|
Here's the main thing to understand about the Swiss: They are the most polite people in the world. And considering they are surrounded by the Italians, the Germans, the Austrians, and the French, this is no small feat.
Geneva, where I was, is really not connected to much of the rest of Switzerland as you can see.
One way to know whether people are polite is whether they jaywalk. In Geneva, everyone waits for the "walk" signal which is a green picture of a stick figure walking.
New Yorkers are, to put it as gently as possible, aggressive jaywalkers. Most New Yorkers practice the "If-I-Don't-Make-Eye-Contact-You-Won't-Run-Me-Over" theory of jaywalking. This is also known as the "Peek-a-Boo" concept we learned as small children. If I cover my eyes, you can't see me.
The Swiss wait patiently, even for a bus. When I was walking around the
old section of Geneva there were about five people standing one behind the other - not at the curb,
but next to a building. I asked one of them what they were doing, and I was told - "you blithering idiot
American what do you think we're doing, waiting for a bus?" Which, as it happens, is exactly what they were doing.
This measurement of politeness does not always work. Years ago, just after the collapse of Communism, I was in Budapest and I noticed people didn't jaywalk there, either. But that, I assumed at the time, was not so much politeness as learned behavior: You never knew when a Russian tank might come roaring down the street.
Also, there was very little jaywalking, as I remember, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina during basic training. You never knew when a drunk from the 82nd Airborne might come roaring down the street.
The Delta flight from JFK to Charles de Gaulle was - here's a shock - delayed and so we were late getting into Paris. That meant I missed my connection to Geneva on Air France.
The secret to missing a connection is this: Once you realized you are going to miss your flight, you might just as well relax. Unless you don your blue tights and red cape (or perform some bogus warp factor 10 faster-than-light maneuver) you are not going to be able to make time go in reverse and you might just as well adjust your plans.
Because I am a Delta Platinum flier, I had access to the Air France Business Class lounge which was, to my thinking, way too crowded. Air France should make it harder to gain access to their Business Class lounge so that when people like me want to come in, we will not have to be surrounded by so many French people.
But, that's a discussion for another day.
I DID get to Geneva and went immediately to the annual Bazaar which is run
by the wives of the Ambassadors to the United Nations Office in Geneva. The proceeds go to various international childrens' charities.
As I described in Mullings, this is a two-zoned affair. On one level countries display - for sale - craft items, traditional items, and tourist junk which you might buy at the airport just before leaving Botswana if, in fact you had been to Botswana and had forgotten to buy a little something for the little lady.
The United States had JIF peanut butter, although by the time I got there the shelves had been picked pretty clean and all that was left was Jell-O and Carnation condensed milk.
I toured the exhibit with the US Ambassador to the UN in Geneva and his wife - Kevin and Dorothy Moley.
If being polite is communicable - they've caught it. Ambassador Moley took the time to introduce me to perhaps 10 other Ambassadors who were in attendance.
Mrs. Moley directed me to the US food booth where I had, as I noted previously, a corned beef on rye. Ambassador Moley directed me to the Czech Republic booth where we had an original Budweiser beer.
I might have mention this before, and if so, forgive me. I had a rather lengthy undergraduate career; about seven-and-a-half years.
I spent some period of my day - every day - trying to learn to like beer. Winter. Summer. On academic probation.
Off academic probation (ok, I was never off academic pro). After something over six years of this I realized I didn't like beer and I would probably NEVER like beer.
And I stopped trying.
Many years later in 1989, I was in Prague and someone handed me a beer. I liked it. I thought, perhaps, hormones had changed or taste buds had matured (or deteriorated) and I might like beer.
I tried one when I got back and I hated it again.
The next beer I had was last week. Again it was Czech beer. And again, I liked it.
There are a surprising number of bars in the US in which, if you belly up and ask for a red wine, you are
quite likely to get beaten up before you get back to your hotel. I suspect that peering over the pickled egg
jar and asking the fat bartender with the anchors tattooed on his Popeye-like forearms if he has any Czech
beer on tap would reduce, dramatically, the time between the question and the beating-up ceremony.
The Ambassador and I discussed, briefly, whether we would be sampling the kim-chee at the Korean booth
(and deciding by a very close two-vote margin against), the Ambassador and the Mrs. invited me to visit the residence.
Geneva, even though it is in the southwest corner of Switzerland, is still pretty far north. It is about where Tacoma, Washington is located - latitude-wise.
That being the case, it gets dark pretty early. In mid-December, a scant week ahead of the winter solstice, it began getting dusky at about 3:30 in the afternoon.
Nevertheless, the house is fabulous.
Here is a photo of the front of the house, named Villa Tatiana, as evening was settling in:
And a quick tour:
Here is the main dining room:
And here is a photo of the grand foyer:
The Villa was built by, a cousin of the Tsar Nicholas (I believe his name was Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich) who was on the run having gotten into a spot of trouble in the Motherland - he killed Rasputin.
As it happened, being exiled to Geneva allowed him to escape the Bolsheviks who dispatched the Tsar and all his family shortly afterwards.
The Ambassador and Mrs. Moley invited me to stay for dinner which I was happy to do, never previously having eaten at the same table at which an Ambassador, AND a Grand Duke have dined.
-----
Everyone in Geneva speaks French. Nearly everyone speaks English. This makes the 114th country I have visited where I was the only one who was not multi-lingual. Every year I make a resolution to learn French or Spanish or SOME non-English language.
I make the same resolution regarding learning to play golf.
So far I have learned dBase, and BASIC, but nothing useful in a foreign land.
The hotel I stayed at is called the Hotel Beau-Rivage which means "beautiful shore."
Unfortunately, because December is the middle of the rainy (and foggy) season the hotel should have been named Invisable-Rivage (invisible is spelled with an "a" in French and probably requires some throat-clearing sound in the middle of it).
However, as it is the Christmas season, the Beau-Rivage was decorated to the neuf's.
This is a photo of the hotel lobby looking down from the fifth floor of the atrium. Here's the amusing part of this story: This was as far as the hotel's elevators went. My room was number six-oh-trios.
When I called for a reservation and they told me the room rate in French Francs (which I couldn't compute in my head) but they said it was a special rate and that it overlooked the city. If I wanted a lake view it was about 120 Francs more.
They didn't mention that the special part was there were two flights of stairs to walk up to get to the room once you did the five floors via elevator.
Here was the view from my maisonnette:
Actually the room was quite large and very comfortable. And it wasn't much more than the annual payments on the Mullmobile.
For comparison sake, here is a photo that night from the other side of the building:
Pretty, but not worth $85 per night.
I decided I had been through a lot, and so I went nuit-nuit.
Next: L'escalade!
Click here to return to the Secret Decoder Ring page
|
