-Saconnex neighborhoods surrounding the Knox Centre. Rome may not have been built in a day, but I can safely say that a person could adequately see pretty much everything in Geneva in two or three, tops. The Swiss aren't the most exciting of peoples (although they do have a penchant for large, fairly frequent protests), and I think they like it that way.

Fortunately, despite our initial failed attempts to see the world outside of Geneva's borders, we did have a ready-made excuse to travel - our anniversary was coming up. Given this state of affairs, I began to look into things for us to do. I initially thought we could go to Prague, since it is a very affordable and very cool city. Unfortunately, since we don't have our Eurail passes yet, we had to look into alternative travel options. There is no direct flight from Geneva to Prague on EasyJet, and when I got a quote for two tickets to Prague (not even a return trip, just one way) from SBB for CHF 455, I decided that was no longer a viable option. (We have instead decided to see Prague over Spring Break during our tour of Eastern Europe. We were going to go to Normandy, Tours, Dublin, Cork, and Aberdeen/Edinburgh to visit Aunt Anne, but she told me that some professor from Boston is coming in to spend that whole week doing research with her, so another plan went down the drain. The best laid plans of mice and men...)

I next started looking into Nice, since it's not that far away and is on the Mediterranean Sea. It was a fairly reasonable option, but then I opened my mouth and uttered the word that would end the deliberations - Paris. As soon as I said it, Ashley pretty much made up her mind, and she convinced me to come around shortly thereafter. I knew that transportation and accommodations wouldn't be cheap, but I figured that if we split the costs and tried to limit what we spent while in the city, it wouldn't be too bad. Anyways, it was two weeks before we got the Eurail, and we were two of a handful of people who hadn't traveled or really spent much money yet, so we figured we could splurge a little bit for the weekend. I was able to get train tickets on the TGV for Friday morning and Sunday night, and we tracked down a hotel in the 15 arrondissement that was pretty cheap and was still in the city. I was also able to take Friday off of work, as my supervisor had gone on a two-week vacation, so I didn't need to consult with him.

Paris was the vacation from Geneva that I desperately needed, but I will give all the details in my next post.