GENEVA AND MONTREUX

I slept like a rock. Powering through a day in another time zone is a lot better than napping or making fake sleep. Maria had left for work already; so today I after my Euro breakfast of muesli and yogurt and watched the brief downpour outside. Then I was off to some 50m pool a half-hour walk from the apartment, which I might add is small, but has an excellent view and next to the toilet a bidet—unused.

Streets in Geneva are willy-nilly and the map I was using complete disregarded any sense of scale and distance. The city is absolutely charming and clean, I mean anal. I walked across to bridges and glanced down at the silty grey rivers below and saw not a single scrap of trash on the banks or in any branches of trees dipped into the water. In the USA and most developing countries it’d look like a toilet bowl no one flushed for a week. In Mexico, rivers get so polluted that if yr near a beach after a rainstorm the surf is filled with trash for days. It’s disgusting. But not here. Mere hints of litter and hardly any graffiti. It’s nice to see tax money doing something actually beneficial more reflective of civic pride rather than spending billions fighting fruitless wars over oil. They do things right like that here. People are taken care of, given great health care and a reasonable amount of five weeks vacation. It’s expensive to live here but so are the States.

The pool was immaculate as well, with private changing rooms and shared public space near lockers, so no nudity anywhere but the nudie booths. You’re required to wash the feet before entering the pool in a special foot-shower section. The three lap lanes that were open were filled and the one lifeguard that spoke English (or wanted to) gave me some tips and I ended up in a kinda fast lane near a damn good team, which paced me nicely. Afterwards I went outside to a sunning area and took nap on the hot cement, waking up to topless women around me, which is always nice.

I headed back, stopping by an appliance store to get a power converter for my electronic equipment, hoping to god it worked. I checked out the arts posters and political art slapped on walls that’s about the only guerrilla message allowed, the substitute for marker and spray paint tags I guess. A nice trade off. Had a kebob and ice cream taking my time getting back to the apt for a nap and finding out the power converter doesn’t work at all with my laptop or iPod chargers. My power is running out.

When Maria came home it was off by train following lake Geneva all the way to nearby Montreux, where the Jazz festival was winding down over the weekend. This town is filled with some of the most expensive and beautiful hotel accommodations in the area, catering to the richey rich and musical clientele. We wandered the crowed-filled lakeside promenade with some of the most amazing fair food I’ve ever seen, some of it cooked in these huge wok-like pans filled with delicious looking starchy plates of hash browns and ham, or curries, or pastas. We settled on some decent Thai and the ominous clouds that had been building started off with thunder and lightning and onto torrential downpour. What a wonderful scene of beautiful European people smoking like chimneys, I expected to see someone famous but no such luck. We hung out for awhile in a bar drinking mineral waters and listening to a jazz ensemble under a tent, leaving when the rain let up to get some chocolate waffles and then into a free jazz club since getting into the B52’s or Pet Shop Boys that night was next to impossible. The rain had reached a state of impossible inconvenience without an umbrella, so we had some coffee at a small café then headed home, the evening in Geneva cool, a bit balmy and with none of the inclement weather we’d left an hour away.