Well, yodel-odel-ay-hee-hoo from Switzerland! I got to Geneva on Thursday evening (three days ago), and so far I’m having a blast. A quiet, peaceful, relaxing blast, but a blast nevertheless. I love doing little domestic things. I love going shopping for orange juice and pasta. I love looking at the foreign brands of shampoo and hot chocolate and yoghurt. I love walking up to my local little café to stand at the bar and drink an espresso – something I never do at home. The ability to diverge from my usual routine and emerge myself in the local vie quotidienne is so cool! It’s a freedom that I really cherish.
The family I’m staying with here is brilliant. For starters, it’s a family. I was expecting to be renting a room in a grumpy person’s flat, but it’s not like that at all. I feel so comfortable and welcome here, and it has been made abundantly clear to me that while I’m here I’m to act as though I’m part of the family. It’s really lovely. I’m sleeping on a mezzanine sort of thing but the bed is SO comfy that I’ve taken to describing it as sleeping on a cloud of singing angels. But that was mainly to irritate Aedan who spent his first night in a remote hippie commune in the forest, surrounded by prolific snorers and sleeping on a bed that broke three times during the night, causing him to clunk his head on the wall the first two times, and fall clear onto the floor the third time. Haha. The poor bugger. But as happens so often with these things, it’s already just a funny story.
Geneva seems so far removed from the Switzerland of Heidi and cuckoo clocks and chalets, until you squint a little bit and look into the distance, and remember that the whole city is surrounded by improbably high snow-capped mountains. The town is quite cute, and there are shops selling expensive watches, cuckoo clocks and Swiss army knives all over the place. I might get in trouble for saying this, but the place is remarkably like France. I can’t really explain how – it’s just the vibe...
We’re being briefed by the Australian Permanent Mission on Tuesday, and we start meeting delegates from the other countries on Wednesday. It looks like the Commission will start Monday week, and may even run for the full 6 weeks! It will be so funny if after all this to-ing and fro-ing everything just goes to plan. However in all the media reports, people are referring to the CHR as “the discredited United Nations Human Rights Commission” which doesn’t bode well…! Oh well. We shall see.
Anyway I’m going to go and read some more. I’m reading David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s book ‘Dark Victory’ – it’s a book about every tiny strategic move and the wheeling and dealing surrounding the Tampa, and leading through to the Howard government’s unlikely election victory 10 weeks later. It’s quite an amazing book – if you’re interested you should get your grubby mitts on it. You don’t have to be a lawyer or a political scientist to read it – it reads fairly easily and rather like a political thriller. Lots of suspense and antics on the high seas. The worst part of it is that it’s a true story…! Read more here : http://www.allenandunwin.com/Shopping/ProductDetails.aspx?ISBN=1741144477
See you later!
Jess x
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