Au Revoir for Now....

As I've mentioned before, I won't be posting for the next two weeks because....
I'll be in MOROCCO!

This is the "field study" portion of my program, so I will be spending two weeks in Rabat studying public health policy. I don't know too many of the details, but I just found out my homestay assignment yesterday and great news: I have a Western toilet!

It doesn't sound like much, but in Moroccan homes, most people use Turkish toilets. There's no seat; you just squat on the floor and go! My homestay doesn't have one, but most public places only offer this kind of bathroom. Joy.

And if you ever wanted to know the gritty details of how to use one, click here.

Here are some other cultural adjustments I'll be making:

• Moroccan homes don't have showers. You can clean yourself with a little bucket or go to the Hammam (bath house).
• My host family - a mother, father and their daughter - speak only Arabic and French. No English for me!
• Dinner typically isn't served until 8-10pm at night (and I thought 7pm in Switzerland was late)

But on the bright side, a dollar is worth 8.50 Moroccan dirham! Switzerland is so expensive, and I'm excited for some real bargain shopping (even if it involves haggling in Arabic at the souq, or market). I'm also hoping to travel around on the weekends, perhaps to Casablanca, Fez, or Marrakech. 

Needless to say, this is going to be quite the adventure. 

I'll be back in April, so until then, "ma'a salama" - that's goodbye in Arabic

And yes, Mom, I'll be very safe - promise!

Clowning around at CERN

Bonjour mes amis,

This is my last post for a little while... check in tomorrow to find out why! (See what I did there? It's called building suspense)

This past week I had my French final exams, which means I'm done with intensive French class for good! Between the studying though, I did manage to squeeze in a trip to CERN in Geneva on Wednesday. For those who don't know, CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, home of the world's largest particle accelerator. (Don't worry, before this trip, all my knowledge of CERN came from The DaVinci Code). The organization has been in the news recently for its efforts to prove the existence of the Higgs Boson particle, or "God particle," which may explain the creation of the universe during the Big Bang.

Physics is not my strong suit, in case anyone didn't know this, so it was a little difficult to keep up with the tour guide's explanations. But the exhibits in the CERN museum were fascinating, mainly because they were simple enough for even me to understand:

Standing next to the world's largest particle accelerator! (27 km long)

"The Particle Room"

Then on Saturday night, I went on another exciting Geneva excursion: a Clown Show! My host mom's cousin is a professional "hôpiclown" that entertains sick children in hospitals. This weekend was their big "Spectacle de Clowns" so my host-mom, my host-sister, my host-mom's best friend, her daughter, and Lauren (a previous American exchange student that my family had hosted who now lives in Geneva) went with me to watch. It was hilarious! Really funny and not at all creepy like I had expected.

Anyways, tune in soon to find out why I'm going off the grid :)

Mountains of Snow (and of Chocolate)

This weekend, a few friends and I decided to take a casual day-trip to France (as you do in Switzerland) to see Mont-Blanc. It's still amazing to me that I can just take off and do these things on any old weekend!

Anyways, we took a bus from Geneva Airport to Chamonix, France and it was extremely casual: we didn't need passports or any kind of inspection to cross the border. Completely unlike the United States.

When we arrived, it was a stunningly beautiful day in the Alps - sunny blue skies and crisp winter air. We took a little red train up into the mountains. Lots of people were skiing, but since I didn't know how to, we took a tour inside of a glacier instead! Fair trade off, I'd say:

In case you were wondering what the inside of a glacier looks like

Having my own Sound of Music moment in the Alps

We then took two sets of lifts 3,842 meters up to the very top of the Aiguille du Midi, or the "Needle of the South." It's incredibly high up and narrow: just check out the picture below!

It was quite the trip up! My ears popped multiple times and once we reached the peak, I felt light-headed just taking the few dozen steps to the highest point. But the view from the top was completely worth it.

We were pretty exhausted after cramming all this activity into one day, so we all passed out on the hour and a half bus ride back to Geneva airport. Again, I can't believe we just casually visited France for a day.

