Geneva's Escalade

After a hearty breakfast of omelets with wild mushrooms (ones I dried from this fall's harvest), R, J and I dressed warmly for our trip to Geneva. Every year, around this time, Geneva remembers and celebrates the brave Genevoise who fought off a surprise attack in 1602. On that cold December night 408 years ago, the Genevoise banded together to overthrow the troops of the Duke of Savoy (Charles Emmanuel II) and his brother-in-law (Philip III of Spain) who coveted Geneva for themselves.

The city all lit up in lights, near the Pont du Mont Blanc.





On the L'Escalade Wikipedia page, you'll see a pic of "A soldier in the commemorative parade". I think I got a picture with this exact same guy on Sunday (see below - had to crop myself out because my eyes were closed)!

Loups-garous

First, I was the Idiot and then Cupid and afterwards, just a simple villager in love with a werewolf who turned human. The little girl had me laughing my butt off, and everyone was suspicious of everyone else. Puzzled?

Last night, R and I attended an awesome event in the Paquis neighborhood - a Loups-Garous party. If you don't know what that is..it's a French social game in which villagers are haunted by werewolves. Each person is dealt a card which contains his/her secret role - either a villager, a villager with special powers (such as a Prophet, Witch, Cupid, Village Idiot, Hunter, or Little Girl), or a werewolf. There are 3 werewolves and many villagers. The werewolves' identities are revealed to each other; but the villagers cannot discriminate between plain villagers, villagers with special powers, and werewolves. The objective is to figure out the villagers posing as werewolves and lynch the werewolves before they eat you and the rest of the village up! The fun part is that it's a very social game in which suspicions, lies, pretending fly around; but in the end, only logic will help you solve the puzzle!

In English, the game is called "Werewolves"; other variations of this type of game are Mafia and Murder Detective.

I played Murder Detective years ago at a birthday party and though it was fun, I loved the Werewolves game much more. For one, it was hosted by the most jovial Japanese man who had played the game a number of times and liked it so much, decided to host his own event at a friend's house. His props, music, and the signs he gave for each character were hilarious! Especially the one of the "Little Girl" which was a wink and a sideways tilt of the head. Anyway, there were 16 of us including the host, who played the narrator/moderator.

Here are the general rules in case you'd like to play! Maybe we can organize a game when I'm back in Boston in December or January! Let me know if you'd be interested.

Microcosm at CERN

On Thursday before attending a World Cup party, I visited CERN's interactive science center, the Microcosm. The Beatles' "Across the Universe" played softly in the background as I stepped into the Microcosm, CERN's interactive museum which explores the mysteries of the universe via physics.

CERN is an acronym for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire. It is home the Large Hydron Collider, or LHC and many top research institutions. CERN's other claim to fame is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who started working on the concept of the Internet while he was working at CERN. Eventually however Berners-Lee left the physics world for Boston and Cambridge, where he further nutured his idea into reality. Nowadays CERN's computing center has turned its focus on grids to help process and share the immense volumes of data collected during the experiments.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
In 1999 an large international team of engineers, physicists, and artisans started building the LHC in an already existing 27km tunnel (previously used for another big thing). In late 2008 the LHC was finished and experiments began. The LHC covers the Geneva countryside but you can't easily see it because it's 100m below ground! Measuring 27km in circumference, it is really long. So what does it do? It re-creates the conditions that were present at a millionth of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang.

A huge number of smart people work at CERN on the following four main experiments. I'm probably boring most of you to death...so I won't go into too much detail.

ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS)
Has 2500 scientifiques; with a team of 37 pays

CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid). Experiments that search for "dark matter" the void around the planets and galaxies that stops planets/galaxies from flying apart and into one another. We can only see 4% of the universe while the rest is made of dark matter; the CMS detector weighs more than Eiffel Tower.
Has 2500 scientists; with a team of 38 countries

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment). Another experiment studying "dark matter".
Has 1000 scientists; with a team of 30 countries

LHCb (LHC beauty quarks)
Has 700 scientists; with a team of 15 countries

Other smaller experiements include TOTEM and LHCf. Totem watches over the funtioning of the LHC machine, measuring the quality of the proton beam created by the LHC. LHCf detects ultra high energy particles spraying from the LHC collisions. Other interesting things I learned. I'm not an expert here, so again, search the web to dig deeper.

Powers of Ten
On the largest scale picture ever taken (at 10 to the 26th meters), there are 9, 325 points on the picture with each point a galaxy like ours! Can you imagine this? Stephen Hawking, in a recently made documentary, is asked whether humankind should be trying to make contact with others out there. Hawking in response says it's not a matter if aliens exist in other galaxies because mathematically they must exist.

