First week in Geneva

From my window, I can see a Catholic church, a skate park, streets, buildings, some very odd looking trees someone told me recently are Chestnut... and behind it all, on days when it’s not foggy, a mountain.



The second evening I was here I noticed what I thought was the silhouette of a mountain around dusk, but the next morning, it had disappeared and I was sure I had somehow hallucinated it because I WANT a mountain view out my window. The next few days were perpetually gray and I had no way of knowing, but finally, the sun broke through and my mountain is back.

So I am sitting at this sunny kitchen table, staring at it in a grateful stupor for the second sunny day in a row, eating my “pain perdu” and listening to the noises of birds and street traffic and distant voices.

My first week in Geneva has been many things, but mostly like my confusion over the existence of this mountain. Nothing is the way I had pictured it – it is dangerous to create mental pictures, but also impossible – but I am starting to really appreciate the place that I’m in. There are moments when I am overjoyed to be here, and moments when I have doubts. But if the first week is always the hardest, and my first week has had so much good in it, then I am sure the semester will be unforgettable; there's so much to discover that is sometimes concealed behind fog at first glance.

The weather in this city has such a drastic effect… when it’s gloomy, no mountains are visible, the color of the nicer stone buildings sort of washes out, and I swear people look less friendly. But yesterday, on our tour of “le vieille ville” I was thrilled to get to see some absolutely beautiful parts of this city – older stone alleyways and cathedrals…







Probably the most amusing thing was a sign pointing down to “Parking & Archeological Site":

apparently, when Geneva's fortifications became useless, they were converted into a parking garage haha

So some general and personal, good and bad and neutral (this is Switzerland after all) things I've experienced/noted so far:

1. Everyone here has a scooter. I have seen 50 year old men with briefcases and scooters. Not the motorized kind - the kind kids ride on sidewalks with helmets and knee pads...

2. it is definitely expensive to eat out. the conversion rate isn't bad, but a veggie burger on my street is advertised outside as being "only 20 francs" Still, if you buy food at "Migros" and cook for yourself, it's not bad at all.

3. The sirens here are almost quasi musical. But sound like sort of a deranged carnival, or a mangled ice cream truck… plus little more incessant… and also they either go flat or it’s the Doppler effect and my musical sensibilities are sort of going haywire. But earplugs solve everything, I’ve found.

4. It's sort of exciting to know I can take the bus to France. I plan to also get a Eurorail pass and try not to have classes on Fridays so I can travel a lot of weekends... and hike!

5. There is a french religious holiday that is celebrated by making crepes. No one I asked seemed to know why, but apparently the higher you toss the crepe when you flip it the more prosperous your year will be? or fertile? I wasn't clear on which...

6. Last night, I met a distant non blood relative who is very nice and lives here in Geneva with his wife and 3 kids. He was at a nearby cafe with a group from his "student society" which sounds a lot like a fraternity... but as he called it a "vertical friendship" where there are people of all ages, all disciplines, etc, that come together to socialize. I also learned a german/ french drinking song. There was a lot of elbow and fist banging on the table. And Kayla looked souped for the singing haha. So I learned about a student society in Geneva called "Stella."

6. The culture is very interesting here because while Geneva is an "international city" in the sense that there are lots of foreigners studying here, I have heard less English on the streets etc than I expected to. French is the primary language, but no one is monolingual and everyone seems to know a different combination of languages... so it creates a really fascinating cultural dynamic. I had known that ahead of time, but not quite how it would look because I've never been to a country with more than one national language.

