Geneva Gibber

Here’s what I did last weekend. It was a four day weekend because Tuesday was the Swiss Independence Day. It wasn’t particularly different from what I do on other weekends in Geneva, but here goes:

Friday Night – We made a big mistake… we rented the movie The Ringer. It’s one of the worst movies ever made, and not bad in a funny way, just really terrible. Never, ever rent The Ringer.

Saturday – It was a nice day, so we spent the afternoon by the lake. We then decided that eating pizza was a necessary part of the day, so we bought a bunch of frozen pizzas, and headed to Monica and Chandler’s place. After pizza and wine we returned to the lakefront to meet some of Chandler’s coworkers who were celebrating their last night in Geneva. Monica and I took a walk back to her apartment to use the bathroom after I was completely horrified by the glowing yellow, underground WC that was available by our lakeside perch. On the way back from the loo Monica and I munched on pistachio’s, and found ourselves entirely too amusing as we left a carefully placed trail of pistachio shells to aid us in our return to the apartment later that night. Sadly, when we later attempted to follow the trail of shells back, most of them had been crushed or kicked aside, and we promptly became lost and wandered aimlessly until we found ourselves in France (ok, that’s not true, but vaguely possible as Geneva is nearly surrounded by France. There are French people everywhere here. I’m sure they are all very happy to hear about this.) But back to my evening… we in fact did not get lost, and made our way to a party across town where our friend Jason was hanging out with coworkers. When we attempted to enter the private party, a man asked Chandler if he had been at the party all night. Chandler very confidently replied, “yes, of course,” and then turned to Monica and I, and said in a classic drunk whisper (A.K.A. a raspy voice that is not in any way quiet) “We’re in!” Luckily the doorman didn’t actually care enough to stop us from going in, so we wandered into a party full of drunken 30 somethings complimented by a DJ playing heinously bad music. The only entertaining part about the party was Chandler’s insistence that he be allowed to help the DJ with his music selection, and Jason’s willingness to buy people drinks, just so he had a reason to talk to the bar tender (who was rumored to be “hot.”)

Sunday: Not a lot happened – frisbee and badminton in the park with Chandler and Monica. Then we watched a couple episodes of Arrested Development – I think we have some new converts. They have come to the enlightened side, and will soon be among other glorious people who know and love the chicken dance, think Franklin is the best singer ever, except for maybe Michael and Maeby in a duet, and find Mrs. Featherbottom enchanting.

Monday: It was a long day of not doing much, except I did get my laundry done, which is quite an accomplishment in a building that houses 120 people and has two washing machines and one drier. In the evening I went to frisbee practice and had a beer with some teammates afterwards. One of the guys had just returned from a few months in the US, where he had lived with his girl friend in Ann Arbor (Michigan is everywhere). He also has played in Sandblast for the last three years, and he’s a fan of Waffle House at three in the morning. Needless to say we had lots to talk about.

Tuesday: Monica and I were supposed to go to Annecy, a small town in France known for its old architecture and beautiful lake. Sadly, when we woke up it was raining, so the trip was a no-go. Later that evening we met up to watch the festivities planned by the city to celebrate the Swiss Independence day. They included a ridiculous a cappella group in matching salmon colored shirts, singing bad American songs, with thick French accents. This was followed by a Led Zeppelin cover band that was sadly, worse than the a cappella group. Luckily, we were with good friends, so the musical accompaniment aside, it was a good evening.

Now I’m back at work for my last couple of days. Mostly I’m just stalling, watching youtube, writing my blog entries, and keeping up on the news. It’s a tough life, but someone has to keep this NGO running.

# posted by Hoptrop : 3:53 PM  1 comments

My blog is almost always focused on the weekends, so I thought I would share a little about my typical weekdays.

Frisbee with the Wizards - Mondays and Thursday nights– You may recall from my beginning entries that I was not entirely enchanted with my frisbee team here. However, now that I’ve practiced with them twice a week for the last nine weeks, I have made some great friends, and it’s going to be really hard to leave them behind. Maybe some day I will come back to Geneva to work, and will be a Wizard once again.

Pickup frisbee – Wednesday nights – This is a pickup game with local professional types, who know very little about frisbee. It’s a good way to network and meet people, but the quality of frisbee is pretty low. Mostly I play because its better than going running, and it is fun, so long as I don’t get on a team with guys who won’t throw to teammates lacking penises (something that is especially infuriating when the guys are crappy frisbee players). In these situations, I generally get very cranky and start bitching at people on my team for bad throws and lazy defense. For some reason this makes the testosterony men that much more likely to look me off, and then I get very angry and swear I won’t ever come back to the pickup game again. Then the game ends and we go swimming, and I’m happy again. Once again my ADD comes in handy, as even my anger doesn’t have a very long attention span.

