I’ve been meaning to upload my photos from Geneva for ages, but have been too lazy to transfer them from my phone to my computer. I’m not allowed to install any phone software on the computer, you see, and I haven’t figured out how to remove the block on me using infrared of bluetooth, so my only option is to painfully email the photos to myself two at a time However, there’s nothing like spending a week by yourself in a hotel room in Bolton to make you think sticking pins in your eyes would actually be rather entertaining, so this evening after having dinner and washing the soap out of my hair, I decided to dedicate myself to the task Unfortunately, it’s now so long since I made my posts about Geneva that it doesn’t seem worth rejigging them for photos. So I’ve decided to make a mega sort of post here which contains all the photos instead… (more…)

Thursday was the day I had really been looking forward to all week. All the weather forecasts I had seen predicted it would be the best day of our short stay in Geneva, and my plan was to use it to visit Mount Salève, the mountain immediately above Geneva.

April is pretty much the worst time you could choose to go to Switzerland, by virtue of everything exciting being closed. With the exception of very high altitude resorts such as Zermatt, the skiing season is essentially over and the hiking season can not begin in earnest until June when the majority of the slush will have melted. April is just about the most dangerous time you could go up a mountain; the melting snow is ripe for avalanches and there is still enough of it left in terms of volume to cause some nasty damage. Avalanches are quite cool to watch from a distance but I have no desire to be in the close vicinity of one, and so it was that the region’s more exciting day trips (an excursion to Mont Blanc, for example) had to be ruled out (more…)

I’ll confess up front that going to Bern was a bit of an unnecessary extravagence. I forget now exactly how much the return fare for two people turned out to be, but I know I did a double take when the machine asked me for the required number of francs and wondered hopefully if I might possibly have pressed something wrong. I hadn’t, but my desire to escape French speaking Switzerland to a part of the country where they use a proper language was great enough for me to pay for the tickets regardless (more…)

The resolution to go to France got off to a slow start the next morning on the grounds that we didn’t know where we wanted to go. I recently did a translation exercise in an Esperanto course book where the passage described a Polish railway worker trying to sell a ticket to a man who neither knew nor cared where he was going, and our situation reminded me somewhat of that as we wandered vaguely around Geneva’s bus station looking for a vehicle which might be about to depart for France. No such vehicles appeared to be in existence and so my boyfriend approached a pair of drivers who seemed reluctant to recommend a destination, but mentioned that a bus to Annecy was departing in a little over an hour. Knowing next to nothing about the place, this was enough inspiration for us to shell out considerable quantities of francs for a ticket, and feeling excited in a reckless sort of way, we set off to kill another hour in Geneva. (more…)

I woke up with sore legs this morning which is a sure sign I must have had a good week I have indeed had a superb week in Geneva with my boyfriend and hardly know where to start with describing it. I am lacking the motivation to blog, in fact, because I would much rather lie here feeling lazy and happy than stir myself to do something useful.

Hmmm. Well, it all started on Monday morning at the regrettably early hour of half five. I didn’t wish my parents to know I was going on holiday with my boyfriend, a fact of which they would deeply disapprove, and so I had led them to believe that I was working in London again. That had a few unfortunate implications, the first being that despite not needing to be at the airport until nearly ten, I still had to leave the house at the time at which I would have done were I actually going to London (more…)