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Going Dutch
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26 April 2005
I went to the supermarket which the housing service guy had recommended for the chocolate selection, and was not disappointed. I also found a place which sells Pocket Coffees. I'm not sure whether I've mentioned Pocket Coffees before. I first discovered them in Regensburg, with the slogan (in German) 'genuine liquid Italian espresso in fine chocolate' which is pretty much what they are. I brought a whole lot home for the geeks, because geeks like caffeine. The Pocket Coffees in Geneva have Italian on the side, for what I think means something like, 'The character of coffee and the energy of chocolate.' Apparently Italians aren't so impressed (or perhaps merely aren't fooled) by claims of genuine Italian coffee. Anyway, I'll be sending some to the addicts (and the people who like to bribe the addicts) back home.
The last time I went to a shopping centre I mentioned that people smoked inside... well, this time I noticed there are even ashtrays in the toilets. It doesn't make sense to me. Toilets are where people go to smoke when they're not allowed to. Why would people smoke in the toilets when they're allowed to smoke wherever they like?
I bought my one year bus ticket, so I can bus all over the canton as much as I like for a year, at less than the cost of one of the cheapest possible ordinary tickets every second day. It's particularly cheap for me because I'm a 'junior', being (just barely) under 25.
It's interesting to hear so many different languages around me. In my office are two people who speak Greek (which sounds like English... no weird sounds and a lot of normally-pronounced English technical terms thrown in) and one who speaks Italian (which sounds like mozzarella.) While I was having my cup of tea in the hostel kitchen the other day, there was a German-speaking couple learning French. It was a bit disorienting at first because I was trying to ascertain which language they were speaking, and just when I felt sure that they were speaking German, they'd speak a bit of French, and vice versa. I didn't really understand what they were saying but at one point they were talking about how the German suffix -isch tends to translate to -ique in französique... er... français. I tried to think of some German to say to them but I kept thinking of the French instead, or weird hybrid phrases like je verstehe, which seems to flow better than either single-language version. J'ai gelernt französisch et ich habe oublié l'allemand.
Today I received my 'Attestation de fonctions' in the internal mail, which, as far as I can tell, is what allows me to live and work in Switzerland. It was all official-looking, with an official-looking stamp, official-looking seal, official-looking white sticker over where they'd mistakenly put 'Monsieur' (Mr.). And under nationality it said 'néerlandaise' (Dutch, female) where it should have said 'néo-zélandaise'. I went to the office where an official-looking white sticker was put over the wrong nationality, and a typewriter (do you believe they still exist?) was used to type the correct nationality over the top. The person who made the correction had to ask what a person from New Zealand is called, since it isn't nouvelle-zélandaise as you might guess. I hadn't been too sure of that myself until my first French class, so it was reassuring to see a native French speaker who didn't know. Anyway, another official-looking stamp was added, and I was officially a kiwi again. For about an hour I was a half-British New Zealander in Switzerland who speaks French as well as a Spaniard and was officially a Mr. Dutchwoman. That's almost as much fun as when I was a New Zealander in Britain asking an Irishman in Spain where to get an American computer part which was probably made in Taiwan.
I went to see another apartment this evening. This one is a little on the expensive side, due to having two bedrooms and being furnished and quite large, but it's still within the limit I decided on. Also, although I can definitely stay there for a year, it's not certain whether I could stay for two years. On the positive side, it has two bedrooms (who's coming to visit first?) is furnished and quite large, is only about seven and a half minutes by bus from CERN, about a kilometre from France, and is across the road from a bus stop, a supermarket, several other shops and a park. More importantly, I'm the first person to visit it, so if I say I want it, I can have it. No waiting around while the owner decides to give it to somebody else. What's more, I'd be able to move in by mid-May at the latest instead of waiting for June or July. I think I'll email the guy tomorrow and say I'll take it. It beats trying to understand French-speaking real estate agents on the rare occasions that they answer the phone when I take time off work to call them. And I won't have to learn the mysterious craft of getting large pieces of furniture into upstairs apartments, although I admit I'm curious.
Oh yeah, and the guy who owns the place has an iPod mini. Either that, or he has the box from somebody else's iPod mini in his cupboard, but I could relate to that, having once rescued an iMac box from the side of the road and used it to decorate my bedroom. And the iPod boxes are so much cooler than the old iMac boxes. Seriously. If you've ever bought a new iPod or iSight you'll know what I mean.