The people in my apartment for instance, have quite a mix of languages. There are two girls from france, one who has spent a lot of time with us and been extremely welcoming... and both are wonderful, another girl with the smith program from Swarthmore who's fantastic. and vegan, which makes it easier for me to be vegetarian, though this isn't a hard place to be vegetarian at all. I think that would only really be an issue if I were living with a family. Anyways, so there are 4 girls and 3 guys - one from Senegal, one from Italy, and one from Vietnam. I haven't seen as much of the guys, but everyone who lives here is really pleasant and I hope I'll get to know

7. also, this probably is just exciting to me, but a girl from the fall or a previous year left a guitar at the smith center to be passed on!! And no one else wanted it or else everyone was just being nice... so now I have a guitar to play! Which is wonderful because that's been the way I de-stress and the sort of filler activity in my life for a long time and I felt pretty naked without one. But when my program director, Jonathon Gosnell, entered the room with a guitar, I really though it was going to be a Julie Andrews moment and he was going to sing us a song, maybe about the history of Geneva or something... too bad it wasn't both haha

Well it's getting time for me to stop writing and go exploring. Today I'm going to take a long walk to a park, and try to pass my probably internship on the way to be sure I can get there alone!

Now that the sun is back - in more ways than one - I'll try to write somewhat often.

England snapshots

I think I am finally adjusting to UK time. Ironic considering that I am leaving England tomorrow. Oops I’ve been a terrible blogger!

Here are some snapshots of trip highlights so far:
Oxford: I love this city. It’s almost monochromatic – so many of the buildings and the cobblestone are made of this warm, tan-ish yellowish stone. Maybe it’s meant to cheer up the perpetually grey sky! No - we’ve had a few days of sun, but January is quite bleak on the whole.

Still, heedless of the weather, I decided that I wanted to go to the top of a castle to get a view of the city. After walking all the way there we found out that we would have to pay for a tour, but there was an option of going up the "mound" for only a pound. And for some idiotic reason, I thought the "mound" was the castle tower, which I was more interested in climbing than in paying for a tour of the whole castle. It turns out the mound was just a gated off hill. So yes, we paid to climb a hill. In the rain. And took lots of pictures pouting at the top "look what Rachel made us do!" Needless to say, my friends have lost trust in my activity choices... lolol

The next day I didn't improve much on that reputation! I was determined to go on a bike ride, and took them to this path that goes to White Horse Hill which in the summertime is BREATHTAKING. But in the winter, the "ridgeway" is full of mud and white horse hill was so windy we couldn't even hear each other. Another pouting photoshoot at a muddy intersection ensued... it was definitely cold and overcast, but the view was still spectacular and the exercise felt great. plus it was amusing to watch these indomitable, hardy British parents taking their reluctant children on walks up the hill - little lisping British voices lost in the wind "mum i need to keep my body warm!"

Of course both days ended up being great, my blunders aside. The rest of that day in Oxford, we toured Christ Church College, and saw the dining hall where Harry Potter's great hall dinners were filmed, went to a famous botanic garden with a bench associated with the Golden Compass series (which my friend Julie said she'd wanted to see for ten years - the famous bench i mean), saw the Natural History museum, and had dinner at a pub called the Cape of good Hope - some great soup and risotto and cider... and took a taxi to the hotel where my aunt play bridge every other week.

The next Big Outing we had was our trip into London. We took the train in, found the Swiss Embassy (I had to work on getting my passport stamped with a visa over here…. Thankfully that all worked out!), then took the “Tube” over to a section of the city with a cluster of museums, including the Science museum where we spent some time. Julie kept looking for exhibits about time travel/ futuristic explorations, but the exhibit that sounded like it was about Time ended up being about clocks through the ages - from the Sundial to the cases of various watches up to the digital clock on the back wall counting down the milliseconds. (timepieces are A bit less exciting than THE FUTURE… )

At the museum café, we met Kayla’s friend Hilary who is studying photography in London for the semester. Then we could all stop worry about getting lost because Hilary is a Tube genius! I also got a little lazy about taking pictures! We had a really nice time walking in Regent’s park and then found Abbey Road and took a Beatles picture… which felt a little less cool than expected because there were crowds of other tourists all doing the same thing, waiting to walk through the cross walk and all I could think was “gosh it must be annoying to live on this street and have to wait to drive through here for everyone’s pictures…” But Hilary and Kayla seemed to be experts on the Beatles’ picture, so our rendition was a lot more accurate than the other tourists’ – Julie even volunteered to be Paul and go barefoot. That definitely put us a notch above the rabble 

That mission complete, we went to eat. We found a really nice Italian restaurant in Covent Garden and then wandered around… and eventually found a café to have desert before heading home.

