evanation

Snow falls, melts hearts, sits,
In a city not feeling
Holiday magic.

Europe doesn't really celebrate Valentine's Day, except in those parts that are heavy importers of American culture. Genève is not one of those places. :)  But I got to frickin' celebrate!  One Mr. Evan Stratford ventured forth from the frozen hinterland of Canada to hang out with me for the week; I feel like a new person!

As silly as it sounds, I don't think I've been adjusting particularly well to Genève.  The fact that I don't speak German never really made anything awkward for me in Darmstadt (or anyplace else in Deutschland, for that matter), but here in la Suisse I feel horrendously guilty every time I fail to remember words or conjugations when speaking to someone.  It's even more horrible when I simply can't summon anything and have to revert to English and vague gestures.  They make me feel dirty.

Not only that, but this city isn't really a city at all: I think there are about 200,000 people living in Geneva proper, and a lot of them are, you know, foreign dignitaries and the like.  The home of the WHO and the UN and the Red Cross is liable to be filled with people "passing through."  Sucks to be a vagrant.

After this week, though, I realised that I have been adjusting better than I thought.  Evan and I never lacked for things to do, and we went out with friends and the like.  :D  I think he had a good time (I did).

A few things we did:

• Skiing in France!  This just sort of has to happen.  He is a much more accomplished skier than I, and he taught me a few new things.  By that I mean he took me off-piste through knee-deep snow and a mogul field to commemorate my third day on skis.  I was a little piste off (haha, joke!) at him for part of it, where "part" includes all of the several, several minutes I spent on my ass or trying to get off it, but I am glad for the experience in the end.  We even got to watch the Olympic opening ceremonies from a ski lodge with delicious food.  Oh, and I broke a ski in half.  Didn't know that was possible.
• Giant chess!  A traditional Swiss thing, I guess; Genève has giant chess boards all over one of the parks, and Evan said that the place he lived in Switzerland for 10 months (near Neuchâtel) had its share of them, too.  I also beat him in a game of chess for the first time ever.  ;)  Huzzah!
• Movies!  There were a couple of film festivals happening this week: one at le CERN and one in Genève.  The one in Genève was the one that we went to, it's called Black Movie, and the film that we watched was a super strange art film about a Korean transvestite poisoned by polluted fruit.  Yup.  Art films.
• Cooking!  Food is always an adventure when Mr. Stratford is around, and this time was no exception.  In addition to going out for fondue (you have to), we also cooked some delicious miso stew, some pasta sauce with fried leeks, lentil sauce/paste/stuff, and breakfast items.  Eating out costs approximately one's firstborn in this country, but groceries are really cheap.  I'm going to work on convincing myself to cook and bring my lunch to work more often.  :-/
• Pub quiz!  Always an adventure, as you know!  We actually did terribly, but I'm going to blame that on the fact that there was a category featuring theme songs from old British tv shows and our team was made entirely of young Americans and Canadians.
• Website design/farm research!  This was probably the most exciting thing, although not the most engaging thing at the time, I guess.  In honour of the 10,000km bike trip we are planning for later this year (see map!), we decided to set some time aside to plan.
  
  View Nostrovia! (Zdorovye!) in a larger map
  So some information about this trip:
  
  • 10,000 km (6200+ mi) from København to Istanbul, via Portugal and Southern Italy
  • All on bicycles!
  • 6 months: 14 May - Thanksgivingtime
  • We'll be staying in hostels, under a tent we're bringing, and on organic farms via the WWOOF programme (World Wide Opportunities in Organic Farming).  We're also looking for host families along the way, so if you know anyone who might not mind having a couple of crazy kids stay with him or her for a couple days later this year, please ping us!  So far we have arrangements (tentative) in Denmark, Hamburg, the south coast of Spain, Croatia, possibly Athens, and Istanbul.  There are still a lot of kilometres to cover!
  • Venus is coming for part of it!  The plan is Spain for her, para que ella practique su español.
  • Evan's brother Neil is coming for part of it!  I don't know any more than that.
  • We are dedicating it to the Green Movement; the bikes and organic farms and such all sort of tie into this.
  We are currently looking for sponsors/donors to help get equipment and places to stay along the way.  We don't have any of our real equipment yet, afaik, so we are looking for bikes, a tent, electronics (camera, something to mount the camera to the bikes, cheap netbook, some sort of connection card for European 3G networks, etc.), and jerseys/bike shorts/bike socks/etc.
  If you know anyone who might be able to help, please tell me!  :D  Also, we don't have a name, and if you can come up with one that sounds reasonable and ties in the green theme, our tech-y nerdiness, the epicness of the trip, and all that, well.... let me know about that, too.

Anyway, I guess that basically sums up his visit here.  I have to get ready to go out for CHINESE KARAOKE tonight, so I'm wrapping this up.  :)

Have a pleasant day, y'all.