On the subject of the apartment, and iPods, the bus stop across the road from the apartment is the one which is closest to the Mac shop I keep seeing from the bus. Ha... huh?
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22 April 2005
I thought of a few somewhat funny things today. One of the beds in the wheelchair-accessible room I'm in has wheels on it, like a hospital bed. I can see the logic behind that. People who can't sit without wheels probably can't lie down without wheels either. I wouldn't be surprised if they also couldn't walk without roller skates.
Another thing... the teacher of the French class I'm in is from Switzerland, yet every weekday she goes to France to teach French. It sounds sort of like selling ice to Eskimos, or selling '101 Top sales techniques' books to people who make a fortune selling ice to Eskimos.
Working at CERN I'm officially an international civil servant. Is that where the importance of 'International' meets with the drudgery of 'Servant' and tries to be civil about it? Take out the 'Civil' and you have slave trade.
I went to see an apartment yesterday, only six bus stops away from CERN. It seems nice enough but it won't be available until June, so I'm still looking for a place I can move into sooner.
It's hard to believe it snowed last weekend. There are so many daisies that the fields without an equal number of dandelions look almost as white as when they had snow on them. There are also patches of little purple flowers and white and pink flowers which I don't recognise. Along with the pink trees and yellow bushes, there are also white trees. It must be springtime. Still, I'd like it to snow again.
I've spent most of the evening writing an AppleScript to export certain statistics about what's on my iPod. It's been fun. 'Sometimes it's great... sometimes it's not.' -- from 'I Smoke a Lot' by K's Choice (the song I had in my head yesterday. Incidentally, people here do smoke a lot, and it's not great.)
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20 April 2005
Yesterday was interesting, to experience if not to read about. It started off well. I went to buy some fizzy water from the vending machine, put a half franc coin in, put another half-franc coin in, then realised they were both stuck at the top and hadn't gone down into the machine. So I put another one in and wiggled it about a bit to see if I could free the two coins. There must have been a whole lot of other stuck coins, because I got my 2 francs worth of water and about three or four francs change.
Since some time last week I have actually been working on something useful, rather than just fiddling around getting to know the system. I finished that yesterday before lunchtime. Restaurant 1 was serving gnocchi in cheese sauce for lunch, which had a different texture from my first gnocchi, so I hope I remember to look up what it actually is the next time I'm on the internet. I could dig my Chambers dictionary out of my suitcase I suppose, it would probably be in there.
Later in the day we had a meeting, with just my supervisor (recently returned from a conference) and the people who work in one or the other of my two offices. I figured it would be fairly relevant to me for a change. It might well have been, but no sooner had we arrived did my supervisor receive a phonecall for me. I don't know how they knew I was in his office, but I was called out of the meeting because I urgently had to change to a different room in the hostel. Apparently I was supposed to have checked out of my room the day before yesterday, but they gave me an extra night (without mentioning it) and then waited until they had somebody ready to move into the room before telling me to get out of it immediately. I thought I had until the 25th, which was probably a mistake on my part, but in any case it would have benefited everyone if they'd said something earlier rather than waiting until it was urgent and pulling me out of a work meeting. I hurriedly threw everything into my suitcases, my backpack, and my pockets. Some friendly chamber maids helped me get them all downstairs, to where I had room number 1 for two nights. It's a double room, wheelchair accessible (which means it's spacious!) and slightly more expensive. They reserved another room for me for about six nights after these two nights. It was all rather a shock, but eventually it occurred to me that if Stephen Hawking visits CERN, he'd probably stay in this room.
I got back to the meeting about five minutes before it finished, and five minutes after that I was due at my first French class, so Donatella (the one in my office who gets to work on a PowerBook) gave me a lift there. French class was cool! The teacher speaks in French almost the whole time... sort of a bootstrapping thing, you have to understand some French already in order to learn more. But I understand enough to know what she's saying. So we get a lot of practice at listening to French, and learning French the same way we would if we had to ask a French speaker what something meant. Also, people for whom English is a second language are not at a disadvantage. Apart from myself, in the class were two Italians, a Spanish guy, two British guys, a Norwegian, a German, and somebody from a country I didn't understand the French name for. It's interesting that I can get away with saying 'a German' but not 'a British'. Now you don't know whether the Ger(wo?)man was male or female. That wouldn't happen in French, or German for that matter.