Other daytrips included Bath and Stonehenge. Bath might be my favorite little city, or is neck and neck with Oxford. Kayla said it’s probably because of the Roman influence speaking to my Italian genes. There were some incredibly talented street performers outside the Abbey – first a woman with a powerful, clear operatic voice, then a fiddle player, later a guy with an acoustic guitar… We ate in the museum café and toured the ancient Baths. I’m a little jealous of the Romans to be perfectly honest – they would soak in hot springs, get massages, dry out in heated rooms… and then go through the whole process in reverse. No wonder it was considered a spiritual experience.

Stonehenge and Avebury are both ancient stone circles. We toured them on the same day – they’re a little over half an hour apart. The stone circles definitely have a mystique. It was funny to see something as ordinary as sheep, and tourists with audio guides walking around a formation that looks so mysterious and imposing. We were joking about the sheep being specially selected to guard the stones… I really liked the section of the audio guide section “myths and legends.” If the stones aren’t some kind of observatory or calendar, they were definitely brought by Merlin. Or aliens.

At Avebury, we ate at the only known pub inside an ancient stone circle: The Red Lion. I got excited because the lion on their sign looks like Aslan on the Narnian’s shields (please no one make fun of me). Plus, we were inside a stone circle… maybe the Stone Table was here too…

This week we went back to London just to pick up my passport. We didn’t have much time to spare but I did arrange to meet an Italian relative from Norwich in London – a lovely older woman named Luciana who is my grandfather’s late cousin’s wife. I met her at my cousin’s wedding, but immediately felt like she was family. She even invited me to stay with her and her relatives in Florence some day.

I think this is turning into a long enough entry. I’m going to try to write shorter entries more frequently and not play catch-up (I hope). I really enjoyed our outings in England but the thing that always means the most to me when I come to England is just seeing my aunt Gail and my uncle Jonathon. It’s the little moments – chats at dinner, walks, watching in wonder as the hermit crab in their salt water aquarium molts its shell… I too am changing, molting. I’m ready for something different, something that scares me a little. The prospect of living in a city scares me a little. But I am mostly just excited, mostly just anticipating being surprised by joy, as Lewis might say.

In the car on the way home from the last London trip to the embassy, Kayla played a lot of Crosby Stills and Nash. Opening the window and letting the cool damp night air flood into my face, looking at the hints of stars, these line jumped out at me:

When you see the Southern Cross for the first time,
You understand now why you came this way.
'Cause the truth you might be runnin' from is so small.
But it's as big as the promise, the promise of a comin' day.

The harmonies and everything behind them just gives me chills. I’m not sure how to explain the connection I felt in the lyrics to my own life… but it was very strong and startling. The truth you might be running from is so small… maybe as small as forgetting to notice all the potential joy that surrounds you every day: this eternal sense of wonder…

We’ll see if I’m so dreamy and idealistic tomorrow when I’m terrified! Haha

Packing up

I moved everything home from college today and spent most of the day unpacking and organizing, willing my closet to grow or my nostalgia to shrink. It’s strange, how the affection I feel for my room, for this house I’ve lived in since I was six, can almost make me feel like I’ve gone back in time as my present and past selves unite, as my books from the past semester merge into the shelves with Calvin and Hobbes, ancient journals and school papers and projects… Today I rediscovered, for instance, a book of short poems I was required to write in 3rd grade in which I rhymed “umbrella” with “salmonella” probably because of the many lectures I got as a child about the dangers of eating cookie batter with raw egg in it. (Yes my dad is Woody Allen sometimes). Yet In my room, it all coheres; not as one of many worlds I am present in, but a kind of wood between the worlds. Like this poem I love - something along the lines of “There are three of us: the child I was, the girl I am, and the woman I will become.” And here, I am reminded of that view of a life as being like a Russian-doll... all the inner layers I often ignore that remind me who I am and where I came from.

More on travels coming.
Next week, maybe Florida, next month England and Geneva!

cookies fix everything

It’s been a week full of surprises.