On Sunday, I went with more friends to a Chocolate Festival in Versoix, a town near Geneva. It was completely free and we got so many free samples! We ate every kind of chocolate you could imagine: not just milk, dark and white, but also chocolate embedded with flowers, ginger chocolate, absinthe chocolate, and much more! There were also samples of different wines, chocolate liquors, ice creams, hazelnut spreads, and caramels. In other words, I was in heaven. 

Chocolate whiskey?!

Yes, that is a chocolate fountain twice as tall as I am

I'd call this a pretty successful weekend - and a well-budgeted one at that! The chocolate festival was entirely free and Charmonix was much less expensive than any international trip (and much less expensive than most train travel within Switzerland). A victory all around!

I won't be posting again until I come out of this chocolate coma, so à tout!

Bern, Baby, Bern

Not too many exciting things to report from the school week - except for a field trip to the capital city of Bern, that is!

But before we get that, a few other events of note:

• Earlier this week, a girl in my program who also lives in my village invited me over for a crêpe party at her house - it was delicious! We ate savory crêpes with spinach and meat for the meal, and then chocolate, nutella, honey, and sugar crêpes for dessert. Hopefully her host mother wasn't appalled by my insatiable appetite!
• I got my senior housing for Boston College next year. My friends and I got one of the best pick-times available so we will be living in... *drumroll* a MOD! The "Mods," or modular apartments, are these little red houses on campus with backyards and grills. They form a little community that are ideal for football tailgates and really are the heart & soul of social life on campus. I can't wait - it's almost enough to make me willing to leave Switzerland :)
• My boss at my internship, Dr. Carballo, mistakenly took me for a diplomat's wife at work this week. Maybe that's a common thing in Switzerland? Hah.

Anyways, onto Bern:

The purpose of our field trip - paid for by the program, thank goodness - was to visit the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). It's similar to USAID and we attended a lecture on Agriculture and Food Security. After that though, we had the afternoon free to visit the city. Bern's an hour and a half by train from where I live (and the trains are very expensive to take), so it's unlikely I'll have another chance to visit Switzerland's capital. 

It was a little bit of a culture shock being when we first arrived - the city is on the German side of Switzerland, so all I heard around me was Swiss German (which doesn't even sound like normal German)! It was very disconcerting to understand absolutely nothing for a change. But, on the bright side, they also had bretzels and sausages for sale on every corner - yum.

We walked by the capital building, which had an amazing view overlooking the city and the Aare River. We also passed by Einstein's House (he lived in Bern for a time), the famous Clock Tower, and a bizarre fountain of a man devouring children - very strange, but I guess it's a famous thing.

The Capital Building
(and the view from it)

Quite the creepy fountain, huh?

The highlight, however, was definitely the bear pit. The bear has long-served as the symbol of Bern, and bears have been kept in the Bärengraben, or "bear pit," there since the 1500s. Today there are currently 10 living there, in what basically amounts to a small zoo.

Snuggling with the bear statue

Well, that's all for the schoolweek. I'll post updates on the weekend later, but I'm exhausted for now. Here's a little teaser though: there'll be mountain-climbing, international travel, and more chocolate (of course) in the next post!

Internships and la Vie Genevoise

Another week down! I can't believe that I've almost been here month - it feels both incredibly long and incredibly short.

Schoolwork is becoming more and more intense as time goes on. The research questions for our big Independent Study Projects (ISP) were due last weekend and I am officially studying "barriers to access to health care for migrants in Switzerland." Woohoo!

I also secured an internship last week at the International Centre for Migration Health and Development (ICMHD) in Geneva, which will hopefully help me with this project. The director, Dr. Carballo, is one of those rare people who just radiates intelligence - you can hear it just in the way he speaks. But at the same time, he radiates such humility and compassion. He's wonderful to talk with and he listens to you like you're the only person in the room. I'm going to ask him to be my ISP Advisor for the semester and if you couldn't tell, I'm pretty excited about getting started.

The center itself is also a great work environment. There's a bunch of post-grad interns from all over the globe working there as well. The girls from the UK are really sweet and always want to brew you tea. I think I can live with that for a few months.