This morning I went to work late, having spent half an hour attempting to phone various real estate agencies. That's the problem with real estate agencies (as opposed to, say, the CERN housing service.) They have to be contacted during business hours, and usually insist on a phonecall (in French) rather than email, and some insist that the properties be visited during work hours as well. I have one agency which keeps sending me emails with appointments to visit a place at very short notice, and I have to keep emailing back (if I get to the email in time) saying that I have a meeting or French class or whatever at that time. Anyway, nobody was answering the phone this morning. Luckily people don't have to stick to any particular hours here, actually Donatella is the only one who is sometimes there when I arrive in the morning. I arrived at work expecting to have an email saying I got that apartment I visited last week, since that's the way things usually work out for me. Unfortunately the apartment had been given to somebody who had been waiting for it since February, before renovations were done. Why they advertised it again I don't know. I think that was one of the first ads I saw when I started looking at the housing service website in February. I thought it looked like a good deal, so I was disappointed when it disappeared, and surprised when it reappeared.
Since I'd skipped breakfast in favour of fruitless (indeed, entirely foodless) phonecalls, I took an early lunch and tried them again. I called some residences first, but they were all full. The last of those spoke in English when he didn't understand my French, so I decided to stop trying to speak French just ask the next one (an agent) whether she knew English. She didn't, so I managed to say in French which apartment I wanted to visit (the one by the Mac shop I keep passing on the bus, although that's not how I described it to the agent) and she gave me another phone number to call. I thought she said that the person at that number knew English, but it turned out she didn't either. Nonetheless, we managed to make an appointment for 6pm tomorrow, which means I'll miss the CERN Micro club Mac meeting again. I'm glad I know the French word for 'tomorrow' because she originally said jeudi and although I knew it was a day of the week, I couldn't remember which one. What's more, I had forgotten how to say that I'd forgotten it, so it probably seemed like I didn't have a clue what she was saying. It even sounds like Thursday... how could I forget that? The visit will be challenging for both of us.
It's good to know there are people in Geneva who don't speak English. Sometimes it seems that learning French is rather futile, since people so often reply to my bad French with good English.
I was given another semi-useful assignment today, and also went to another French class, with a few new classmates. Things are getting interesting, for sure. After work I went to the hostel reception to find out what time tomorrow I should move my bags from this room to the room I have booked for the next six days. As luck would have it, the nice man from the housing service was at reception, and he said he'd been looking for me because there's another apartment which might be suitable for me. He tells people who are staying in the hostel about apartments before he puts them on the website, because it's more important to free up hostel rooms than to help other CERN employees move from one apartment to another. Unfortunately this place he mentioned is only free for six months, but it would be a place to stay for a while while I looked for somewhere else. I mentioned the place I'm visiting tomorrow and said I'd see how that goes first.
Eventually I got around to asking about changing rooms, and he said I could just stay in the room I was in, at the normal rate (not the more expensive rate for a double room.) That way I wouldn't have to move and he wouldn't have to fiddle about with changing my room on the computer, which would, he said, be more expensive than making me pay the full price for the room. If I haven't found a place by Friday of next week I can just go back and ask for another week. Even though people are not supposed to stay in the hostel for very long, he has a special cache of rooms for people looking for apartments, since it's so difficult to find apartments in Geneva. Most people find an apartment within two weeks, although for most of my first two weeks here I had neither internet nor a phone so I'm taking a bit longer. He'd kick me out if it seemed like I weren't looking for an apartment, or I were being too picky. Then we got to talking about chocolate, the best brands and the best places to buy it in Geneva. Apparently the best value Toblerone is the 750g. And that's nowhere near the biggest.
