When I tell people I've just come back from a trip to Geneva, their first responses are usually something like, "Oh, great, I've always wanted to visit Switzerland!" But I suspect that neither the time nor the circumstances of my visits would suit most of my friends much better than they suit me. Geneva is a city of business, not tourism (no matter what the opponents of the bridge and tunnel proposals may say), of French culture, not milk-swilling aryanness and celebrations of the cow. The surrounding agricultural areas of Geneva are largely given over to viniculture, and while the grapes are often on steep hillsides the city itself is rather flat.
On my most recent trip I took the train from the Gare Cornavin (as featured in an The Sunflower Affair, partly produced by Herge while a resident at the Hotel Cornavin) to the Zuerich Hauptbahnhof. The trip took three hours, the same as the time from Geneva to Paris on the TGV but the cultural distance to Zurich was ten times greater. I went from a small business-oriented hotel in Geneva, with a french-style bed, to a student-tourist hotel with murals in dairy motifs with a german-style bed. The wall of my room showed little yellow blocks flying away from what seemed to be a butter mountain. I gained ten pounds just sleeping there, but walked it off on the hilly streets of Zurich.
Geneva is a city where people go to do business. The League of Nations built its permanent headquarters there, the Palais des Nations, now owned and operated by the UN. The UN is also the proprietor of the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union, the organization my company has business with in Geneva. For two weeks I attended meetings of the ITU-T, the Telecommunications Standardization Sector of the ITU Study Group 15. Study Groups are essentially the means by which the technical consequences of international treaties (originally) and industry-driven standardization are worked out by engineers who actually build things like telephone systems and videoconferencing systems. In the ITU-R they get to work out satellite orbital elements and frequency allocations. In the ITU-T we just work out standards like the one that made Intel's recent videophone announcement feasible: they "invented" implementations of the H.324, H.223, H.245, H.263, and G.723.1 standards.
Sometimes I really hate these meetings. After a week and a half, it seems to be inevitable that I'll be anxious to leave, but there are times when it seems I'm absolutely in my element. Possibly due to all those years of convention committee and NESFA meetings, along with the sometime chunks of fanwriting: nice to know I can now erase the comment "wasted" that's written against some of the time I spent in those ways. I might even have used something from Shintaido "sensei care" at this last meeting. Not to say that that was time wasted, just without immediate application to my day to day life.
Days in the kinds of meetings I've been to take place indoors. Most of the people in the meeting are sitting in desks arranged in an arc around a dais with a speakers' table. That table is usually occupied by the meeting chairman and possibly a chairman acting for a particular part of a meeting, that is one associated with a particular set of standards documents. Documents are submitted (usually ahead of time) to the meeting and copied and distributed by the TSB, the Telecommunications Standardisation Bureau, which is the permanent staff part of the the ITU.
During the meeting, the documents are introduced by people who agree to describe them aloud for the meeting. The method of introduction varies between reading verbatim and a two sentence summary of what's in the document. Once the document has been introduced, the chairman may make some comments, and then the floor is opened for discussion or clarification or both. One requests the floor by raised hand, when it is granted one presses the button on one's microphone: a light goes on on the mic, and one has the floor. It's usual to open one's comments with, "Thank you Mister Chairman," and close them the same way. This is apparently due to the use of translators: they will know to get on the line when they hear, "Thank you, Mr Chairman," "Merci, Monsieur le President," or the Spanish equivalent. Most of the meetings I have attended were conducted all in English, but the standard opening is still useful in the Study Group Plenary sessions.
The best thing about these meetings is that they are in permanent meeting rooms, so the chairs are pretty comfortable. Having meetings for eight or more hours a day for two weeks would be impossible with standard-issue hotel meeting room chairs.
Meetings usually continue over dinner, with people from a single company or national delegation filling each other in about doings in other, parallel track meetings during the day. Business with competitors and with ITU officers also often takes place over dinner or otherwise away from the main arena and after office hours. This is the ITU aspect of a common business practice, and it helps explain why Geneva's restaurants are uniformly very expensive. The ratio of prices in the Geneva Wendy's to those in the US is about three to one; a German friend remarked on how much more ice cream at a Haagen-Dazs stand was than in Germany. The ratio to US prices for ice cream was amazing, particularly considering how much ice cream seems to be sold in Geneva.
The last SG 15 meeting was held during a heat wave in Geneva, so maybe ice cream sales were elevated, but "creme glacee" seems to be a very standard item on restaurant menus and the first choice of many patrons. This is an exception to the rule that French culture dominates Genevan cuisine, one of the three main exceptions. The other two are fondue and raclette.
I have to confess that on my first trip to Switzerland I did not order fondue at any time. This wasn't entirely by choice: I set out one night for a restaurant specialized in the cuisine of Valais, a canton where fondue is a standard dish, only to be informed by the chef that although the fondue might be served, "this is the evening of the cassoulet!" I went back to that restaurant this time and had fondue, but I have to admit that it was a somewhat challenging meal on a hot night in a non-airconditioned restaurant. Raclette did not stand a chance in that kind of weather.
Raclette, for those of you who haven't had it, is basically melted cheese poured on a plate and served with potatoes. One usually picks up the cheese on pieces of potato and eats them with cheese and pickles. The plates are replaced as you finish them. Appetizers may include "raw ham." The cuisine of Valais, especially the fondues with forest mushrooms, always make me wonder how long the Valois went between sightings of green vegetables.
Unfortunately for the visitor wanting to have a close encounter of the fresh vegetable kind, two of the cuisines often associated with cheap plentiful veggies in North America tend to be quite expensive in Geneva: both Chinese and South Asian restaurants tend to be quite "up-scale" and pricey. I haven't tried any Japanese restaurants, but am assured that their prices are on scales more familiar to astronomers than gastronomes.
Long term exposure to the visitor-milking machine of Geneva can leave one with a very cynical attitude. Does anyone really live here? Even on the very high rates of pay we hear of for people in this city, how do they manage? How do people survive the gouging by their neighbours?
Through some fairly determined efforts to see more of the real city of Geneva, I've discovered that there really are people living in the city and that the cost of living does not have to be so very high as we think. Groceries and other essentials of life aren't priced in the same ratio to prices elswhere that service-based products are. If you don't have to pay somebody else to buy it, cook it, and serve it to you, you can save a lot of money. Similarly, if you're willing to live a notch or two further from american standard, you can get a roof over your head for less money than the average ITU delegate pays. If nothing else, you can live in an apartment in France and take the city public transit bus into work at the ITU building.
They take off their shirts and hang around the Rade, walk out to the base of the Jet d'Eau, smoke dope in the Jardin Anglais. ...
Boy, I sure hope everybody realizes that what I write here is my personal opinion and does not represent the opinions of my employer. My remarks are absolutely just my own: nobody even reviews this stuff before it gets out on the web. I sometimes don't even remember to them for missing verbs or tpyos.
Also please note that if you find yourself "knee deep in replicant goo" as a result of something you find here and construe as advice or a dependable opinion, you have only yourself to blame. Writing is always "under construction," the construction that the mind of the reader does on the particular choice of words of the author. Beware the dog of your own eye before casting out another's tome.