Two weeks in Geneva

Man, these two weeks have flown by so fast! Upon arriving here in Geneva, I was immediately swept up in a whirlwind on French classes, sightseeing, and living with a new family. Well, not exactly a completely new family, but one I haven't seen in four years!

Notice: This blog post is separated into two parts: Week One and Week Two.

Baby me and Vickie (four years ago!)

Week One

As soon my flight landed, Vickie and her father whisked me from the airport to the University of Geneva, where we had our first French class! It lasted from 4 to 7 PM with a 15-minute break in between. The professor, Philippe Jarjat, spoke in French for the whole time, which was a big difference from my AP French class, and all my classmates came from different parts of the world. Out of my 13 peers, I was the only one who lived outside of Geneva, but there were people originally from Peru, Guatemala, Spain, Germany, Norway, Bolivia, and more. Therefore, since we all had different mother languages, we were forced to speak in French to one another.

The only other teenager aside from me was called Ian, and he was an American student going to the international school here in Geneva. As for the rest, they were lawyers, doctors, bankers, and a few WHO and UN employees as well.

The view from Vickie's apartment

Outside of French class, I visited the UN with Vickie's mom and walked along the lake and city. There are lots of swans in Lake Geneva, and I learned a bunch of random swan facts (courtesy of Vickie's mom).

Swan Fact #1: After their mate dies, swans never search for another one.

Swan Fact #2: The mother swan sits on her egg for three(?) months to protect it before it's born. Apparently, you can see how skinny she gets by the end of her sitting period, since she barely eats.

On July 4th, the great Independence Day of America, I did...nothing patriotic. Well, I ate pizza. In Switzerland, it's common for one person to eat an entire pizza themselves! I was amazed when Vickie told me, and even more amazed – incredulous, to be accurate – to find out that the pizza cost about 25 francs. I guess everything is just more expensive here.

I also ran to the Botanic Gardens in the morning, which were super large and filled with interesting animals. There were ducks, deer, even black swans! I didn't know they existed in real life, so I was super excited to see one.

Vickie and I visited Belexert, a shopping center, where we had some crab balls and McDonalds for lunch. Look at the cute package the soy sauce came in! I also bought some reusable coffee/tea mugs for me and my mom that I found in an eco-friendly, environment-saving store.

One of the highlights of my trip was visiting CERN, the European Center of Nuclear Resesarch. After reading Dan Brown's book Angels and Demons (off topic, but Dan Brown books are amazing), I was so excited to visit the home of the world's highest energy particle accelerator, which is also where the Worldwide Web was invented! Everyone in Vickie's family was occupied that morning, so I braved the journey myself. Although Geneva's public transportation system is generally really great, I did undergo the unfortunate experience of having a drunk man yell at me while I was waiting to catch my tram. I tried to ignore him in the beginning, but he walked across the platform to sit next to me, so I zoomed from the bench and went to stand with a couple of girls on the other side of the station. Fortunately, I got to CERN without any further incidents, and proceeded to be impressed and befuddled by the physics information placards and demonstrations.

I knew I had to get my best two physics buddies (Jake and Eric) some presents, so I bought some postcards, like this one of two particles accelerating!

During the weekend, we took a cable car up to Mont Salève, which is actually in France! We got to see some people parachute off the mountain and land in some obscure location in Switzerland, so we took some photos, ate some ice cream, and headed back down the mountain.

Vickie also took me to eat mango sticky rice, which was super yummy! If there's one thing I've learned these past few weeks, it's that Vickie loves mango. I've tried dried mango, mango candy, fresh mango, mango sticky rice, mango ice cream, mango sorbet, and even smelled mango perfume and moisturizer here.

I also met Maria, whose mom is in my French class. Sue Mey, my classmate, suggested that I meet her daughter since we had similar personalities. Maria brought me to Holy Cow – aka Swiss McDonald's – where we ran into two of her acquaintances. One of them posed a really weird question to me: What is your utopia? Then, he proceeded to explain in detail his utopia and economic system that would work best for our world. It was a really interesting, albeit confusing, conversation, but I had a fun time. After that, we went to Carouge, the Italian sector of Geneva. The architecture of the buildings was completely different and more quintessentially "European" than the international cityscape of Geneva, and we had a great time walking through the streets and getting to know one another.

