Trip to Geneva
I went to Geneva for a weekend, to see my friend from Georgetown who happened to be there for an event in UN headquarters. I’ve never been to French part of Switzerland, so this was definitely interesting for me!
The French experience started right on the train — where the waitress could only speak French and English, and absolutely zero German. I was later told at one souvenir shop that Swiss people usually learn German in school, even in the French part. But Geneva has many other francophone foreigners, which don’t speak German. So overall I had a feeling that I was in a French city, but people had quite good English.
Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get into UN headquarters, since they are closed on weekends in winter, but I did go to the Red Cross museum. It was quite an intense place to be honest, and if you go there, get ready for an emotional roller-coaster. There was a section about Red Cross’s work on restoring family connections, and I got stuck for around half an hour reading about a family that was separated in Poland during WW2, to be connected around end 90s via translated letters through Red Cross, where one of them lived in Australia, and another one in Moldova.
