The big update (SF-Paris-Geneva)

A massive update of my chronicling my--Humble Beginnings in Geneva

The short of it: After a whirlwind move out of SF, a beautiful reunion with mom and the boys, I rush off to Geneva.

Friday: June 22, 2007
Finale in SF
Irene takes her final exam and finishes the first year of medical school at UCSF. It’s been a whirlwind year, and I always enjoyed it. Although I must say the rushedness of the last week made me quite unhappy.

I don’t want to dwell on the problems of the final days, but I do want to learn lessons from these trials. Perhaps a list will suffice, just to serve as a reminder to myself.

• Studying for the final – Irene is majorly behind
• Wrapping up plans to clean the apartment
• Final class activities: snacks & bagels
• Insecurities about friends
• Preparations for going to Europe – essentially none!
• Vascillating over whether to get an ISIC student card and Eurail pass. – In retrospect I’m glad I didn’t yet fall for these tourist traps!
• Moving! Definitely was not ready to do it…and it took me way longer than expected. Thank God I had help from my uncle, eastbay kids, elainers and debbie’s boxes.
• Dad does not come along for the trip. This was a huge disappointment, but at least I had a ride to the airport. I intend to go on a vacation with him using his flight credit!

I also fit in a final day of settlers with the Sonrise/Cupertino crew. Fun as always. I am gonna miss this group.

Sunday: June 24, 2007
The flight
Daddy drops me off at SFO at 5:30 am and I’m off for a 6-hour layover in Newark, NJ. It actually is not unpleasant. I am greeted by Au Bon Pain, the café chain of the east coast that the family enjoyed on our east coast trip more than 5 years ago. The bread is still delicious there. :) Healthy food makes me happy. I have both lunch and dinner there. I spend the interim shopping the Westfield shopping in the airport and reading Rick Steve’s Europe book in a Borders. America is good.

The continental flight sucks. Food is subpar and tiny, movies are old and suck, and the flight attendants are none too nice. There is an interesting Jewish family sitting in front of me. The dad appears young, but he’s got 4 kids! He apparently teaches part of a religion course taught at UC Berkeley, and I apparently look very familiar to him. Haha…too bad I never took his class. I think it would have been really interesting. He’s a rabbi in Oakland who trained at a rabbinic school on the east. He seems to be raising very intelligent, well-behaved children. (They played an animal naming game for some of the flight, and I joined in.)

All the stress of the past week must have caught up to me. I slept for most of the flight. Amazing! And quite a mercy as well.

Monday: June 25, 2007
Arrival in Paris
I arrive at CDG at 10 am. I navigate past customs and take the train into the main city without too much trouble. Then the panic sets in. I realize the Gare du Nord is not a great stop for getting to the hotel with mom, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get a ticket from the machines. A middle-aged, balding man offers to help me, but I am suspicious and uneasy of pickpockets since I have all my luggage. Why would a man be just waiting around at a train station? It turns out he was waiting for his wife. Lol. Then another kind man sees my distress with the ticketing machine and just gives me his ticket and sends me on my way. I marvel at the kindness of the French!

I make it okay on the metro (which is very similar to Seoul’s subway). Another nice woman points me to the escalators to save me from lugging my bags upstairs. As I break onto the street, I am astounded to find the hotel is smack in front of the metro stop! Wow…does mom know how to pick ‘em or what? I enter into the hotel and a gentleman with a French accent greets me. Step aside man, my MOM is here. We are reunited, and my heart bursts with joy!!!

I find the room, put down my bags, rough up the boys and we head out for lunch. We buy baguette sandwiches (a staple of the Paris visit) and head to the War Museum and Napolean’s Tomb. Talk about hitting the ground running.

The War Museum is not my favorite, but really seems to intrigue Noah and Norman. Just goes to show how much I am not a boy.

Seine river tour









Versailles really put into context the luxurious grandeur of Louis XIV’s reign. You see it in movies, you read about it back in high school, but finally I saw it!
La Tour Eiffel – freezing on a windy night to ride an elevator up and then ride it back down. But what can one do when it is the quintessential thing to do in Paris?
Louvre – we lost Norman! Mona Lisa and all the other paintings were pretty awesome. I’m impressed at how much my mom knows about art. Really…I need to respect that woman for how intelligent she is. She knows way more than me…and she knows all eras too. She knew everything from the Renaissance works at the Louvre to the modern works at the Pompidou center.
Jardin des Tuileries
Orsay Museum
L’arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysees

Picasso – saw some cool sculptures I never knew he did. More kids learning art here as well.


Pompidou – by this time I’m pooped and all “art museum-ed” out. Mom is a trooper and diligently chronicling the paintings she’s seen.

Upon arriving in France, I had to learn to let go and relax. After being so tense for an extended period of time, it was quite nice to unwind. It was also really comforting to be with family. Although I will say my brothers pestered my mom and me to no end. Mom and I got to do some of the best shopping in my life, but we had to fight to do it. It was definitely cut short and sour because those two adolescent humbugs.

