Hellooo Geneva!!
We arrived in Geneva Wednesday at 8:45am (CET), my first impression - cold
and dreary...
After meeting up some of the people on my program, we spent the couple of
hours before meeting up in a coffee shop in the Geneva airport.
Our Geneva experience began from here - we all loaded onto a coach bus
(storing our massive amount of luggage in the undercarriage of the bus) and
headed off to the Youth Hostel we have been staying at for the past few days.
The rest of Wednesday was mostly relaxed – after a quick orientation during
which we received transportation passes and student ID cards, we wandered about
the city and discovered some shopping sites where we could all get phones. Luckily, my Blackberry works with a Swiss pay
as you go sim card!
Dinner was in the food court of this big shopping center called Manor – there
was lots of great food.
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| The Famous fountain in the center of Geneva |
Geneva has been great so far, though a bit intimidating due to the language
barrier, but hopefully I will be able to pick up some French fairly
quickly. There are about 6-8 of us who
know no French at all out of about 28, so we are all in the same situation.
On Thursday we had an orientation about some guidelines and the usual
harassment and health information that’s always discussed at the beginning of
the academic year at the SIT office on Rue de Monthoux. After this session we wandered about a little
bit and tried to figure out the phone situation for some people and then went
back to the SIT office for a session with a counselor. Following this, we went to lunch at Manor
(again) and then headed over to Old Geneva where we had a two-hour walking
tour. Old Geneva was great to see –
there were a lot of old buildings from the Huguenots and we saw the main
squares, a big cathedral, and the house of Jean Jacques Rousseau, along with
many other things. It is so impressive
to see all these historic sites and the amount of history European nations
have. Our day concluded with a dinner at
a Pizza place near the hostel with the entire group. Following which we all went straight to bed
after an exhausting full day in Geneva.
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| Plaque on the home of Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
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| Albert Gallatin - Swiss Born, US Secretary of Treasury and founder of NYU |
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| First school in Geneva |
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| Remains of original city wall found when building a new parking complex |
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| World's longest bench - 126 meters (413 feet) in length |
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| Reformation Wall - William Farel, John Calvin, Theodore Beza, and John Knox |
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| Statue of Henry Dunant - Founder of the Red Cross and first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize with Frederic Passy |
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| Occupy in Geneva? |
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| University of Geneva |
Friday, the second full day here, began with a session on the academic
schedule and information about our ISPs (Independent Study Project). It was fairly intimidating to hear the amount
of work that we are going to have but part of the program involves trips to
both Paris and Brussels – I am definitely looking forward to that! We had an hour break in which we went to a
little coffee shop and had some café (there was a cute Swiss guy running the
place). After this we had to attend a
session with the Home Stay coordinator to find out more about our
families. It was very exciting to hear
about everyone’s families – my host mom is originally from Germany and luckily
speaks English (in addition to German, French, Dutch and some Spanish). Tomorrow morning we will finally meet our
families and be able to go home – I can’t wait to finally have my own room,
more access to the Internet, and the chance to finally unpack! The last planned event we had today was a
trip to the French school we will be studying at. We all had to take written and spoken tests –
luckily for those of us who didn’t know any French, we only had to take a quick
2-minute speaking test. It was pretty
horrendous but I can’t wait to learn some French! The night ended with us taking a trip to one of the pubs in Geneva, where we were able to interact with some of the locals and just hang out a bit.
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| Alex, Me and Rachel at the Pub |
Well, that is all for the first few days.
I’ll write more soon – au reviour!
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