End of the First Week!

My next two days at work were pretty uneventful. I get the feeling they don't have too much for me to do and since there's a big conference of Soroptimist leaders next week in Palarmo, no one has that much time for me, which is fine for me this week since I just used the time to get to know the organization better. I further proofread the website for little English mistakes and then began looking for topics for the newsletter. It was a pretty vague assignment but pretty interesting so far. Like did you know that in Libya's new government so far only two women have been incorporated, despite the fact that women were a driving force in the revolution? Even more interesting is that one of the women offered a position was an Arabic professor at Michigan!

We have coffee breaks around 10:30 and eat lunch together in the park--it's perfect. It feels so cozy! The only thing is, I didn't know Swiss keyboards were different than ones in the States! So far I haven't been able to find the ! key and the y and z key are switched so I end up with a lot of typos.

Anyway, Thursday night I went out to dinner with Emily and a bunch of her friends that also work at the UN. It was really fun--worth waiting until 8:30 for dinner. We went to a pseudo Mexican place called Ole Ole near the train station. I say pseudo because it wasn't quite right. Like the fajitas were definitely more curry intensive than spicy. I had goat cheese salad, tapas and chardonnay. It was very good, but of course expensive. It was worth it to hang out and feel like I had friends though. I had a lot of fun talking to Emily and her coworkers about what the UN is really like. In my head it was too big and too contentious of an organization for less than perfect people to be there. From their stories, it didn't seem like I was completely off, but I had definitely underestimated the number of unsavory people in the UN system. I guess racism and gender discrimination are pretty common in the UN. I guess it's made me think that I would much rather work at an NGO than in the UN. But there's a lot of time before that gets decided.

Friday me and a friend from the hostel went out for Vietnamese food. It was really good! My pork buns were just perfect and we split egg rolls and noodles too. It was a good start to the weekend. Geneva has a lot of kebab places but also a lot of Lebanese and Thai too. Tons of ethnic food, which is just what I like!

I had to change hostels this morning until Thursday. L'Auberge de Jeunesse only allows people to stay for 6 nights--kind of a bummer but that's probably the longest you can stay there and still be sane. I opted for one kind of a lot farther away, but much cheaper. It's actually in France, which sounds insane, but Geneva is close to France--less than an hour. It's gorgeous here so I'm definitely happy with this choice. There are no good pictures on google but if there were, I'd post them. Also, food is way cheaper. I can eat good food without wincing at every bite I take! It should be fun for 5 days to just see somewhere so close to Geneva, but so different. Plus I get to practice my French more. A lot of people in Geneva speak English and are really quick to switch to English the second I falter in French. It's nice when I'm doing something important like buying an all access train pass, but I could do things like order coffee in French if they'd only let me!

Jokes. Found a picture:

Gorgeous.

I'm off to have a lazy weekend and work on my tan before I start my first full week of work on Monday! I'm excited to catch up on some reading! Hopefully I live through the "rapture."