Week Two

And so begins my second week! Vickie and I started ballet classes at Geneva Dance Center this week, which meant that we actually had to wake up early and commute 40 minutes near the French border.

The classes were taught Balanchine-style, which meant that my foot cramped terribly after every combination and my calves were sore by the end of the day. There was no AC in the studio, so we sweated profusely on the 90-degree weather days and felt just a tad better on the 80-degree ones. I had no experience whatsoever with Balanchine (I'm trained in this Chinese/Russian style fusion), so I felt like a floppy fish trying to keep up with the combinations and get to third – let's not even talk about fifth – position between jetés.

On the bright side of things, there was an Aldi just below the school, so Vickie and I tried a different pastry and drink combination every day! We quickly realized our leisure time shrank to a minimum, since we would get home and scarf down lunch before going right back out the door and sleeping on the way to French.

However, we did find the time to take some Polaroids, golden hour selfies at night, and bake some chocolate chip cookies. At one point, we had an impromptu dance party in the garden! This was really nice for me because it reminded me of how fun it was to be spontaneous and stop worrying about what others might think of me.

Vickie and I have rather different personalities, and I often jokingly muttered "I don't know her, I don't know her!" whenever she did something particularly attention-catching in public. She danced in front of the tram station (a truck driver passing by actually honked his horn and gave her a thumbs up), played music in public, and talked louder than I normally would in the privacy of my own home.

However, being around her made me feel comfortable enough to play at vlogging in public (during our day trip to Yvoire) and to run across multiple streets to catch a tram while laughing way too hard.

One day, Vickie and I went to the World Health Organization to eat lunch with her dad! I borrowed her mom's badge to get in, and I had a great falafel and couscous plate at the restaurant inside. We also visited Vickie's school, which was absolutely huge. She thought the exterior was too boring and plain, but first of all, it had a balcony. That's all.

At the World Health Organization!

On the last day of class – both for ballet and French – I was feeling happy and sad at the same time. For starters, I was super happy that ballet was ending for reasons aforementioned.

As for my French classes, I felt like we talked about something interesting every day. Our discussion topics ranged from TV shows to climate refugees and even how men express emotions! We listened to audio clips from French news sources and wrote a dissertation on online commerce. I even got to explain the Gini coefficient in French! (I emailed Reeder about it and he told me that the UN uses it for some of its human development and country comparison stats. Go figure.) All in all, I became good friends with some of my classmates, and one, Amaia, tried to convince me to come live in Europe after college. (That will be revealed in the future if it happens or not). Amaia was my discussion buddy for most of these topics, and she's originally from Spain. She's only studied French for 10 months, but next year, she'll be working as a thoracic surgeon in Lausanne!

On our last day, M. Jarjat gave us a few resources to continue improving French on our own, like a frequency dictionary and the grammar book given to all French students. I got to talk to him a few times in the tram, since we took the same one to our respective apartments. We talked about my plans for college and ballet, and I learned about his interest in architecture and how he's learned English, Vietnamese, Thai, German, and maybe another language that I forget. On the last day, he waved goodbye to me from inside the tram after I had already gotten off, and I thought it was a really nice gesture.

On Sunday, we all went to a cheese fondu restaurant, which was super duper fun. We basically ate bread with melted cheese along with some salami and more cheese. Vickie's English tutor, Nikolai, also joined us. He's from Los Angeles, so he told me a lot about the differences between North and South California as well as his experience studying international relations in Geneva. Soon, he's moving back to America to do his master's degree at Georgetown University. Our discussion made me realize that I'm probably not going to study in international relations, which means I've narrowed down one major I'm not going to do! Regardless, we had a really great conversation about literature and US-Russia relations.

These two weeks have been an absolutely incredible experience, and I'm so happy I was able to catch up with Vickie and her family after all these years. Beyond that though, I'm so, so, so excited to go home and see my family and friends tomorrow (if only for a couple of days).

See you soon, Johns Creek :)