Impressions of France: it truly is an art center. With its wealth of art (many stolen from other nations and peoples) the life of the city seems infused with an artsyness. At every museum there were groups of school children learning about the art from detailed instruction or involved activities. (Unlike the free for all that most American field trips tend to be.) The way people dress, eat, shop, live is all aesthetically pleasing. Mom and I reflect on how much this city reminds us of Ingee. Even at such a young age, she was an artist. I would have loved to have seen this city with her. Mom fancied that we would have sent Ingee for schooling here because the rich art education would have been perfect for her.

Friday: June 29, 2007
Au revoir to the family
I am sad to see them leave. Suddenly I am on my own, and I realize that I have not made a single plan as to what to do now. Do I stay in Paris with my things? The thought of lugging around my bags and finding and expensive hotel makes me shudder. I decide to make a break for Geneva and take the weekend easy.
Silly me. I have nowhere to stay once I get to Geneva! But I am counting on the English speaking population to get me there. I am also promising myself time to go shopping once my things are put away in Geneva. (This was wrong! There is no Comptoir des Cotonniers in Swizterland. Mon dieu!)

Anyway, first things first. I plan to buy a train ticket to Geneva and spend extra time if possible shopping in Paris. Boy was I wrong. I get to the gare station, and there is a long line for tickets. After debating between a railpass and just a one-way, I secure my ticket to Geneva since railpasses are not sold at the station. I then try to find the correct track to wait at when I find that I am at the wrong station! Trains bound for Geneva leave from Gare de Lyon not Gare de l’Est. Good thing I have the time to get there!

I make it to the station and get on the train with, what else, a Korean tourist group. One of the young girls is so sweet as to help me with my luggage. I am stressed from the lack of travel plans and decide to worry about housing in Geneva when I get there.

I sleep on almost the entire 4 hour trip, and am slightly taken aback by my arrival in Geneva. It’s all very green and all very rural. I guess I really have left Paris. In fact, if Paris reminded me of Seoul, Geneva reminds me of Incheon or some other suburb of Korea. I don’t find it particularly clean and it’s not very eye-catching. I get the sinking feeling that the shopping will not be as good…nor will the food.

That aside, it’s still all in French! What happened to the internationalism of it all?!?! I bungle around the gare station figuring out what I need to do. After letting a telephone machine eat 5 swiss franks (about $4.50), I am out of money for a pay phone. Thankfully the man in the cell phone store lets me use the house phone to call my foyer. The sister at the foyer was not expecting me until Monday, but by some miracle my room is open. I immediately head over there, and am pleased to find that it is an easy bus ride. Unfortunately the maps don’t label all the streets, and my map does not show me the foyer street. This will be a problem for the rest of the weekend.

The foyer is ghetto and in a ghetto neighborhood, but I am too desperate for housing to know or care. It is run by a group of nuns, a few of whom speak English. Sister Eliza calls me “my dear” in soothing tones, and I am reassured that all will be okay. Once again I’m reminded of Korea because I’m back in a ghetto dorm. But it’s all good baby…cuz I get internet! Being connected to the world is the most comforting feeling. I put out some feelers to walk around the neighborhood, but I’m kind of creeped out by the approaching evening. I buy some Evian water (we are very near the source) and head home for a dinner of nutrition bars I bought at Cupertino Whole Foods. (These have been instrumental on my trip so far.) I wrap up the night on the web…basking in my connectedness with the world.

Saturday: June 30, 2007
Strike out on my own
Things on the to do list today:
Get money from a bank
Go to tourism office – for a better map
Go grocery shopping
Tour Geneva – see the flower clock and water jet fountain thingy
Go running



Things done:
Everything except going running

The Geneva tourism thing was thoroughly underwhelming. Though now that I’m looking at pictures, the lake seems beautifully pristine. The watches in all the stores are indeed nice and expensive, but it’s all about presentation my dears. When it’s line after line of unceremonious window displays, the watches don’t seem special at all. If you’re really Phillippe Patek or Baume and Mercier, show me!!! It just seemed like a bunch of tourist trap shops mixed in with totally drab stores of shoes etc. Oh…and the drug stores? For some reason there is no such thing as inexpensive lotion in Europe.

Who knew I could spend such a long time in the grocery store? I must have spent 20 minutes looking for soap and another 20 looking for nonfat yogurt or cottage cheese. It was an unsuccessful quest. Freaking-a…I do not understand how the Europeans can only eat full-fat everything, pastries for breakfast, blah blah. I am seriously desperate for some good old Californian produce. The food is rich and flavorful here to be sure, even the produce. There was a farmers market-type stand in the middle of the shopping district today. The fruit was really expensive, but I bought a basket of raspberries for around $4. They were the sweetest most delicious raspberries I’ve ever had!!! But I am going out of my mind with guilt at what the saturated fat products will do to my arteries. I think I spent at least 1 hour online today looking up where I can get health foods in Geneva. So far my strategy is to stock of up fruits at the grocery and drink it with soymilk. I found nonfat milk, but I know my lactose intolerance will have none of that. My purchase of full fat yogurt this morning was really tasty though.