Console?

I just finished reading this really interesting book that I highly recommend to anyone who wants a good read for a few days. It's called The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas. No, it's not in French. Disappointed? Tough. But it's a very bizarre story about a cursed book that contains a recipe for a potion that makes you travel to a dimension built entirely out of other people's thoughts. It would be a good book to read passages from if you were blazed out of your mind. And when you are in this thought world (called the Troposphere) you can think 'Console?' and suddenly this video-game-esque menu comes up in front of you and you can choose to jump into another person's head who is nearby you in the physical realm. And from there, you can jump to other people based on proximity or ancestry.

I want a console. I'd jump into someone that wasn't in Geneva.

And before you start, yes, I understand that I'm about two months behind the times on starting a blog. I have been doing my best to assimilate into the culture Genevois, and it has taken me two months to realize that it is just never going to happen.

Pre-conceptions about Geneva:

-Tons of shit to do on a regular basis

-City nightlife (aka outrageous parties)

-Plentiful internships

-Mass amounts of work that I could never dig myself out of

-Instant immersion into French

Now, allow me to destroy each and every one of these.

First, if you are ever planning on visiting Geneva, I will give you some pointers. Plan to come in the summer. We had a professor at the graduate institute tell us, verbatim: 'Geneva in the winter makes people suicidal'. He wasn't kidding. It just gets grey and murky and miserable and if you've got seasonal depression like some of us, it's really an issue. Also, you need not plan to stay for more than three days. Go see the Botanical Gardens, take a tour of the UN, wander around the vieille ville for a bit (and if you must, eat some fondue) and take your picture in front of the jet d'eau...but after that, plan on leaving. And DO NOT plan on being here on a Sunday. Everything is closed, including the grocery stores, and the most you can hope for is getting to go down into the archaeological site underneath the cathedral. The thought of which makes me want to vomit, having talked about the cathedral for upwards of 20 hours already. I had thought before I came here, that given the fact that Geneva was an international hub and it had a HUGE university, there would always be something going on here. So very very wrong. First of all, the university population is trumped by the international orgs population, therefore everything is geared towards the 35+ set, not so much the 18-24. Problem.

Which leads to the next pre-conception: nightlife. Not to say that there isn't any. But it's limited and not consistent. I suppose I imagined that Geneva would have the feel of New York, or at least Boston (or even Portland for Christs' sake). Quite the opposite. Disappointing when I can finally legally go out to the bars and purchase alcohol, and I have little to no desire to do so. We try our best to make our own fun here, and we are successful on occasion, but as a rule, little old Colby College has a much more exciting nightlife than does Geneva, Switzerland.

Now, internships. Many of you know that I'm aiming for some sort of combination of international relations/finance/development as a career field. I didn't think that it was unreasonable to hope that coming to Geneva, I would be able to find an appropriate internship. I'm not saying that I wanted a place in the WTO (although that would've been AMAZING), but that I could've been able to find an internship with some sort of organization that was slightly related to it. I don't care if I had to do filing (ok, maybe I do care a little) but just give me something remotely related. No. Essentially my options are with the Rights of the Child or Refugees or ILO. 0 for 3. I sound like an ass saying that I don't want to work with things like that, but it's just not my niche and dammit, it's frustrating. 75% of the reason why I'm in Geneva in the first place is to get a kick ass internship. Merde.

Workload=joke. I'm taking 6 classes. One of them is even a graduate class. Workload=joke. I don't have written work. The readings aren't necessary for any of them because we go over them in class. I'm going to be so ridiculously fucked when I come back to Colby that I can't even laugh about it because I'm actually scared shitless. I've reached the point where I've got scads of extra time, but I know that it just doesn't matter if I do it or not, and there isn't much to do, so I don't do it. It's a seriously vicious cycle, with an end result that by definition, blows.

Finally, the French thing. Let me explain the language situation in Switzerland because I know that most of you don't understand it. 'Why are you going to Switzerland? Do you speak Swiss?' No guys, there is no Swiss language. The very Western portion of Switzerland (aka Geneva) speaks French. The middle, and largest part, speaks German. The South speaks a weird version of Italian. And over to the East, they speak a really ancient language called Romanche. So, I am in a French speaking region. However, I am also in quite possibly the most international city in Europe. And the majority of international organizations speak English. Therefore, English is everywhere. Everyone speaks it here. Along with Italian and German and French of course, but English is EVERYWHERE. Whenever I go into a store or a restaurant and start speaking French, they can immediately tell that I'm not great at it (aka American) and they start speaking English. Frustrating? Unbelievably so. So even when I try to improve my French, it goes nowhere. My roommates all speak French, but since they know that I'm not great at it, they either avoid speaking to me, or speak their broken English at me. As a result, when I'm in class at the university and I actually have to pretend to know French, I'm fucked. It's quite a joke that I'm here to fulfill my French major requirement, because I don't see myself becoming fluent.

Donc. Ca explique tout.