Settling In: Finally Feeling Like a Natural Part of Geneva

This is the first week we're I've started to feel comfortable, probably because my routine (or lack thereof) is now more or less in place. I feel like I have a lot more room to breathe, and almost like I'm having too much fun and that there must be some sort of giant catch to being here! I have Fridays off, so I have three day weekends, and Monday and Tuesday I just have internship (where I'm working on translating a web page into English). I don't have very much homework to do right now, which feels so bizarre to me. I'm so used to picking one night on the weekend to have fun and doing homework the rest of the weekend, dividing each day into precise amounts of time to spend on assignments to make sure everything gets done before the weekend is over. Now I'm dancing on the weekend, going to shows, walking in the park, taking train rides...I don't even know who I am anymore!

I've been hanging out with a small group of Smith students that live in my dorm, and we have been working very successfully at making meals together and hanging out and watching TV shows and drinking wine and tea. The culture here largely revolves around going out to bars--I've gone to them a lot with the students in my group, but decided I really don't like the ones we've gone to so far. Most of them are dark and loud and crowded and I don't understand how going to a bar like this is cool. I also don't understand why you would even want to meet someone that goes such bars anyway. I do, however, enjoy spending time with my friends no matter what they are doing, and I've found that I enjoy having a glass of wine with mes amies while we talk and watch TV shows, but that's the extent of alcohol's influence over me. It's so strange to see students drinking in the common rooms, etc, since I'm so used to America's culture and the idea of alcohol in public spaces as a very very bad thing. But here, alcohol isn't a big deal, and I really like that.

Emily and Marie made a yummy Salade Niçoise!

I've also met a bunch of cool international students, but I feel like I always meet them for one get together and then they are out of my life! I want to work harder to make closer friends with some international students.

Classes this past week (which I only have on Wednesdays and Thursdays) were pleasant. In my Toni Morrison class we are learning a lot about the history of slavery and of spirituals, and it's interesting to see all of the students' responses to this history, but at the same time it's also hard for me to know how much or how little I should contribute to class discussion, as I know a lot about the history of slavery and also the history of jazz. I hope that I am helping to make the class more interesting culturally for the other students and the teacher and not appearing to be a stupid American.

I feel like I'm doing kind of an African studies semester + music and its influence over the other arts semester. In my cinéma course in French, the focus is on rhythm and emotion in cinéma, so we spend a lot of time learning about the soundtrack of films and the use of music in films in combination with the other film elements. In my Toni Morrison class, we are talking about the use of music in her novels.  It feels like all my classes are making sense together. Also, I like the music class I'm auditing about music and children, although I do find myself sometimes confused with the vocabulary, but it gets easier for me each class. So, in summary, I'm studying my favorite things: children, music, literature, movies, French, and America!

This weekend, a bunch of us took the train to Gruyères, a place in the countryside about a three hour train-ride away where a lot of good cheese is made. I cannot emphasize how much I love riding the train and looking out into the countryside, watching the towns become smaller and smaller as we are farther away from Geneva. I need to hop on a train more often and see more countryside and less city.

In Gruyères, we went to the cheese-making museum, and learned from the voice of a cow named Cherry about the "magic" of how milk is made into cheese. They even gave us little cheese samples to taste the differences of different stages of cheese.

After the museum, we explored Gruyères itself. We walked up the hillside to this little stone village, with the alps in the background, and I felt like it couldn't even be real!

After wandering, we chose a place to eat fondue (but I ordered a salad...) and then took the train home. I loved the feeling of napping on the train with your face warming in the sun, eyelids drinking up the sunshine and somehow the sensation of summer washes over you. 

Yesterday, we made brunch and then went for a walk in the nearby park, which was nice. At night we went to a concert at Victoria Hall with Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff on the program. The whole concert I was thinking about how a person could help a child understand how to appreciate beautiful music like this, and I was thinking about how I am always completely taken aback by the fact that all of this music is just the thoughts of a composer, something that came out of someone's brain. And then I thought about the journey of music from composer to listener, and how it starts out just as thoughts--sporadic bursts of somewhat organized emotion in a composer's consciousness--musical ideas that start as nothing and quickly become everything, then they are transferred to the conductor who is supposed to try to capture these ideas as accurately as he can, and then transfer them to the players who must interpret his words and movements to produce these musical thoughts, and finally, the listener, who should strive to enter the same state where the composer began so that he can be as surprised and pleased by the musical ideas that burst forth as the composer himself was when the ideas first came out of nothing. I'm typing this quickly, so I'm not sure if it's making any sense, but it sounded good in my head at the time.

Alright, well I need to go make lunch and go to my internship!

xoxo

Kay