Wednesday morning at 6:57, my I heard my fellow Agape intern Kristen running up the stairs and, thinking she was going to hurry me to the morning meeting to help me keep from being late (again), I shut off my alarm for the third and final time and sped to meet her on the landing, to prove I was on my way down.

But instead of saying anything about my sleeping habits, she said “Rachel guess what? Michele is here!”

“What?” I was stupefied. Michele was a WOOOFer from Italy who had left the previous week to finish his vacation in America by going to Niagra Falls. What did she mean he was back?

Apparently that morning at 5:00, Suzanne had seen a car parked in the driveway, and someone sleeping inside it!

I could picture Suzanne and Kristen creeping up to the vehicle, peering cautiously in the window at the imposter, seeing only a striped hat, under which was… Michele!

He had gotten tired on his commute from Niagra back to Boston, and just decided to sleep in his car here. And he happened to come just in time to give Kristen a ride to Boston the next day. It was unthinkable timing.

All I could think was of the end of Chamber Singers’ tour this spring. We had said many emotional goodbyes to our tour guide, Luigi, and to Italy, and we were on the road. As we stood moping in the airport, feeling the hollowness that marks the end of every powerfully happy experience, a man walked over to us.

“LUIGI IS BACK!”

I was stupefied.

“What?!”

How could he be back?

He was going to be picking up his next tour group at the airport, and had decided to meet up with us, say a final goodbye, and help us get through the security/ baggage line faster (I don’t know how this happened, but Luigi can do anything.)

Now, “the time Luigi came back” has made the cannon of Sicily stories.

And the moral of the story: Italians always come back!

Maybe that’s why the word for “goodbye” in Italian is “Arrivederci”: “until we see each other again” because it’s never too long, be it in the airport or in a car in your driveway…

So Michele’s return was the first big surprise of my week. The second was a less welcome visitor.

At 2:30 Thursday morning, I awoke to a rustling and a vague sense of something hitting me. It took me a few moments to groggily awake and register that this was not a dream, roll out from under a tangle of blankets, turn on the light…

And there on my bed, stark and fearsome, was the silhouette of a squirrel, crouched in a frozen, about-to-jerk-away-and-run-like-wild posture.

So I did the most natural thing, ran out of my room and shut the door, swearing inaudibly and fighting the urge to scream. Thankfully Kristen (later compared to Miss Clavel from Madeline) was already awake (“Something is not right!), or else was a light enough sleeper to hear me and come out to calm me down.

So after a shower (mostly for psychological comfort) and a few cookies (again, for psychological comfort), we resolved to sleep in an empty room on the second floor instead. A happy resolution to a traumatizing night.

Or so I thought….

Until after a few peaceful moments in the darkness, I heard the faint insidious humming of a mosquito, hovering just outside my ear like an evil dwarf vacuum cleaner. Or something else evil and small that hums. Too tired to swat and not wanting to wake Kristen, I just tried to sleep with a sheet over my head. But eventually I had to breath. So life became a cycle of “stay under the sheet until you suffocate” and “listen to the mosquito until you want to suffocate something.” How do people sleep in the actually wilderness? I wondered. I’m inside a nice house!

Eventually I moved to the couch downstairs. It was like a triathlon, first event facing down a squirrel that apparently really wanted to sleep in my bed, second event the mosquito population of this room, third event finding a comfortable way to sleep on the couch. The last event was my favorite, but by that time I only had a few hours left to sleep before someone would wake up and make noise.

Ah well. All is well that ends well. I got to nap the next day a little, the squirrel tracker man was called, and now I have a funny story to tell.

a closer look

I saw a hummingbird today. While I was out working in the garden, watering rows of beans, all of a sudden there was this whirring object in front of me making a loud buzzing sound… and I thought it was a bee and almost sprayed the hose at it instinctively before I took a closer look and saw its colorful tiny body and black beady eyes, unreal looking like an animation. It stood in the air staring straight at me for a full five seconds before zooming over to a flower, and then off into the woods. Seeing it, I felt shivers of otherworldly ecstasy.

