living vs visiting, and our apartment
The day before I left for Geneva, two weeks ago today, I had barely thought of what I would do while I was there. Clearly this wasn’t a vacation. This would be the first time I’d seen Alessandra (live, in person!) in over a month. That pretty much sums up my expectations.
Luckily for us it’s easy to make such a visit into much more than that. Ali had moved into our new apartment just the weekend before I arrived, and so there was lots of setting up to do. The trip, quite happily, turned out to be more like living there than just going for a visit, and that is one of the things that made it so special.
Looks like we just moved in, huh?
We did a number of fun things (hiking, seeing the old city in Geneva, going to market), which I’ll talk more about later. But we also did a bunch of important moving/couple things like buying clothes hangers and getting the internet set up. We lounged around while watching the paralympics, in French. It was great! I went to work at CERN and got my ID badge and office keys and worked in my new office. We rode the bus a lot.
Even though it was just an eleven day visit, I participated in enough chores and actually accomplished things in French (“un baguette, s’il vous plait”, I didn’t speak any French last week!), that I felt more like I was living there than just visiting. And I definitely wasn’t vacationing!
A couple of more photos from the neighborhood:
The Jura from our front yard.
The Main Drag, Rue de Gex, in Maconnex, France.
I miss turning on the tv to a whole different language, heck, I don’t even turn on the tv here. There must have been terror in my eyes when I went to ask the bus driver “deux pour Cornovan, s’il vous plait”, and I kind of miss that too. It was adventure in everyday life. I’m very excited to be going back in about two months!
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Spring Break in Geneva « justing's blog said this on 2010 27 March at 11:46 pm |