The first night walking in the park around our new apartment, we saw some mice go scurrying by. Normally, this would bother me a little bit, but they were kind of small, and as far as park-mice go, on the cuter end of the spectrum (the rats in Baltimore could probably eat us, so mice are no comparison). And in true European fashion, one even had a giant piece of cheese in it’s mouth as it was running across the path! Soph said she thought she saw it wearing a beret, but I think she was just being silly. You never know, though.
So – regarding our new apartment – it rules. It’s a duplex on the
top two floors of a building in Plainpalais (one of the fun parts of Geneva). 3 bedrooms, has a nice balcony with mountain views, a great upstairs with lots of space, large kitchen, spiral staircase separating the floors; easily the coolest place we saw, and I’m completely shocked we got it, what with the way the Geneva housing market is (not so much a housing “market”, as a housing “crisis”). So we’ll have plenty of space for visitors in the future. More importantly, we’ll also have plenty of space for parties! And as Sophia has quickly taken to becoming the party-organizer for a measurable portion of the Geneva expat community, we’ll probably get a lot of use out of the floor space. The last point I need to make is that I’m only a short, eight-minute walk to work; the sweetness of that statement oozes from my fingers as I type.
So – regarding our new apartment – it rules. It’s a duplex on the
top two floors of a building in Plainpalais (one of the fun parts of Geneva). 3 bedrooms, has a nice balcony with mountain views, a great upstairs with lots of space, large kitchen, spiral staircase separating the floors; easily the coolest place we saw, and I’m completely shocked we got it, what with the way the Geneva housing market is (not so much a housing “market”, as a housing “crisis”). So we’ll have plenty of space for visitors in the future. More importantly, we’ll also have plenty of space for parties! And as Sophia has quickly taken to becoming the party-organizer for a measurable portion of the Geneva expat community, we’ll probably get a lot of use out of the floor space. The last point I need to make is that I’m only a short, eight-minute walk to work; the sweetness of that statement oozes from my fingers as I type. Up until now, we hadn’t really done any true shopping since our arrival. Therefore on Saturday, we went out to what is considered a mall, and “got a little crazy”. Ahh, shopping. It really is both an art and a science when done correctly. Among the items we needed to buy were: A) clothes B) adapters (electricity plugs) C) an ironing board D) a microwave E) groceries. That being said, you know that feeling when you’re arriving home from the store, and you don’t really want to get out of the car yet because you know you have to bring in about 15 bags of food and drinks, and if there’s a flight of stairs involved it’s just a pain to make more than one trip, so you try to carry it all at once and the handles on the plastic bags start to dig in because there’s too much weight, but that’s still better than going back out to the car because you just want to sit down again? Well, after three hours of shopping and completing most of our purchases, a feeling very similar to that set in, except instead of just lugging it from the car to the kitchen, we had to somehow get everything on a bus, then after about 10 minutes transfer to a tram, complete a five-minute walk, and then ascend a couple flights of stairs. To me, I felt a serious lack of motivation and dread. Sophia, however, had her mind on our sofa that had newly arrived, so she cared only about the fact that within an hour she would be laying on it. Further proof it’s the little things that matter...
Anyway, we bought some pancetta, grated some parmesan cheese, and had a nice little dinner on our balcony as the sun set above us, turning the sky a pinkish-purple with the mountains in the background. The only thing we could think to disagree about was whether or not the snow-capped mountain far in the distance was Mont Blanc or not, but some things are better left unresolved.