Coaching softball – Tuesday nights – Geneva has one fast pitch softball team that practices on the fields where my frisbee team practices. During frisbee, I often watched the softball girls bat and pitch and would suffer so greatly from their form that I would lose focus on what I was doing. Finally, four weeks ago, I approached one of the coaches and offered to help the girls with their pitching (for anyone who has the slightest idea about softball pitching, the girls looked more like they were bowling than throwing a pitch.) The coach I talked to seemed enthusiastic, so I came to their practice the following Tuesday and helped out with the two pitchers. The following week, a coach who had been absent during my first practice arrived and proceeded to undermine everything that I said. Much like the pickup frisbee men, he was also clearly unimpressed by my lack of penis, and decided that there was no chance that I knew anything about any type of sport. Three of the four coaches were completely behind me and my advice, but one stupid penis proud man had to go and ruin everything. So now one of the girls is pitching under my advice, and another one of the girls is attempting to incorporate a giant leap forward into her pitch, which is not only unnecessary, but also very prone to throwing one off balance and creating a wild pitch. Not so surprisingly, the girl I’ve been working with has been much more successful in keeping her pitches straight. And I say – HA HA – to the stupid man.

So that’s pretty much my weeknights. I realize that this blog entry makes me sound like I hate men, but that's not true at all. I only hate stupid men. And even with stupid men around, four nights a week of sports has made my summer very fun.

# posted by Hoptrop : 3:44 PM  0 comments

This story is further proof that I aptly applied the Joey pseudonym. Apparently as a child Joey (Dukies, this is a classmate of ours, feel free to guess which) thought that eating stones would make his head harder. So he and his friend would sit around swallowing pebbles, and then head butt one another… Hmmm, now that I’ve written the story it just isn’t that funny when sober. Perhaps you should all be in the same state that we were last night when we found it funny. Go find three or four beers and a couple glasses of wine and then reread the story (it may also help to picture a little Joey Tribbiani eating stones and head butting his friends.) Now it’s funny, right?

# posted by Hoptrop : 4:00 PM  0 comments

Being in Europe, I have had the pleasure of reading primarily European coverage of the Israeli –“Hezbollah” conflict (i.e. – fight the Hezbollah by killing lots of Lebanese civilians and destroying all access routes to prevent any kind of humanitarian assistance). While reading a more balanced view of the matter hasn’t made me any less enraged about what Israel is doing, at least I’ve had the luxury of reading about the conflict from a less biased press. Today, however, out of curiosity, I decided to venture over to CNN.com to see what they were saying about the conflict. I am currently fuming at my desk, and may have to cancel my flight back to the US in protest of our crappy press and heinous president. (Don’t worry mom, I won’t actually do that – I miss free pop refills and air conditioning too much… sadly I am that shallow of a person).

But back to my rant - My favorite sentence in the article was

The combat has left more than 400 people dead on both sides of the Lebanese-Israeli border.

Hmm, that’s an interesting way to obscure the facts. Somehow, I think that clarifying that 377 of those people (almost all civilians) were Lebanese is a rather important part of telling a nonbiased news story.

I also enjoyed the news footage they had of Israel’s plan to enter “Hezbollah’s terror capital.” Of course if it’s a terror capital, what choice does Israel have but to obliterate it?

I could go on and on about this, and I’m sure you’d all rather not here it. Feel free to post comments about how Israel has a right to protect it’s people, bla, bla, bla, but I’ll say now that I think that argument is a load of crap. Sure Israel has a right to protect its people, but they aren’t fighting the Hezbollah, their just using this as an excuse to bomb the hell out of the Lebanese people and to flex their US provided military muscles. I’ve even heard (firsthand) talk of war crimes from people at the UN (which really is a remarkably unbiased source, even if Fox News and the Ann Coulters of the world don’t think so.) In the end Israel is doing exactly what the US is doing in Iraq – making millions of enemies and exponentially diminishing the security of its citizens. It is remarkable how the US and Israel continue to be shocked that their practice of killing lots of people never results in a sustained peace.

# posted by Hoptrop : 11:41 AM  0 comments

Pre apology – I think I’ve started writing Gibber more like a journal, than a blog. Sorry if I put in too many details:

We went back to the chalet in the Alps this weekend! I love it there. Sadly, we all forgot our cameras, so no pictures from this trip (the pictures you see are from our first trip). Spending the full weekend there was much better than leaving Sunday morning, as I got to sleep off my hangover on Sunday morning, and I got a whole extra day of hiking.

