Update!

Liz recently (gently) reminded me that I haven't posted in about two weeks. She's right - I owe you an update, even if it isn't as complete or as artfully constructed as some of my previous posts! So, let's travel back a week and a few days to...

July 25-27: I visited Thun. Thun is a city in the Bern canton, a few stops before Interlaken on the train after changing at Bern. More importantly, it's where the Aergerters, a Swiss family that I know through one of my friends from U of R, live.

Thun is not as touristy of a city as Interlaken or Bern, so for these three days, I had a taste of real Swiss life in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. It was amazing. The Aergerters went beyond "hospitable" and treated me like one of their grandchildren. (Mrs. Aergerter even dug through the attic to find a pair of American flags to put by the bed I slept in!) They took me for drives in the surrounding countryside, told me stories about their daughters, introduced me to the staff at one of their favorite restaurants and tried to teach me a bit of Switzerdeutsch, the local dialect of German. If I cleared my plate, I'd be given more with a word or two about my being young and needing more food. (I learned by Sunday how to say "I'm full" - Ich bin satt - which worked better than trying to convince them in English that I had had enough!).

July 30: Jazz concert in the park! I went into downtown Geneva with two other people to go for dinner and a free Jazz concert by Lac Leman. We went to Les Brassieurs, a restaurant by the train station, to eat Flamenkush, which is a (from what I understand) a Swiss adaptation on pizza with a tortilla-like crust and without tomato sauce. After dinner ended, we went on a chocolate quest and walked to a park on the other side of the lake where the concert would be held. Les Fêtes de Genève were just getting started as we walked through, with carnival rides, food vendors, other free music and people watching galore. We stopped to smell the roses in the rose garden in the park before finding our way to the Ella Fitzgerald Stage for the concert. We sat with a bunch of other summer students who we found once we arrived at the concert.

August 1: Friday was Swiss National Day and the fireworks for it completely outshown anything I've seen in the States. It was an amazing display with groundworks galore by the statue of the reformers in Parc de Bastion.

August 2: After a lazy morning, I went into old town for an organ concert at 6pm. The first full set of pieces that we heard was some organ suite by Poulenc, which was in a distinctly different (and considerably harder to love) style playing with atonality on the edge of tonality than the other Poulenc that I know (namely, one of my favorite flute pieces of all time - Poulenc's Sonata for Flute & Piano). After walking around for a bit, I had dinner after the concert at a creperie right next to the cathedral.

August 3: Mom, Dad & Jess arrived at the airport early this morning from NJ! It was great to see them. After dropping off their luggage at their hotel, we went to Jardin Botanique (Dad liked the little of the math exhibit that we saw there - mentioned in my post from July 15) where Mom and I struck up a multi-lingual conversation with a couple from somewhere in Northern Spain. After that, we visited the UN together.