Easter Break 2010- Geneva

Geneva was one of my favorite places. The lake was gorgeous, the view of the Alps was breathtaking, and the UN tour was amazing!

To get from Nice to Geneva, we had to make a side trip to Milan. We only thought we were done with Italy. We didn’t see anything in Milan though, we just made it there in time to get to a creepy hostel to sleep, and then woke up to go back to the train station. We made it to Geneva in the afternoon just in time to miss the tour of CERN. Chloe is an engineering major, and really wanted to see CERN, a big scientific study location of anti-matter or something like that in Geneva. (I apologize to anyone who actually knows what CERN is; science is not my favorite subject). So we found our hostel and a grocery store and then passed out for the day.

While in Geneva we went to the UN and took a tour of the building. We had the best tour guide EVER. We took a picture with him in the end and we were supposed to find him on Facebook, but I think we lost his e-mail. He liked to make fun of our Texas accents; he said “ya’ll” a lot. Obviously being a tour guide there was just his side job, normally he worked in some legal department at the UN. Fun fact, his roommate works at CERN, we had a good laugh at how smart their apartment must feel. Here are some cool facts I learned on the tour of the UN:

1. There are 192 member states and 2 honorary members, the Vadican- because it chooses not to be an active member, and Palestine, because it doesn’t have set borders.
2. The 6 official languages of the UN are English, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and French.
3. There are about 10 peacocks that live on the grounds. Meetings have had to been stopped because of the loud obnoxious mating calls.
4. The UN headquarters in NY are the official political headquarters while the Geneva headquarters mainly focuses on human rights.
5. All other branches of the UN (other than NY and Geneva) are just operational branches, including one in Vienna.
6. A bunch of other historical facts that I won’t bore you with, or out myself for not already knowing them.

Like I said before, Lake Geneva is beautiful. A couple of different times, we just ate our lunch while sitting on a bench by the lake. One evening we walked around it and went out to a lighthouse. There are swans nesting on the side of it. I don’t know that I have ever seen a swan this close before, they are rumored to get violent if you annoy them.

We met a girl named Natalia in our hostel who was there for 2 weeks interning at the UN. She is a translator, she spoke English, Russina, French, and Spanish I think. She was officially translating English to Russian. She was super sweet and smart, and I decided that she should marry my friend Justin Bauman (who is studying in Russia right now), but I didn’t get her full name or anything, so… sorry Justin.

I LOVED Geneva. I would really like to go back there in the summer time. Our tour guide said it was amazing then. Visiting made me really excited to go back to Switzerland with my family in July.