how to operate a ceramic hob with touch control
hello. consider this to be arrival pt. 2.
what is a ceramic hob you might ask? the more relevant question is: how else have i demonstrated my incompetency since my arrival? stay tuned.
well… you last heard from me right after a delicious meal of salad, well-seasoned chicken, rice, and swiss strawberries (delicious real non-polyploid-ied strawberries) with gruyère cream and some sort of meringue cookies crumbled on top. i slept like 10 hours in the kuo castle and then got up, threw all of my stuff into my suitcase (remind me why i unpacked…), ate another lovely breakfast of omelets and dark chocolate, and then was taken to the bus station to take a bus to cité bleue — which is on the opposite side of geneva from alex’s apartment in the Champel neighborhood.
i had to transfer buses to get there and alex stayed with me up until I got on the right one: #3 toward Crêts-de-Champel which is conveniently the end of the line, but couldn’t guide me through the entire way because she was headed to Milan for the afternoon to go shopping #casual. obviously, the simple task of putting me on a bus was complicated by the fact that i had no ticket (only free from airport) and since i don’t have a swiss cell plan (although, i do have a new swiss number, for all interested: +41 77 901 63 64) and can’t text 788 and get a ticket charged to the monthly bill, we had to improvise. so at the third stop, alex exited the bus, sprinted towards the kiosk as other people were getting on, and somehow bought me one all in the span of 90 or so seconds in which the bus driver kept closing the door on my hand, but it didn’t matter because she made it. *round of applause for our efforts*
interestingly, as I later learned, the swiss operate on the honor system. unless you get extremely unlucky and the huge security people happen to walk onto your bus (which they do periodically) no one checks your ticket. it’s just assumed that you are a good law-abiding citizen that has bought one because this is a direct democracy and people here aren’t conniving communist cats that try to take advantage of the system. so, did i really need to buy one…
thoughts of ethics aside, everything went pretty well from then on. the bus stop is right in front of my dorm, so i got off, saw the sign, walked inside, met martha and alex (my professors prefer to be called by first names), checked in, promptly went up the wrong elevators and got lost in a different part of the building, spoke spanish for the first time in like two years, came down 10 min later, readjusted, and finally found my dorm room. home sweet home, room 3–25. everyone’s in singles here.
i’ve always known that i’m incompetent with keys, but these swiss keys are seriously something else. legit confound me. first off, you have to hold them upside down to even insert them into the keyhole. second off, sometimes the lock isn’t synced up with the key grooves or whatever and you’re left turning the key around dozens of times without the lock budging. it’s hilarious though, because everyone has the same exact problem. it’s not uncommon to walk down my hall and see someone outside who is on their third try trying to get into their room. my wallmate, aadjtya literally couldn’t get in for like 15 minutes until katarina, a graduate student from ukraine that’s been here a couple of years who is a veteran at opening these locks rescued him.
oh, btw. i met the dukies. it’s honestly been great. i immediately felt like i have a place here. that’s saying a lot, because before i came i was super stressed that it would be hard to make friends or cliquey because most of them came here knowing at least one or two other people on the program and, as a penn student, i am the only odd one out. but all my fears were immediately disproven, which I’m incredibly thankful for. i actually think i’m going to come out of this with more than enough reason to go visit durham next year during like spring break or something.
anyways, i moved in. unpacked. ditzed around a bit in the hallway. and then everyone that was in by noon on saturday (like 12 of us) ventured out into champel to go find food. we stopped at a cafe and ate sandwhiches (ordering was hilarious because like no one knows french except for tahnee who is actually from paris. also, she’s engaged already so some of us have our lives together…), and then hit up two of the grocery stores to find supplies to cook for dinner. study abroad pro-tip: make your own food when you can. especially here, in the most expensive city in the whole world, it’s an absolute necessity that you cook for yourself (and buy your own alc since even shots here cost like $14). we also bought other necessities like laundry detergent. alex had already taken me to aldis suisse to buy soap the day before, so i really only had to focus on buying pasta to make dinner, cereal and milk for breakfast, and peanut butter, nutella, jelly, and bread for lunch and everything else.
basically everyone was dead since they’d just walked off a plane, but since i had come in the day before and already pretty much ~adjusted~ (or so i thought…), i decided to go for a run. alex and martha apparently googled me and noticed that i was a cross country runner, so when i checked in they had given me directions to a nearby park that’s about six blocks away. i figured i should check it out since i hadn’t moved for real in like 52 hours.