Timeline

• 13.7 billion years ago, the Big Bang gave birth to our universe
• 300, 000 years after the BB, the first atoms were formed
• 1 billion years after the BB, the first galaxies formed
• 4 billions ago, planet Earth was formed from debris orbiting the Sun, our nearest star
• 3 million years ago, humankind evolved and the first humanoids walked on our Earth

From the physics point of view humans and most things that have "matter" are composed of three basic building blocks: the electron, the up quark, and the down quark.

Four Forces of Physics

• Gravity, the weakest of the 4 forces but without it, we would float into space! Gravity pulls matter together.
• Strong force. There could be no life without the strong force. Most powerful of the 4 forces. Carbon is synthesized in stars via SF.
• Electromagnetism keeps us solid; during thunderstorms, charge builds up in clouds then runs to Earth as lightening; Aurora Borealis; mobile phones use these waves.
• Weak force—without this, the sun won't shine; WF causes beta decay, a form of radioactivity that triggers nuclear fission in the heart of the sun. There's naturally occurring radioactivity in granite rocks.

The World Cup party was fun but I was not ready to mingle. I was happily parked on the sofa watching Mexico beat up on the French (2-0).

Tuesday in Geneva and a selection of photos

R and I decided to start our exercise regimen this week. It's hot and dry in the afternoons with the hottest period between 13:00h and 16:00h. As a result, we start our days early with a morning hillside walk and then end the day with an evening walk after dinner. Besides fresh air, the walks up and down are good for digestion and toning up the legs and thighs.

TUESDAY
While R visited with former colleagues in Geneva, I took a guided tour at Palais des Nations. The tour was excellent—our tour guide holds a Master's in international relations from Tufts. What a small world! He led us through as much of the tour as he could...though many conference rooms were off limits because the UN was hosting labor conferences over the next three weeks. We visited the General Assembly Hall (see photo with flags) and another conference room where a meeting on labor issues was taking place. We observed/listened to the conference proceedings from atop the public observation deck. I thoroughly enjoyed the tour and learned a few things too.

• The UN has six distinct bodies
• UN has 72,000 civil servants worldwide. That number only accounts for the people who are responsible for getting things done and for carrying out its duties...it doesn't include diplomats or delegates.
• Six official languages are used at the UN for its intergovernmental meetings and documents: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. If a delegate does not speak/understand any of these languages, they may bring their own interpreter who will interpret from that delegate's language (let's say Portuguese to English). Then the UN interpreters will translate from the standard, which is English to each of the other 5 languages. Although there is sometimes a lag, the interpretation is pretty much simultaneous. Our tour guide explained that there are three Chinese interpreters..and they each take turns speaking and writing down what is said
• Taiwan and Palestine are treated as special entities (with Taiwan officially being treated as a province of China) by the UN, although certain member countries do recognize Taiwan as its own sovereign country
• Each member state has special missions to the UN which is separate than each member states' embassies and consulates
• Peacocks roam about Parc Ariana at Palais des Nations

WEDNESDAY
The horse farmer erected electric wiring around the parameters of our garden to fence in the areas we don't want the horses to eat. Les chevaux are partial to the bark from our poplar trees as well as to old, stale bread..the harder the bread, the better. It'll take the horses three weeks to mow the tall grass in the front yard. I'll post some pictures of the horses soon.

THURSDAY
I feel lazy today but still went for our morning walk. For lunch, we had grape leaves, marinated olives from the market, and leftover galettes noires. Snacking on cherries from our neighbors right now and contemplating spending some time working the garden. Maybe.

Here are some pictures from the past week.

1 - R at Fort l'Ecluse, after we climbed 1,165 steps
2 - Fort l'Ecluse
3 - Me, trying archery for the first time
4 - Le chapeau de gendarme
5 - R sitting down for cafe au lait at Le Tram Bar in a village nearby. Good coffee, cute dog, great day
6 - Fat content cat sitting on a music box in Geneva, at Rue de la confederation
7 - General Assembly Hall at Palais des Nations, in Geneva
8 - Tree-ripened cherries from neighbors down the street. Everyday, we pass by their house and two days ago, we introduced ourselves and got a gift of cherries
9 - Weekly farmer's market. Today we got 2kg of apricots, 3 kinds of cheeses (goat and cow), and 10€ worth of olives)

Asian markets in Geneva

Watching Ocean's 13 right now as I write today's post. The weather was really nice, so R and I decided to spend the day in Geneva. Overall today was a success—I bought a Swiss cell phone so R and I can contact each other while in Switzerland (and for emergencies everywhere else). Then we visited some schools that offer French language courses.