This upcoming week, I'll be helping with one of their current projects: Children Left Behind. It's a study researching what happens to the children of migrants left behind in their home countries, while the parents leave to seek job opportunities in Europe and elsewhere. The point is to discover what happens to these kids, left with grandparents and friends to be raised: do they complete their educations? Are they at higher risks for substance abuse, etc? This particular study is focusing on Southeast Asian countries (Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the Philippines).

Enough with the shop talk though, I've nerd-ed out about my studies enough for one post.
You'd probably all rather hear about weekend trips and adventures!

This weekend I decided to stay local (especially after splurging on Rome last weekend) and do some cool things in Geneva. The annual Geneva Auto Show was going on, so I popped in to see all kinds of ridiculous luxury cars: Ferrari's, Lamborghini's, Mazzerati's and the like. It sounds funny, but it's actually not uncommon to see fancy sports cars like that along the streets of Geneva any old day! Regardless, the exhibition was really extensive, although I felt like I wasn't enough of a car aficionado to truly appreciate it all.

On Friday I also reunited with one of my college friends, Jooyeon, who graduated from BC last spring. We used to play violin together, but now she's teaching English in France and interning at the UN in her spare time (what a life, huh?) We grabbed dinner and caught up over coffee at a little bookstore café - très chic, n'est-ce pas? I'm making plans to hopefully visit her in France sometime soon as well.

Saturday, I wandered Geneva all day with some friends. Because my village is 40 minutes away, I'm not always motivated to get out there, but I really should do so more often - there's plenty to do!

We found a bit of warm weather (finally) in the greenhouses at the Geneva "Jardin Botanique."

Best of all, the sun actually made an appearance this weekend! The fog from the lake always makes it really dreary and overcast, especially at this time of year, so sunshine was quite a treat. 

For those that don't know, that's a 140 meter fountain shooting upward in the distance. My friends and I almost stood under it this weekend - we were soaked but it was awesome!

Sunday was quiet and rainy, but that didn't stop my host-mom and I from taking a two-and-a-half hour walk down the mountain where I live to eat dinner at her father's house in town. Even in the dreary weather, it was so beautiful - plus, I was able to keep up a conversation in French for almost three hours!

Here's a photo of my view on the way down, walking by all the vineyards.

All in all, it was a very laid-back weekend. It was nice to take it easy - especially because from here on out, I'm on a bit of a traveling spree! Until next time, mes amis.


     

A Healthy Dose of Insanity

This week, my French class took a field trip to the Musée d'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. It's an exhibit of "outsider art," meaning artwork created outside the boundaries of normal culture. Usually the artists are mentally ill, prisoners, or children. Because these "artists" exist outside mainstream ideas of what is fashionable or acceptable, they supposedly have the greatest level of creativity, at least according to l'art brut enthusiasts.

The exhibit was breath-taking, but also somewhat disturbing. It's interesting to see how artists straddle the line between genius and madness. Here's a few highlights (photography wasn't allowed inside the exhibit so some of these pictures I found online):

Pascal Desir Maisonneuve used tropical seashells to make portraits mocking famous politicians and monarchs (the one shown above is Queen Victoria)

Emile Ratier, although blind, made mobile sculptures animated by cranks and other resonant mechanisms. The noises, the grating, and the grinding were the only way he could determine if his contraptions worked (since he couldn't see them). 

Nek Chand created a 40 acre sculpture garden out of waste products, called the Rock Garden, in India. 

Aloise Corbaz, a Swiss schizophrenic, was a governess in the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II. She became obsessed with him and much of her work features women romancing royal figures. 

Her work also demonstrates "horror vacui" - or the fear of empty spaces common among art by the mentally ill. In her work, every blank space on the canvas is covered. 

Morton Bartlett, a Boston-based freelance photographer and graphic designer, had a secret hobby of creating and photographing intricately carved, lifelike plastic dolls. He would spend months bringing a doll's facial expressions to life and up to a year modeling, casting, and painting each part. The dolls weren't discovered until after his death.

Sorry if this was a bit of a creepy post... but it was just so fascinating. I did edit down the artists I chose to write about (some were much more... provocative than those I've described). I promise I'll follow this up with a more light-hearted blog update soon!

