Hi All! It's been a busy and exhausting week, but I finall found a small window of time to hop on here and fill you in! Monday was relatively uneventful, and we were all crammed together in the Smith Center all day. In the afternoon we got a presentation of the "sports" offered at the university. It's pretty much all club teams... and then for exercise classes, you need to pay (at least for most of them). ON TOP of that, we discovered that their "gym" consists of no free weights, and you need to pay 60 CHF. I may buy my own bar. My friend mentioned a crossfit gym... but that would prorbably cost 1,000CHF a day..lol...but really. Then we had this awful conversation about "coping with the stresses of studyinga abroad" by a woman who clearly only wants to make her money. Also... she had no idea how to talk to a whole room of Smithies... being told that "when you start to wear make up and dress up again, you're doing better" was probably the wrong thing to say. After this, I went home, got a newspaper article and wrote about it so I could present it to my class the next day. My article was about an anthropological study done on children across cultures on the basis of selfishness. It was found that the youngest children are most likely to share... becoming less and less so to eight years old, at which point they take on acting how the adults in their society do, so whether or not they share depends largely on on the adults in their society interact.
Tuesday, I presented my article in class, which went very well, because the study was really fascinating, and then we went to the Art Museum in the Vieille Ville, which was absolutely beautiful. I don't like art museums at ALL because I was once chided for being too close to a painting, and then again for carrying my jacket because the building was five billion degrees (I was obviously going to try to smuggle out a painting under my tiny jacket), but at least I wasn't the one that got scolded this time, and it was really interesting to see the paintings there. There were Monets, Manets, Renoirs, and the first ever landscape painting in history (which was a scene of Geneva with the beautiful Mont Blanc in the background). From there, a few of us went back to CUP 1 and I did homework while I watched my friends bake REALLY good banana bread. ALSO and MOST IMPORTANTLY! I did laundry FOR ONLY 4 FRANCS. For those of you who don't know how INCREDIBLE that is, in my building, laundry costs 12 francs. I will be continuing to do laundry there until I leave!
Wednesday WEDNESDAY we went to the UN. It was AMAZING. We got a tour of the library and the archives which was HUGELY impressive. 40 miles worth of shelves that are taken up with transcripts from meetings starting with the League of Nations. There are original documents, and there are minutes from conventions and meetings. It is the PERFECT place to conduct research on the ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) and also to find the minutes of what led to the adoption of that Covenant. For those of you wondering, the ICCPR mandates that each country have legislation protecting against hate speech. This is my thesis topic. While I'm here, I want to delve into why other countries signed on to this legislation and why the U.S. did not, and also conduct interviews of the men and women my own age to uncover their attitudes toward it. After which, I will then conduct similar interviews in the U.S. to see if we seem to be heading toward a more liberal reading of the contitution with regards to hate speech. AND THEN GUESS WHAT. I got my official UN library badge TO GO DO THAT RESEARCH WOOP WOOP WOOP I was like a little kid in a candy shop. I was squealing like a little girl I was so excited... is that a bit nerdy? Donnnnnnnt really care :D. When classes start I'm going to try to find one day to go there and do research in lieu of a class... and try and go in mornings or when I don't have class. After this, me and a few friends went onthe MOST beautiful run along the Rhône, and ended atop an enormous bridge that overlooks the river. From there, you can see the mountains, including Mont Blanc, in the distance, and then you can see the valley between them in which Geneva is. We could see the entire city from that bridge. It was absolutely breath taking. After this, we went back up the OTHER side of the river, which was very difficult because the path was about the width of my foot, needless to say running was not an option! When we got back, my building had floor meetings for new residents, in which my suitemates and I realized we had inadvertently broken almost every rule, and then they gave us pizza (which was obviously the best part except for the fact that we needed to wait about an hour and a half for it to show up because apparently when you order 15 pizzas they think it's a joke and don't actually make it...LOL).
As an aside, I'm also hugely overwhelmed right now because I've started the process of applying for a Fulbright which is really stressful, I have a book to read for my thesis which I've been working on for weeks, so it's stressful, and I can't make my classes add up to meet any sort of criteria that I need, becaues I need gov classes but can't take them at the gov school because I'm only here for a semester, so I need to find courses in the literature school, which means finding history/ gov esque classes but they MUST be taught by a gov professor, and also need to find some of those that are in french, that are based on a french topic to count toward a french major. Nothing is going smoothly right now.... so I'm going to sign off and head to try to sort out my life, and will hopefully be able to go on my second trip EVER to a bar tonight :)
Bisous!
Edie