there’s a little bit of a backstory here that i just have to share: i got a stress fracture in my femur in january that basically ruined my life (i’m sorry even “complicated” doesn’t do the experience justice)) for the entirety of second semester. literally the night before i flew out, i was finally cleared to run after six months of frustrating immobility and i legit almost cried on my brief 1.5 mile spin around our neighborhood. i’m literally so so so glad that i can run in switzerland and flouncing through this park was absolutely wonderful. i did half mile intervals in the midst of strollers, dog walkers (fyi, no one here keeps their dog on a leash. it’s incredible), and children playing soccer.
i came back to cité, and then aaditja, tahnee, madeline, matt, tyjair and i made gnocchi together in our common kitchen. super simple stuff, boil water, put pasta in, wait, drain, heat up sauce, combine, add olive oil, eat… right? except here’s where the ceramic hob (and my most recent youtube search come in). i’m still not clear on the actual definition of what a “hob” is (and again, german google isn’t really helping me learn what it is either…) but all i know is that i took one look at the flat, lifeless surface that was supposed to be a stove and sort of just started touching all of the buttons i saw to no avail. i couldn’t figure out how to turn the goddamn thing on. and it was super awkward because it was like 10 minutes before everyone else came in to help make dinner. so it’s me, alone, basically palming a stovetop (hobtop???) with a huge pot of water, and nothing happening. i legit googled gorenje to figure out what the hell was going on, watched a tutorial video… still nothing. i was eventually rescued by someone whose name i don’t know because neither of us could communicate beyond gestures (this is when i really start to regret not continuing spanish, not learning french, not learning anything useful really…) but he will forever go down in my memory as my hobstarter and for that i am forever grateful.
so we made pasta, and then katarina came in and gave us the lowdown of how cité works and the clubs we should go to, etc. basically duke is using this facility along with a bunch of other international schools/students (UC Davis is here and we plan on challenging them to a game of volleyball or football sometime soon) because it’s the cheapest housing available in geneva. we all live interspersed. like there’s no “duke only” section or anything like that. one of my neighbors is from duke, the other one is french. it’s cool, because that means you get to meet more people. there’s a common kitchen, common refrigeration room, common bathrooms, common showers. we all share stuff. the only expectation is that whatever you take comes back clean and/or unharmed.
katarina told us about her master’s program in political science and a bit more about the swiss school system. apparently, it’s cheap but hard because the professors owe you nothing. like you aren’t paying to get a degree. you’re paying to learn and then just maybe you’ll get you’re degree on top of that, which is interesting because if you really think about how our college system works… it’s actually nothing like that at all. katarina has one more final to take (in international finance — she said she just might forfeit because apparently you can choose to take things “just for credit” here even if they necessary courses toward getting your degree) before she starts her thesis.
katarina also told us that if we were going to go out, we should check out the village du soir.
i don’t know what i was planning — probably to continue reading my assignments for our first day of class and then go to bed — but my friend from high school, madeline, is doing data analysis for the ATLAS project at CERN this summer, and we decided to meet up at a bar called Scandale that’s inbetween the train station and red light district downtown. so plans of being “responsible” were thrown out the window as i showered, got ready, grabbed my bus pass, and flew out the door. luckily, the stop i needed to get off at was on the #3 line as well.
lmao to the fact that i got there before madeline and was intimidated by the presence of a bouncer (because i still think i look like i’m 15) but eventually i stopped being awkward and walked in. sat down at the bar with carrigan and another girl who is in madeline’s sorority at Harvard. madeline came like 5 minutes later and we all chilled out and enjoyed drinks. the bartender was legit wondrous. straight out of a cologne add and super charming and all that. his friends came by to mess with him as well which was hilarious — let’s just say ice was being thrown everywhere and there was lots of coordinated dancing. behind the bar, there was a screen playing videos and i died because at one point they were playing supersonik electronik, which is this SNL skit of a soviet music video that defined my childhood. OFF BLAST! anyways, drinks, like everything in this city, are hella expensive. like i only spent around 2 francs feeding myself pasta for dinner, but then i went to the bar and bought one mixed drink for like 14. check that disparity. at least i got to have real authentic russian vodka, though.
we stayed in the bar until like 12:30 and then headed to village du soir, which brought another moment of incompetence because yours truly had not brought any form of ID on her beyond a copy of my passport which gets you nowhere. so the guard was like no you cannot come in and then we sulkily dallied for a little bit until he eventually gave in and let me in. another 20 francs lost as an entrance fee.
village du soir is right next to some sort of stadium. kind of out of the way — had to take an uber, which is pretty rare in this city since the bus system is so efficient. the actual premise of the club is that it really is a village. like there are multiple buildings, each playing different music. there’s an outdoor food section with bocce ball (which madeline’s srat sister ended up playing with some randos), grills, and a tiki bar. it’s an awesome setting, but the music was whack. like at one point they went from MIMS to the macarena and i died.
