Il faut profiter le soleil! (One must take advantage of the sun! )

Last week was work as usual, though a bit more relaxed at the office since our boss is out of town for three weeks : ) It’s just us interns at the office, so the other day we had cake for someone’s birthday, but we still do get work done, which is what I should be getting back to as soon as I finish this. I’m telling you right now, they aren’t terribly exciting articles, but if you’re interested, you can now see a couple of the articles I’ve written for the website. They are mostly informative articles about different human rights bodies, the UN system, and meetings I’ve attended, but if you want to see them, go to www.humanrightsnexus.org . On the right hand side, click on the link National Human Rights Institutes, which I wrote. I also wrote the piece on the homepage about the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, as well as the article under the link Advisory Committee, on the right. When you click on that one you’ll see a link for a report on the 2nd Meeting of the Committee, which I followed and took notes on. Right now, we are preparing for the Human Rights Council. It meets every three years, I believe, and it starts on Monday discussing various issues such as the right to food, water, housing, education, as well as what the Advisory Committee discussed, the Universal Periodic Review, and the Review of the Durban Conference on Xenophobia and Racial Discrimination. So, in preparation for that, we have been writing introductions to each of the subjects the Council will discuss, to kind of prepare the readers of our website for what is to come and give background information before we write the reports of the Council’s discussions on those subjects. OH! And at the top, you’ll see a link that says internships. If you click on that, you’ll see a picture of us interns : )


Friday during class, Pierre told us to “profit bien le soleil” (take advantage of the sun) Friday and Saturday because it was going to be gorgeous those two days before getting a little chillier again on Sunday. So, that’s exactly what we did. After lunch, Leah and I took some extra fruit and bread from the caf, invited everyone else (which we received no acceptance to our invitation), but it mattered not. We were going to have a small picnic by the lake. We invited Leo, who did accept, and met us up in Bel-Air to walk to the lake. It was so nice I was actually wearing a skirt, flip flops, and a t-shirt, thought it did get a little chillier later. We had a grand afternoon the three of us. It was good just to get out, enjoy the sun and fresh air, walk by the lake, and they even had the jet turned on. So we sat right by the jet and had our fruit and bread and took pictures before walking around a bit more and then heading back.


Upcoming plans include a trip the weekend after next; I just bought my ticket for Belgium! Woohoo! Yea for budget airlines and cheap flights in Europe! We have a five-day weekend, Monday and Tuesday, and I have a friend from Idaho doing an internship in Brussels, at the embassy. We haven’t seen each other in forever, but we’ve been keeping in touch and practicing our French together, so we wanted to get together, since we’re so close. He’s so cute; he wants to be a good host so he’s been planning the whole weekend. He’ll show me all around Brussels, take me on a train ride to a nearby town with his friends, go on a boat ride, go to museums and the national palace, and then to Amsterdam and the International Criminal Court. Then the same friend is going to come visit me when we both have the same Spring Break in April. We’ll spend a couple of days in Geneva, then I think the plan is to head off by train east, stopping in different towns in Switzerland like Bern, Zurich, Innsbruck, and Salzburg, before finally ending up in Vienna. It’s either that or a cheap ticket we found to Helsinki Finland. Either way, I can’t wait!