So, as you can see, my day ended on a sweet note, in a suite (not). Ensuite, noté! Déjà va
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18 April 2005
The snow stopped falling while I was eating dinner yesterday, so took the opportunity to use my camera outdoors. I started by wandering to the reception so I could take pictures of the snow-dusted Globe of Innovation. I then went down past where the strange saplings were still poking up through the snow so that I could get a nice picture of the Jura with a light dusting of snow right down to the bottom. I went to restaurant 1, then up Route E. Rutherford (and into France) to where the pink trees by the sign are -- looking rather sadder due to having been snowed on. I came back via Route Democrite, taking pictures all the way. They'll all be up soon, I promise. In the process of writing my name in the snow, I created a snow angel on the back of a truck. I went on to make a snowman. All right, so maybe that's not really a snowman. But this is. All right, maybe that isn't either. It's more of a snow-pillar. But it has character. The first one, on the other hand, has characters.
I also got a picture of a a table losing its 'tablecloth', and the patterns in the snow which is sheltered by a tree.
As I said, it was just a little introductory snow for my benefit, so by this afternoon there were only handfuls of snow here and there. I went to France to see how good my French was... a common enough thing for people to do, I suppose, except that I walked to France to take a French test. That was so that they can decide which class I should go in when I start French lessons here. The lady who called me about it said, upon hearing that I've been trying to learn French over the last two months, that I'm a 'false beginner'. I thought that was an interesting way of putting it.
Anyway, I was told to go to building 54 for the test, so I looked it up on the map, and was satisfied I knew where it was. But by the time I left to go there, I somehow had it in my head that I was going to building 55. So I walked all the way to where I'd seen building 54 on the map, and arrived there ten minutes early, only to find that it was, in fact, building 54, and I thought I was supposed to be in building 55. After first checking that there was no obvious evidence of building 54 having the right sort of room numbering scheme to have the room I was looking for, I set off for building 55. Check the linked map... they're not as close together as their numbers. In fact, they're in different countries.
I realised, when I got to building 55 that it was the familiar building near the entrance which I had seen even when I came here for a visit last year. Perhaps that's how the idea of building 55 got into my mind in the first place. Upon establishing that building 55 did not have the room I was looking for, I went back to building 54 again. Yes, that's right folks, I walked to France and back twice in one day... I dare you to try it. I picked up bits of snow along the way to cool myself down, and I must say, every hot day should have bits of snow scattered about. It's very refreshing.
It took me about another ten minutes to find the right room in building 54, by which time I was 40 minutes late, but it didn't matter. I did the test, and was put into the 'false beginners' class. I was naturally surprised that there is such a class, as I thought that was just something she came up with on the spot to describe people who have learnt a little bit of French but don't really know it. Actually, the 'false beginners' class is usually for people who speak Italian, Spanish or some other language which is closely related to French, since it makes French easier for them to learn. So there you have it... the whole of 'Hugo in 3 months French', 16 lessons of 'Pimsleur's French I' and the entire French title in 'Eureka's Languages of the World' software, and I may as well be Spanish. ésa es vida.
I'm glad there is such a class though... I'm probably not good enough to start at an intermediate level, but I'd hate to have to slowly go through the stuff I've already learnt again. Now I get to go slightly more quickly through the stuff I already sort of know, with classmates who can already rrroll their 'r's (yes, I know you can, Rrrrob.) I start lessons tomorrow.
While I was deciding what to have for dinner in restaurant 1 today, somebody asked me, 'Parlez vous français?'. Now there's a question you can't answer non to. The person who asked turned out to be an English speaker who didn't know what something on one of the signs meant. Luckily I looked up that very word a few days ago, so I was able to tell him what my dictionary said it meant, and what I think it really means, in that context.
Woah, I just found an apartment for rent in the same street as that Mac shop I keep seeing from the bus. Mes premières chutes de neige
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17 April 2005
It's morning and it's snowing again. I've taken some more pictures in daylight... again, I haven't uploaded them all, but here's a picturesque picture picturing a general scene and one of a deciduous tree covered in snow. Also, I couldn't help thinking about what would happen if a bowl of steaming hot curry were put on one of these tables. I also shot a video of the snow falling with my iSight, although it was snowing very lightly at the time so you can't see much. While it is still only snowing very lightly, I'll smuggle my PowerBook over to the restaurant so that I can connect to the internet. Of course, even when it was snowing slightly more heavily, it was still nothing compared with what they might get in, say, Paisley... but this is just a little introductory snow for my benefit.
I've added a tips page, and I also finally got around to making the rest of the text the same size as the links. I haven't decided whether I like it that way yet... it means people have less control over the text size and the links are slightly less emphasised. Next Page |
