Geneva!

Geneva!

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Skiing in Verbier!

So, I decided to give myself a break from studying to blog. This weekend, I went to Verbier, which is a town in the Swiss Alps that comes alive during the winter months. It is quite a fancy place with a mixture of great skiing and great nightlife. (Kate Middleton and Prince William have stayed there.)

I was lucky enough to have met a good friend here, Courtney, who has a chalet up in Verbier and kindly invited us to join her for the weekend. Urvi, Courtney, Courtney's cat, and I headed up on the Saint Bernard Express (yes, that is the name of the train!) to Verbier early Friday.  We arrived before noon, had a nice lunch of grilled cheese, and headed to the slopes!

I cautiously grabbed my skis and went onto the slopes- going from East Coast skiing to the Alps is quite a big jump. The conditions were great, and I got right up on my skis and luckily it came back pretty easily to me.  I was able to do the medium pistes and one black diamond! It was very exciting! Courtney also was a great help and we went "off piste," which is when you go off the trail. Luckily there has been tons of snow already, so there was lot of powder! Throughout the mountain, there are tons of places where you can stop and have lunch on your way down. It was so interesting to see people head up the mountain just to have lunch and some drinks!

After a weekend skiing in the Swiss Alps, I have asked myself, "Can I ski on the east coast again?" We will see, but I loved my experience in the Swiss Alps!

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Family Visitors

So, I am taking a quick break in studying to update you on my second group of visitors to come through Geneva, my parents! Being real American patriots that they are, they decided to head to Switzerland for their Thanksgiving Holiday (and to celebrate their 32nd wedding anniversary)! Even though it was their first Thanksgiving without turkey (which is miraculously hard to find in Switzerland, or really expensive), I think they truly enjoyed Switzerland as they traveled through Geneva, Lausanne, Luzern, and Zurich all in 5 days! (I kept them busy.)

Even though we did have some zut alors that led us running around Zurich because of a bad map, we nonetheless had an amazing time. They stayed in Geneva for 2 days while I was finishing up some work, where they enjoyed fondue and the Patek Phillipe watch museum. I think it always interesting to get people's opinions on Geneva, and they were impressed by the transportation system and the parking garages throughout the city that tell you how many spots are in each garage. I think they want to bring American politicians here to bring them back to the US!

We then traveled to Luzern, which is a beautiful city nestled in between the Alps (picture above). We came in late at night and woke up the next morning with sheer delight to see the sun and the beautiful mountains! We then headed on over to Zurich so they could see the largest city in Switzerland (picture to the right). We went to the Kunsthaus Zurich (the art museum), where we saw a Picasso exhibition based off of Picasso's exhibition in 1932 that was held in Zurich. We finished with a nice dinner to celebrate their anniversary (that I was invited to!) and headed back to Luzern.

It was a whirlwind trip, and it was great to see them. They left in the just the nick of time as Geneva and Europe in general got a huge snow storm (the largest one in Geneva in 20 years!). It was interesting to see another city that can't deal with snow! Felt just like home in Washington! I will try to update before I am on my way home, but there is a lot of school work to be in the 15 days before I hop on a plane back to the Good Old USA!