Roman Holiday

Ciao, friends!
I highly recommend you listen to this song while reading this post, since it (along with the Lizzie McGuire Movie album) was pretty much the soundtrack to my weekend in Rome!

For those of you who don't know the background behind this trip: the University Chorale of Boston College, of which I am a member, goes on tour abroad every year for spring break. Once every four years, that trip is to Rome and the group gets to perform everywhere - even at St. Peter's Basillica for Mass! It's a pretty big deal.

Here's the group this year, standing in front of the Vatican

Because I'm abroad, I unfortunately couldn't join in the actual performances. But plenty of chorale-rs studying in Europe meet up with the group during their stay in Rome. And I have to say, there's nothing like reuniting with 100 of your closest friends in a foreign city!

So, after class on Friday afternoon, I scooted off to Geneva airport, took an hour and a half plane ride (thank you EasyJet) and landed at 6pm in Roma. It was a little strange planning, packing, and traveling completely alone, but it worked out pretty well. I only got lost in the narrow sidestreets of Rome once - which is quite a feat given my awful sense of direction!

The chorale wasn't arriving until Saturday morning, so I had coordinated with one of my best friends from high school, Rebecca, to meet up in Rome too. She's studying abroad in Siena, Italy for the semester and she took a train into the city with a friend from her program. So many reunions in one weekend!

Anyways, we met up at our hostel on Friday night and then grabbed our first real Italian meal: bruschetta and pasta, of course.

Then we took a little night tour of the city, stopping at the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain. It was like a re-enactment of the summer trip Rebecca and I had both taken when we were sophomores at Wakefield High School - all of the same sites, in the same city, with the very same person! It was very surreal.

Oh, and of course, we stopped for gelato while we were exploring. Because it wouldn't have been an official first day in Italy without ice cream.

View from the Spanish Steps

High school reunions at the Trevi Fountain!

So much gelato!

After resting up at our hostel, we embarked on an action-packed Saturday of sight-seeing. From 9am to 5pm, we traversed the whole city. In the morning alone, we managed to cram in: the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, St. Ivo, a museum of Leonardo daVinci's inventions, Piazza Farnese, and an enormous open-air market.

St. Ivo

The Pantheon

The Tiber River

Oh, and I found a nice tall Italian boyfriend as well

We took a brief pizza pit-stop for lunch, and then hit the Vatican. It was the day before cardinals started to arrive for conclave (the meeting in which the College of Cardinals selects the new Pope) so it was a crazy time to be there! But St. Peter's Basilica was as beautiful as I remembered, and the brief time we spent there was hardly enough.

St. Peter's Basilica

I even found some of my Swiss brethren (the Swiss Guard) to hang out with

Rebecca and her friend left to return to Siena once we'd finished touring for the day. And, after dropping them off at the train station, I finally caught up with my chorale friends! I don't think I've ever hugged so many people in one sitting and it was amazing. That night, we sang Tollite - the chorale's anthem - outside the hotel to celebrate our arrival and I felt immediately at home. It was like I had never left BC.

As for sleeping arrangements, I mooched off three of my wonderful friends - Marissa, Alessa, and Olivia - who generously let me crash in their hotel room.

The next morning, after smuggling a few croissants out of the complimentary breakfast (hey, it's expensive living abroad!), I joined the giant chorale entourage for a tour of the Roman Forum and Coliseum. It was beautiful, sunny, and 60 degrees - such a nice change of pace from Switzerland! And I couldn't have asked for a better group to go with. 

We even did an impromptu performance outside the Coliseum, which drew quite a large crowd and a lot of compliments. The chorale was scheduled to perform later that day at St. Peter's Basilica, but I knew I wouldn't be able to go because I had a Sunday night flight to catch and classes on Monday. I was really disappointed, but having this one special performance - at the Coliseum of all places too! - made up for all of it.

Unfortunately, after the morning's adventures, it was time for me to depart. My 48 hours in Rome were a dream come true and it was so hard to leave. The city is great, but really it was the people that made this trip special for me. I know that I'll see them all back in the States, but I miss them already!

Now before I get too sappy, I better sign off.
Don't worry though, Switzerland is still wonderful and I'll have more exciting adventures to post about here soon. À tout!