According to my post-vacation routine, including unpacking, laundry, and phone calls, I am now prepared to give my readers the overdue update on my recent activities. I believe the last time I wrote it was a beautiful Saturday afternoon in which I was planning on hiking the Saleve later that day. I did end up going up as planned, and spent nearly the entire afternoon there, reading, listening to music, writing postcards, and even fell asleep for a bit. I was going to stay up and watch the sunset, but there was a lot more ice up there than I expected, and so between the increase in ice, my dying flashlight, and the likelihood of running into wild boars, I decided it was better to head down before it got too dark.
The next day Sarah and I got up and went for a lovely 2 ½ hr. walk through the woods, which was relaxing. Monday and Tuesday afternoon I had to go to work, but took full advantage of the outdoors in the mornings before I left, and then Tuesday night Dallin came in! His plane didn’t get in till about 10:40, and I thought I planned it perfectly so we could catch the last bus to the border, but unfortunately the train schedule was wrong and we missed the bus by about 10 minutes. Thankfully, I have very nice friends, and Leah and her visiting boyfriend came and picked us up at 12:30 PM.
Wednesday was my chance to show Dallin Geneva and my life here in France in a day. So in the morning we went to my favorite Patisserie for breakfast, and also my favorite bakery where we got our bread for our picnic that evening. We then headed to the university park where we played chess (I put up a good fight, but as you can see ended up losing),
saw the Reformation Wall and the Cathedral where John Calvin preached- as well as a great view of Geneva from the top of the Cathedral.
Afterwards we headed to the UN where we got the official tour, and then I took Dallin to my office and showed him around. We popped into one of the meeting for the Durban Conference Review where we heard one of our favorite quotes from the whole trip. Someone was speaking in their native language, and when it was interpreted he said it was interpreted well, so the chair of the meeting asked the speaker to say it in English, at which the speaker responded with something that included the phrase “…the dictatorship of English…” : ) After the UN, we headed to the grocery store and got the rest of our supplies for our picnic by the lake and the jet d’eau, which included a random assortment of eggplant and cucumber for me, eggrolls for Dallin, and guacamole, chevre, bread, juice, and strawberries for the both of us. After eating, we spent a bit of time looking through some of my favorite pictures from the entire year I had just gotten developed to decorate my room with while we waited for Matt and Leah. They were meeting us in town to go to the fair. Most of the rides weren’t that spectacular, but a couple were pretty fun, and we had a good time and got saved the walk up the hill a second time.
I intelligently stayed up till 2:00 AM packing and putting up my pictures before going to bed that night and getting up at 7:00 to hike the Saleve. We had decided that since we were leaving that day for Austria and would be stuck on a train all day, we should get some exercise first, but 7:00 AM came all too soon. We were seriously dragging before the fresh air and the elevation hit us, and we soon woke up. Not very long into the trail, Dallin asked, “this is the right way, right?” He was walking ahead, and I wasn’t really paying attention, though I should have been because he obviously didn’t know where he was going. We had diverted off the trail somewhere a ways back and were now scaling the rocks. Literally. As in, the face of the mountain. But we dove in; I think it was my first experience like that and it was awesome! That is, minus the nasty shale and the goats kicking rocks down at us. Yeah. We eventually found the trail again and had to hurry back down to catch a train at a decent time. Dallin had unfortunately dirtied his only pair of jeans on our unexpectedly interesting hike, so we tried to wash them, but they got caught in the black hole that is our washer, which refused to give them back. Long story short, we finally made it into town around 2:00 and made it to Zurich around sunset. We hung around Zurich for a while and ate dinner before catching the night train to Salzburg.
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