the hilarious thing is that without even trying, i found duke people that had gone out after i did to meet madeline. like all of a sudden i see jake walking towards me with barely a shirt on and i’m like thank you. i am rescued. i have people to go home with. so yes. all in all, was a safe excursion :3
anyways, ’twas a fun night. it ended a lot later than expected because i fell asleep around 3 am but left my phone’s ringer on for alarm purposes — since we were embarking on a tour of geneva on sunday at 10:30 — and then phil messaged me saying he was dying of hunger like half an hour later so i had to feed him because that is my duty as resident mom.
the tour was great! we went around a lot of the places that alex had already taken me, which was awesome because it’s only day four and i already have a pretty good feel for where i am in relation to other things in the city. we went to the train station, took the bus down to the old district, learned about how geneva became an impartial place of international arbitration with the alabama incident during the american civil war, took a ferry across the lake (jet d‘l’eau was on today!!!), saw a monument commemorating luther/calvin/cromwell/and other prominent protestants, and went to a farmer’s market. i also had the best dark chocolate gelato of my life, so it was a good four hours spent.
after the tour, we had a couple of hours before we went out for our fancy dinner — apparently duke pays for one meal a week. so, even though i’m not supposed to go running everyday, i decided to check out the trails along the river rhone with jake. needless to say, we got a bit turned around, noticed we were really close to the french border, and decided we had to cross it because why not? so jake and i ended up wading across a river to touch french soil.
we ended up going a lot lot farther than we expected… all in all, 7 miles when we set off for like 3, maybe 4. we barely made it back in time to shower and get all fancy for dinner at Restaurant Parc du Bastions. it’s really pretty. glass windows and all. sort of looks like an obscenely fancy greenhouse, but with chandeliers and tables instead of plants. the food was delectable and duke actually got us real wine. i’m not a big wine drinker, but i tried both white and red and it wasn’t as gross as it usually is. the red was actually pretty good… perfect for my beef meal. of course so would’ve been any other drink save sparkling water. it’s the only thing about europe that i don’t understand. like why put carbon dioxide in water?? there’s no flavor that can be accentuated by oxygenation. like tahnee’s from paris and her dad owns a merlot vineyard so she was explaining to me the proper way to drink wine in order to maximize flavor, which is by really disgustingly sucking in air after you have the wine in your mouth. honestly, who knows… but water should be still. that’s all i have to say about that.
best part of the three-course meal was, of course, dessert. i mean check out this platter they brought all of us: creme brulee, some sort of cream-based something with berries on top, and a brownie-thing (palamakia for my great foodie descriptions).
i stole tahnee’s brownie thing because the more chocolate, the merrier. also, she has to fit into her wedding dress so i’m helping her right??? after dinner, we all sat around a little awkwardly for a bit because no one wanted to be the first to leave/be rude or anything since the restaurant was open just for us. oh! yeah, in geneva absolutely nothing is open on sundays. it’s a legitimate day of rest. it goes beyond being just a religious thing… especially considering the history of where we are at. still — just another way that europe is better. but eventually we were all sort of like okay. let’s get out of here since no one had finished all the reading we had due today. we skrrrted under the pretense of taking pictures outside.
we reversed course, came back, and then i read for a few hours until midnight when i forfeited. what can i say… jetlag is real. but the good thing about having stayed up until like 4 am the night before was that i was finally exhausted enough to get back on a regular schedule. unfortunately, i still had to wake up at like 6:30 am today to finish martha’s reading on the dynamics of national advantage. i have to keep looking up terms since i know like no econ, but i’m doing alright. i guess that one year of legit reading every printed word in The Economist sort of helped.
we just finished our first day of classes. it’s a three hour long period in which martha starts with her course Topics in Management: International Business and then we have a five minute break before alex comes in and takes it away with The Political Philosophy of Globalization. both are actually really really interesting. like at penn, whenever i had 90 minute classes, i’d die (especially during multivariable), but here it’s different. they are both super engaging teachers, and even though i got reprimanded for eating a banana (apparently alex’s one rule is that you can’t eat bananas in his class… of course it had to be me hahahaha), i can honestly say i’m excited to learn whatever i’m going to learn in both of them. also- really low key, but alex has an article that’s going to be in the NY Times tomorrow, so keep your eyes pealed for Alex Rosenberg’s work!
that’s all for me for right now. i did laundry. was able to bs my way through the french directions and pay for/operate the washer and dryer. i was hoping to go explore the area, or at least go for a walk in the park before we have our simulation orientation and i meet the group that i’m supposed to be selling toothpaste with.
au revoir for now!
