Geneva Gibber

I don’t particularly feel like writing today, but I have nothing else to do (or nothing else I want to do). Plus I’ve been a giant blogging slacker. I will do my best to be entertaining, even in my uninspired state, because I feel a sense of obligation to provide all of you with a procrastination option at work. (Oh, but for those days that I don’t write, which will probably be the rest of this week, I highly recommend wasting away your work day at Dave Eggers McSweeny’s. Just be careful not to laugh out loud, or people will suspect that you aren’t toiling away at a spreadsheet like you’re supposed to.)

But back to me and my oh so riveting life. Frisbee friend Kacey arrived on Thursday night and we headed out to frisbee practice, so I could run off all of the anger that had built up during the US/Ghana match. (By the way, the Ghanaian fans around us were without a doubt the most insulting, obnoxious fans I have ever watched a sports event with. Ghana is officially my least favorite team in the World Cup.) After practice we had a beer with a couple of guys from my team at the sports complex bar. I’ve had a beer at this bar five or six times now, and I still can’t get over my amusement and glee at the idea of a bar built right into the sports facilities. How smart is it to put athletic fields and bars together, embracing the fact that adult athletes are really just participating in sports, so afterwards they can have a reason to go to the bar on a weekday night. Think of all the money Chicago Parks and Recreation could make if they put in bars right by all the softball fields… someone should look into my plan, save the tax payers a pretty penny.

On Friday night, Kacey and I ventured out to my coworkers going away party, hosted by her two older brothers. The party was 80% Swedes, which meant it was 100% great. Scandinavians are good people. (I realize that my Danish friends reading this may be upset by my lumping them in with Swedes, but frankly I have yet to meet a Scandinavian I didn’t like, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, or Finnish.) There was lots of tasty wine and champagne at the party plus very social people who went out of their way to make Kacey and I feel welcome. Gunner, my friend’s older brother, even offered to show me the lively Geneva nightlife that I (and all of my friends) have been unable to find. He was a little tipsy when he made the offer, so I’m not sure if he’ll actually follow through on it, but it was a nice gesture nonetheless.

Saturday wasn’t particularly exciting. We slept in, went to the park, watched the Sweden/Germany game (I was rooting for Sweden after the Swedish hospitality from the night before, so they inevitably lost.) Then everyone took a nap and awoke to a thunderstorm, which we all agreed was a sign that we should skip the bars that night. We stayed in, splitting a couple bottles of wine and playing a rousing game of Gin Rummy. I, of course, proved my superior ability at collecting three of kinds and small straights, crushing the competition. The fools… they should have given up and conceded defeat the moment I told them my parents met at a bridge tournament. Cards are in my blood, and no contest demands the mind of a card shark like a game of Gin Rummy.

Sunday, Kacey and I had big plans to take a day trip to Annecy, France, as we had both heard that it was beautiful and only a short trip from Geneva. Turns out, the short trip was an hour and half long, and by the time we would have arrived we would have had two and half hours to see the city before the last train back. Somehow, it didn’t seem worth it. So we went to Lausanne, Switzerland instead, which is about 45 minutes away from Geneva and has trains running all day. In Lausanne, we visited two cathedrals, each of which brought me an overwhelming sense of relief and calm upon entrance. A spiritual epiphany?… perhaps. Or it could have been that I was sweating up a storm outside trudging up a big hill in the sun and humidity and old stone churches are cool and dark giving me a chance to dry off. Who knows which was the cause of my serenity, but either way, I thoroughly enjoyed our time in the churches. One of them even had lots of dead people all around the back, and a wooden door in the floor with a big metal ring to open it. Sadly, the door was locked, destroying all of my hopes for an Indiana Jones/Da Vinci Code-esque adventure. Just once, I want to go into an old church or a castle and find a crazy door that leads into some unaltered, abandoned nether regions of the building, delivering me to astounding discoveries and adventures. Is that really too much to ask for?

After the churches we wandered into some giant building filled with four different museums, where we unintentionally wandered into a geology exhibit without paying. Actually, it wasn’t that we unintentionally wandered in without paying, we had no intention of paying to look at shiny rocks (even though we both confessed during our viewing that we had collected rocks as children… Kacey had even been to a rock show to purchase rocks, which I think qualifies her as the bigger dork, since I just picked my rocks up off the ground). Anyhow, the unintentional part was that we didn’t realize we were stealing our viewing of the rocks because we didn’t know we were supposed to pay. When there’s no one sitting there telling you to pay and everything’s in French how can you tell.

After the rocks we went to down to the lake, bought some fruit at street market, and walked through the International Olympic Committee gardens. We were too cheap to pay to go in the Olympic museum, but we figured we could guess what was going to be in there – in the current Olympics section some pictures of people playing sports and lists of Olympic records, and in the historical section, some statues of naked guys wrestling. As much as I like the Olympics, I don’t need to spend $10 to see a list of athletic records, and frankly I think someone should pay me if I have to see naked guys wrestling.

Well, that was one of the longest entries I’ve written this summer. I guess I was mistaken at the beginning of this entry. Apparently my blogging spirit is alive and well, I just needed to get started and then I was on a roll. Sorry I rambled so much. Odds are that I won’t write again until next week because I have to go to class on Thursday and Friday, instead of coming to work. Boo class! I might be going to Swiss Nationals this weekend with the frisbee team, so that should be fun, and should provide lots of stories for me to share next week. Ciao chicos.