We headed up to the chalet on Friday night, and watched the thermometer on the car drop steadily as we drove further into the mountains. Leaving behind 93-degree weather for high 70s is a glorious thing. I even wore my sweatshirt at night because the temperature fell so much – who knew wearing a sweatshirt could be so thrilling?

Saturday morning around 8:30, on cue, a stressed out Chandler woke us all up. For some unknown reason after Chandler drinks, he wakes up early the next morning anxiety ridden, and then shares his concerns with everyone near him (or accessible by phone). Luckily, I find his early morning fretting quite amusing, especially because after he has flipped out for a little while, he will usually let you go back to sleep.

Once we all eventually crawled out of bed, we begrudgingly headed to the grocery store to buy food for the weekend. Sitting on the porch enjoying the morning in the mountains seemed like a much more desirable way to pass the AM hours, but being in Switzerland, if we didn’t make it to the grocery store by five that evening we would be foodless for the remainder of the weekend. After the grocery store and tasty brunch of eggs and bacon we headed out for a hike. The hike never really happened though. The ski lift we were planning to take up the mountain had been shut down for the summer. We drove about looking for a functioning lift, but we never found one. Instead we cruised around for a long time until we dead-ended at a meadow. We walked around in the meadow for a while, and then sat and enjoyed the scenery and ate sandwiches. It wasn’t the afternoon we had planned, but you can’t really complain about a scenic drive, wildflower picking, good company, and lunch high up in the Swiss Alps.

After our frolicking in the meadow we stopped in Gstaad, a near by town known for it’s ridiculously wealthy inhabitants. The goal of our stopover was to find a tourist office to tell us which lifts were open, so we could hike on Sunday, but we also took a little time to do some window-shopping in the ridiculously expensive jewelry and watch shops. Monica and I were horrified to find that an overwhelming amount of the diamond jewelry was in heart shapes – why, why, would you do that to a diamond. To my readers, if, on the off chance I do eventually find a serious boy friend, and he happens to ask you if I might like any kind of jewelry involving a heart, please tell him absolutely not. Hearts are fine for some people, but I am not a heart kind of girl. Phew, glad I cleared that up with all of you.

After Gstaad we headed out for a boys vs. girls bowling outing. Sadly, the girls’ team lost, but we did both individually beat Joey, so at least we’ve got that going for us, which is nice. The girls also lost at pool (two games to one), for which I entirely blame myself. I have become an abysmal pool player; I was never great at pool, but I have definitely deteriorated to a player that can only be described as terrible. I’m going home for ten days this August, and the padres have a pool table - I’m going to have to put in some serious training time while I’m home.

Sunday morning we slept in a little later and left the house around eleven. We found a functioning chair lift and had an outstanding hike. It was a bit steep at times, but luckily we had mountain man Chandler leading the way with his walking stick. Apparently, no mountain man worth his salt would even consider a hike without a giant stick to aid his progress - I have a lot to learn about being a mountain man. Sadly, I have no pictures to share, but it was very beautiful. After the hike, we headed out to a lake in the mountain valley and grilled hamburgers and played badminton. It was very close to an ideal day, the only disappointing part being that it was Sunday and we had to leave the next morning. Monday came all too fast, and now I’m at work, roasting in my office, wishing I were back in the mountains. Maybe some day I’ll make millions in a public policy career, and I’ll buy a chalet there too… or more realistically, maybe I can get Chandler’s family to adopt me – they already have five kids, what’s one more.

# posted by Hoptrop : 3:23 PM  2 comments

It’s very hot today. It’s actually been rather hot here for the last month or so, but today it seems to be taking a larger toll than normal on my work ethic (by work, I mean the work it takes to entertain myself for eight hours while trying to avoid doing real work). Rumor has it that it’s been very hot in Midwest and northeast lately too, but you all have air conditioning and Geneva definitely does not. The heat has made me so apathetic today that the internet is completely failing to entertain me. Every time I try and find something amusing to read or consider watching a video on youtube, the effort of having to watch my back to avoid getting busted seems too great an obstacle to overcome. So mostly, I just sit at my desk and wait for the brief glorious moment when the oscillating fans swings my way before it turns back to my breeze hoarding coworkers (by breeze hoarding, I mean that they refuse to let the fan blow only on me.)