FRENCH CLASSES

There are several good options which I've listed below—at this time I'm leaning towards Migros' École-Club which is located in Geneva, Switzerland just over the French border. Before signing up, I will check at the Mairie in case they can suggest French classes closer to home.

University of Geneva (UNIGE) offers fairly cheap, intensive summer French classes, and is located a short tram ride away from Cornavin, Geneva's central train station.

Migros, a Swiss supermarket chain offers French courses as part of École-Club. In addition to French and other language classes, they also offer dance, fitness, cooking, finance, and business classes. At École-Club, I took a free French language placement test and got 26/36 questions correct, placing me at the A2 level (which is advanced beginner). 

Ifage is another option. Like Migros, it is well-priced, with good schedules, and is centrally located at the train station. But it was kind of depressing looking. I saw some brochures for EF at Ifage, however, I don't think EF is associated with Ifage.

BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO GENEVA
Before arriving in Geneva I knew very little about the city, only that it ranked as the number one city to live (having tied with Zurich in a study conducted in 2007) and that it was home to the United Nations and the Geneva Conventions. Therefore I knew Geneva would be international, but just how much was quite a surprise. Wikipedia gives la ville de Genève a population of 191, 000 (as of 2010) while the Canton of Geneva has a population 457,428. Of that nearly half a million population, 39.2% are foreigners and more than 50% of people living in Geneva (the canton I believe) hold foreign passports. These numbers don't even take into account foreigners who work in Geneva but live in neighboring France (such as me and R and many expats who work for CERN situated both in Pays Gex (France) and Geneva).

The United Nations and its many agencies play a huge part in creating an international, bringing in diplomats, staff, and support from 192 countries, or member-states. Wikipedia cites that Geneva is home to 22 international organizations and more than 250 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). In addition Geneva serves as the European headquarters for many corporate companies like Proctor and Gamble, HP, and Dupont amongst others.

Due to its international setting, there are more Asian stores than I expected, most of them centered in the Paquis district, close to the railroad station. Walking around the Paquis, R and I found many more shops than we found through a quick Google search. I read somewhere that Geneva has a large Japanese ex-pat population. And more recently Geneva is trying to court the Chinese banks so there may be a small Chinatown here in the near future. Genève is quite small and compact so we weren't that far away from the Paquis district. Today we visited the stores below.

ASIAN STORES IN GENEVA

Asia Store 

• Pros: Clean and organized, no weird smells, with good basic selection. A nice surprise was the owner of Asia Store was not only Chinese, but he spoke Teo Chew, my dialect. We chatted briefly and I found out his last name is Chan, which is as common as Smith or Jones. He emigrated to France from Cambodia and now lives in Switzerland.

• Cons: Tiny with only about 3 rows of food. Not a wide selection. Quite expensive. I paid 7.10CHF for ginger, vermicelli, and rice paper (which would have cost maybe $3 in Boston). Eating out, and food in general, costs much more in Switzerland partly due to universal healthcare and the high salaries the Swiss enjoy. I have to keep that in mind instead of making a straight comparison to Boston prices.

Alimentation Japonaise Miyai
45 Rue de Zurich, 1201 Genéve
Tel: 022-731-4862
Pros: Neat, well-stocked Japanese grocery store where I bought pickled plums, miso paste, wasabi peas, and gyoza wrappers.
Cons: Expensive, but not any more expensive than Asia Store or other Asian markets in Geneva.

Vietnamese Market (whose name I forget)
En route to find dinner, we accidentally found the best Chinese/Vietnamese supermarket.

• Pros: The owners are Vietnamese—and directed us to Cho Lon, a Vietnamese restaurant around the corner from their store. We should have heeded their advice, but we didn’t, opting instead for another one nearby. Before heading to dinner, we checked out the store. Although still quite small compared to Asian markets in Boston, it was still the biggest one yet. It carried a big selection of Asian fresh vegetables, packaged goods, big bags of rice, different kinds of tofu, lots of frozen fish, fish sauce, shrimp paste, rice paper, many kinds of noodles, and even "mam", fermented river fish. Most of the goods came from China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Thailand. I quickly bought some hoisin sauce, roast pork "char siu" marinade, and a bag of dried green mung beans. Why mung beans? From these dried beans, I can sprout my own bean sprouts at any moment to use in fresh summer rolls, or to use in Vietnamese dishes. I have yet to find fresh bean sprouts in my French markets, so I'm super excited that I found the dried green mung beans today!

• Cons: None