taking fire

Geneva isn’t nearly well enough documented for the tourist. But it’s ace.

Start from the very beginning:

My good friend Lauren seems to have crammed in a ridiculous amount of life experience for her comparatively few years on the planet. Last year before going to university, she moved down to Edinburgh to au pair for an affluent Anglo-american-arabic family who lived on Gt. King St. So after a while, she was pretty much adopted by them and spent a lovely year toning her gluteus by pushing prams up and down that big hill in the New Town and learning how to make stuff with chick peas taste nice. Jolly good. Except a few months ago said family decided to up sticks and move to a place called Lucerne, which is sort of north of the centre of lovely Switzerland. Lauren has had a zillion weeks off this summer, so after a packed schedule of fabulous family holidays and social engagements lasting from june-August, she decided to go visit familie zwei who asked her to stay til uni starts in Edinburgh. Now the little shit has a fabulous suntan and about 10,000 air miles under her belt. I on the other hand, hadn’t left the office since March and had aged about 30 years. Time for some sunshine. We decided to meet up in Geneva as Lucerne is small and she’d already seen it and got bored.

Boring stuff/amazing stuff/dangerous stuff/languages

Fly EasyJet from Edinburgh – They make you queue for miles, taking a pee is extra, the hosties look like they’ve been tangoed, but they fly direct from here and you’re there in a jiffy.

Them are mountains – Go during the day and you fly over the alps/Mont blanc. I’d never (consciously) done that before and it was spectacular. The way the serrated ranges partition the cloud into its hundred misty soup bowls was proper nice and made me think of food (£5.10)

Trams will kill you – We met up late at night and went out. We drank fizzy at the hotel. We staggered to the nearest cocktail bar. There’s a reason why something travelling at speed, emitting a monotone past an immediately placed stationary object sounds like a reverse crescendo of varying tones, I saw it on Brainiac, and it has a name but i’ve forgotten it. Lets call it Tony. Tony is fucking TERRIFYING. Lauren yanked me out of the way, I did a cartwheel in the air, lost both my shoes and landed on my head. I now have many scabs on elbows and knees. Pay attention or die, fool.

Don’t try and speak French if you’re a golly – Genevans are polite, lovely people. But much like the other French speaking places i’ve visited, they wince if nouns and numbers are all you got. They’re not going to smile and correct your l’s le’s and lezzies. They’re going to sneer and slowly answer you back in better English than your own, like you’re a gleck.

Cool stuff:

Patek Phillipe museum – Patek are pretty much the best widely known luxury arm-clock maker in the world. Their watches start off at about eight grand and go right up into hundreds of thousands of pounds for the ones that have the most ‘complications’ – ie, most difficult to make. Notably, their pieces don’t go up in price respective to the amount of gold and diamonds they cram on. (unlike Rolex whose ‘expensive’ watches are for chavs.) H&I in Ed sold a Patek tourbillion to someone last year for £150,000, and it didn’t look noticeably different to one at a tenth of the price. Anyhuu, the museum is a horologistic heaven of ticks and tocks and springs and cogs, detailing their history from the 1700′s up until present day. Amazing. I loved it.