So instead of searching the internet, I thought I would write a blog entry. Writing blog entries in Word is the best way I know to amuse myself without having to worry about getting caught slacking – whenever you’re typing in Word you always look like you’re working. So even though I don’t really have any stories to tell, I feel inclined to ramble a bit, to help pass the last hour of my day. Here goes…

My room is full of spiders. They don’t have screens in Geneva (which is especially irksome when combined with the lack of air conditioning that requires people who wish to avoid heat stroke to keep their windows open all day and night). When I first moved into my apartment swarms of small bugs would gather in the corners of my room at night and completely creep me out - so much so that I would spend a good twenty minutes before bed trying to crush them all – there are now a lot of bug guts on my ceiling. But then a spider or two moved in and did most of the bug killing for me, which I greatly appreciated. I considered naming the spiders and making them my pets, much like Petey in Costa Rica (readers of my Costa Rican blog will of course remember my dear, sweet Petey). However these spiders were bigger than Petey and more prone to moving around (I prefer spiders that stay in one place, so I always know where they are and don’t have scary thoughts of them crawling on me while I’m sleep); hence these spiders were not nearly as suitable to being pets as Petey. But even if they weren’t pets, I still accepted their presence and appreciated their job well done.

But now things have changed. There are about fifteen spiders in my room, and there just aren’t enough bugs from them all, so I’m pretty sure they’re going to start attacking me soon. In fact, one has already tried. Last night, I woke up to use the bathroom, and when I turned on my light, I saw the biggest spider of them all (think the giant, scary spider from Harry Potter), crawling down the wall right at my bed. He was clearly coming to attack me, so I had no choice, but to crush him with my kleenex box. I tried to explain to the other spiders the human-spider rules of coexistence, the first of course being that no spider may leave the ceiling at any time. Sadly, I do not speak their language (unlike with Petey), so I could not communicate with them, and I do anticipate more spider killings in the near future. But what can I do, you just can’t have spiders running wild in one’s room – there must be order.

# posted by Hoptrop : 5:00 PM  0 comments

As my weekdays are minimally interesting (enjoyable, but not story worthy) I will fast forward to my Saturday festivities. Saturday was the Geneva Lake Parade, and I met up with the usual suspects, Chandler, Monica, and Joey, plus some of their friends around 3:00…

Sorry, I feel the need to digress a bit, back into my weekdays, to tell a story about a very special person that I met during class. My weeklong seminar was on humanitarian assistance (ie – food and water distribution, refugee camps, protecting women and children from abuse, etc.), and the group of students was consequently a very liberal assemblage of people – except Ben, the tragically clueless Mormon. I’m not implying that Ben is clueless because he is Mormon; he is just completely and utterly clueless. For instance, suggestions of corruption and bribery in developing governments shocked him to the core; he really had no idea that such things went on. This is especially remarkable because Ben is studying international relations at the Geneva Graduate Institute for International Studies, one of Europe’s finest IR schools. His naivety was bewildering, but back to the point of the story… this does all tie back to the aforementioned parade. Ben’s ignorance did not stop at failing to understand the nuances of the international world; he also did not seem to realize that the rest of our class wasn’t quite the Jesus loving, sin condemning crowd to which he was accustomed. This was most clearly revealed when I mentioned going to the Lake Parade that weekend, and he looked at me with horror in his eyes. I knew nothing about the parade, so I asked him what about it was so upsetting. His response was – “Well, ughhhh, gaaaaaah, it’s just that, maybe I shouldn’t be saying this but, the parade is full of GAY and LESBIAN people.” I think the daggers coming from my eyes were enough to give clueless Ben a bit of clue, and he shut up fairly quickly. Surprisingly, I’m not Ben’s biggest fan.

But back to the parade – After some cocktails at Monica and Chandler’s, the crew departed for the parade. I was pretty excited as Pride parades are always a good time. This one did not disappoint in terms of good times, but it wasn’t really a pride parade. It was a bunch of floats from different local clubs, with scantily clad people (some of whom, judging by their behavior, were not at all gay) dancing to techno music. Every float was basically the same, except the color of the clothing and the veracity of the float riders gyrating. Luckily, I was with company that I thoroughly enjoyed, so we danced to the music, took pictures with some of the parade participants, and had a grand time. Best part of the floats was definitely this guy - I think he thought I was checking him out, but I had to make that sacrafice to get the picture.

After the parade there was a “performance” by some local rap artists. I’m calling it a performance because there were people on stage with microphones, suggesting that they were in fact performing, but really the rappers had very little to do with the show. They pretty much just threw on some old rap albums, and then the men with mics sang along with the chorus. They actually played Hip Hop Hurray and Jump Around and when the chorus came on they would appear from the back corner of the stage and behave as if they were rappers putting on a show, throwing their arms around, trying to hype up the audience. It was really very sad. So we gave up on the show fairly early, and went back to Monica and Chandler’s apartment, where most of us quickly fell asleep. Good times.

# posted by Hoptrop : 5:27 PM  3 comments