March 09

March was a busy old month: rehearsing for the Easter concert in the evenings and work being manic during the days. Spring started tentatively showing itself and as the days warmed up, the occasional walk around the lake's edge on the weekends, reminds me why Geneva is a beautiful place to live. One tends to forget you know!

Most days were spent in the Human Rights Council, in it's very pretty new chamber. The minus is that the new council chamber has less seats than the old one... but the plus is that there is hours worth of view, gazing up at the ceiling.

There was a couchsurfer's party which was quite fun: I got to meet a few of the locals, including some that live in the next street from me.

29 March

An... interesting weekend. Friday night was the party for the end of the Human Rights Council, hosted by the UK, NZ and Mexican Missions. I had a great time, but ended up walking all the way home... a good 5 or 6 kms I would guess. Did get to see some cool shadows...

The next night I went to the Bain des Paquis where I met up with a bunch of lovely couchsurfers from Madrid. We ate fondue and then I took them wandering around Paquis in search of a Shisha bar. After that (at about midnight) a few of us continued on to go dancing. The bar closed at 2 am (which was now 3am due to the time changes) and then I had to walk home, arriving at 4am.

This morning I got up and met with the Spanish contingent again, and we went to Jonction to check out where the two rivers, the Arve and the Rhone meet. Its quite cool because they are two different colours and travel beside each other before blending. From there we walked back to cornavin and then on to a place for a very inexpensive pizza. Then I walked to the hotel Kempinski where I met up with Glocals friends and walked with them to another part of town where we had our photos taken for the magazine l'Hebdo, which gave me a different view over Geneva.

Then I headed back to the Paquis to meet up with a potential tenant. Then things got REALLY interesting. I was sitting in the outdoor seating of a cafe on the street, reading a book, and there was a very loud "BOOOOM". I looked up and saw the debris landing from the building across the road and to the right about 30 metres which had just EXPLODED!! I rushed over and thought for a second that I saw half a person lying on the ground. Luckily it was in fact a mannequin. The building then started to burn and I called out, using every ounce of my singing trained voice to the people in the building exhorting them to get out. "Sortie!! Sortie les Immeuble!" I cried (I suspect lousy French but the message was there). It did work as a few people in the higher floors opened their windows and looked out to see what the noise was about and then noticed that their building was on fire.

I had my camera with me from doing the trip to Jonction, so you can see from these photos that the fire really really seriously went up. The police were there incredibly quickly (I would say within 5 minutes for the police and 10 for the fire brigade).