I have been in this place for a month now. And it’s surprising - the surprise of stopping, the surprise of sunlight, the surprise of an indefinable smell. The surprise as the wind gathers and rustles the semicircle of trees around the land and they all shake so violently it’s hard to believe the leaves don’t all fall down. And the surprise of remembering how we are all moved by so many unseen forces.

For those of you who do not know, I am working and living at the Agape Community in Hardwick, Ma this summer, which is a peace community with a focus on sustainability, established by ecumenical lay Catholics.

I feel like I must do a bad job of describing this place and the work that I’m doing, because after giving a brief description to friends or family, they still seem doubtful about how to reference my job “when you go back to your…. Camp?”… “your farm” …“your thing” …“that place”… “what is it you’re doing?”

I could try again to express the external features of this internship in more detail. The place was founded by a couple who wanted to live in a more holistic way, as peace activists and educators about waste and sustainability. That they grow much of their own food, own a grease car, have solar electricity, have connections with many high school, college, and grad school environmental and spiritual groups who come for workdays or education or retreats. That they host 9 major events throughout the year, one of which they once had Gandhi’s grandson come out to speak at. So the work is a combination of physical, active organic gardening, working with the people who come out, maintaining and building connections, helping with mailings… and so forth, and essentially just learning how a nonprofit community operates.

But beyond all of this, in some ways I feel like I am learning how to really live for the first time. In school, we trace the paths of philosophers with our fingers on a map to know where they have gone, but rarely follow them with our feet. There is too little time for that, too little silence for that.

Here, I’m only a long driveway away from civilization, but it feels like so much more. My first week here, my friend Monika stayed with me to check out the place, and I guess I did a bad job of describing what she should expect, as usual, so on our first day, when we took a walk, she looked at the neighbor’s house and paused in shock.

“Is that a ‘house house’?”

I looked at her, puzzled. “umm…. Yeah. And that’s a ‘car car’.” I said, and then realized that she had thought we were miles from the world of cell phone reception and lawn mowers and televisions. Nope! Just a driveway’s length.

I can’t believe that was over a month ago now. The details are still fresh and vibrant, like a charcoal drawing that I haven’t closed up to smudge in a sketchbook.

I remember the first week I was here, they held a poetry and arts evening here, and before anything had started, Suzanne asked the interns to share a little about our experiences. Which led to the retelling of the “house house” story and other funny moments:

Suzanne said, “Monika, tell them the funny thing that happened earlier today when we were cleaning”

“Oh” she answered, “You mean when Justin almost made me un-marriable?”

At this point in the conversation my mother, who was visiting for the event, turned to me in shock.

But Monika went on to explain that it’s a Croatian superstition that sweeping dirt on a person’s feet gives them bad luck for future marriage.

I’ve learned so much!

And I have so much more to learn. There is so much we never learn just in the conversations we fail to engage in with the people around us.

Since then, I have met recent grads from the Franciscan volunteer corps, new WOOFers, one from France, one coming tomorrow from Italy, the man whose restaurant supplies Brayton and Suzanne with their grease for the car, two high school groups, a retreat group of people from NYC with roots in the Dominican Republic (who made amazing plantains and did karaoke with us and even made me dance!)… and overall, I just have this feeling of being deeply settled and peaceful, of being in a place that my whole heart can respond to without corners of doubt, because the focus here is so practical and so clearly right on target. It feels like time has slowed down when I am here, like most every conversation has real meat in it (metaphorically speaking… they’re actually vegetarians, which is perfect for me).

I feel like my spirituality and creativity has been on passionless autopilot for a long time, feeling like I have less and less to say, to add, that hasn’t been said before…

Like, I’ve said before to people that I decided to become vegetarian for clear reasons when I was ten, but over the years, the convictions wane and all that’s left is the habit of not eating meat. I rarely thought about what led me to that conclusion anymore, the hatred I felt for the Factory Farm system, the cruelty and unhealthiness… At Agape, I feel like the passionate resolve I used to feel about so many things is slowly rising again, that I’m getting back in touch with the roots and the cause, and believing that moving out of all kinds of stagnancy is possible.

YAWN I’m so exhausted but I really want to at least start this so I will move out of the stagnancy of an empty blog! More thoughts to come.