Ciao Ginevra!

I'm sitting in my completely packed room where for once--miracle of miracles!--the internet is working. Hagiko (wife of Dr. Wattles, the assistant program director) is making all of us fried rice and miso soup for dinner, continuing her quest to feed all hungry students until the last possible second. The last week in Geneva has been rather ugly--wind and rain and dreary gray clouds with only patches of sunlight--but today, although it is still cloudy, it is a very nice spring day. Kind of Geneva to give us a send-off like this...

My last two weekends were dominated by hiking adventures, writing papers, and studying for exams. I used the last weekend of my Eurail pass to go hiking along Lake Brienz, in the Berner Oberland region of the Alps. The esteemed Clara Chan accompanied me as my hiking buddy. Full of ambition, we had originally planned to go on an intense two-day hike through the Alps, spending the night at a mountain refuge, but when we called to reserve beds, they informed us that we would have to ski in. So that plan was scrapped, and we decided to just go for something scenic instead.

Lake Brienz is one of the two lakes on either side of Interlaken, and scenic it is. The water is that very bright light blue you only see from melted glaciers--I've never seen a lake so big that was that color, only streams and small lakes. Every time I looked at the water, the color was striking. We hiked the entire length of the lake, from the village of Brienz to Interlaken along the north side of the lake, through forests and fields and a stream or two. The trail went up and down quite a lot, so we got excellent vistas of the scenery. The mountains were hazy, actually, thanks to the volcanic ash still hanging in the air, so my pictures don't show the view very well, but it was beautiful in real life.

It was a very luxurious hike, actually, because halfway through, we stopped at the village of Oberried for a lunch of sandwiches and salads at a restaurant. It seemed to go very quickly, but we realized as we left the restaurant that we had stayed for a full hour! We congratulated ourselves on having unconsciously become European...

There were multiple wildlife sightings: 4 salamanders, a lot of incredibly fat bumblebees (we officially named them "BMI 40 bees"), a squirrel, several goats, and a lot of cows. The shores of Lake Brienz are exactly the manifestation of my vision of the Swiss countryside--mountains, lakes, cows, chalets, and friendly people on the trails greeting you in 500 different languages. (Or maybe they all spoke Swiss German and Swiss German has 500 different potential hiking greetings...) Clara accomplished her goal of seeing a cow wearing a cowbell multiple times over, and I accomplished my goal of not getting sunburned. Clara let me use her 100+ SPF sunscreen, and I think it was a turning point in my life.

Here are pictures of the hike.

Last weekend, rain was predicted for all day Friday, but when I woke up, the sun was shining and the weather forecast had changed to rain just in the evening. So I immediately rousted Clara out of bed, who rousted Matthew (who lives at a homestay) out of his bed by phone, and we hiked the Grand Salève, which is a long, flat mountain--I would call it a bluff, actually, but the French Wikipedia calls it a "montagne"--composed mainly of limestone ("calcaire" in French, I now know) at the southern edge of Geneva. We took the 8 bus, which starts at the WHO/OMS a five minute walk away, to the other end of the line, met Matthew, walked across the border, then started hiking.

The hike was a lot of elevation but not too quickly and through the trees, so it was really quite nice. The top has a spectacular view of Geneva--the rain of the week before had cleared out a lot of the volcanic ash haze, so we could see very clearly. Matthew and I tried to find ICTSD's building, but the massive construction cranes we had counted on using as reference points were too small to show up at that height. The Jet d'Eau showed up beautifully, however, as did the Palais des Nations, OMS, and the WTO.

There are photos of this hike near the end of this album.

Also, here are my last (sad!) ICTSD articles:
US Climate Bill Slips as Key Senator Threatens to Withdraw Support
Caribbean Rum Producers Protest EU Decision to Cut Aid

And now, after four months that have gone by very quickly, it is time to leave. It helps that I have so many adventures to look forward to for the summer and next fall, but I am very sad to leave. This semester's group has really been exceptional, by all accounts (you would only need to hear one rendition of Claire and Hannah's song "Lion and the Bear," to the tune of "Beauty and the Beast," to understand); we're going to miss each other very much. Geneva as well, despite the expense of eating out, because it is a very lovely city and we've wandered around in a lot of its neighborhoods. I am going to miss buying white chocolate for my train trips every week (because as Clara says, you know it's traveling time when Bonnie eats white chocolate), the musicality of the French language, intern conferences from the balcony of ICTSD where Matthew, Jacob and I would survey our domain, and those sunny afternoons when everyone at the John Knox pops their heads out through the open windows and we talk and enjoy being in Switzerland.

But it will be so nice to be back in the US. I haven't had a good smoothie in four months, and I've been craving one for approximately three months and three weeks...