Geneva is not a wallflower after all

It seems that come August, Geneva drinks a little too much from the bottle of fun she’s had stashed away in the drawer all year, rips her shirt off, runs around yelling and generally just goes a bit nuts. And I’m glad to see it.

It starts on 1 August, Swiss National Day. I wasn’t here for it this year, but I’ve heard that Geneva starts to warm up for that; apparently there are some events on a smaller scale but most people keep it relatively quiet. I’ll have to wait until next year to find out for sure.

Cine Transat is a rarity in Geneva - it's free

Then there’s the variety of events – concerts, theatre, films – throughout the city. It’s summer, where the city herself throws off her inhibitions and loosens up. One event is Cine Transat, the outdoor cinemas that have the lake and mountains as an amazing backdrop. They show a mix of films – cult classics, newer releases, and international titles. I caught Romeo +Juliet on Friday night, which I fondly remember seeing in the cinemas as a 16-year old. The truly amazing thing about Cine Transat though is that it’s absolutely free. They have gone nuts.

The weekend just gone though was on another scale altogether and wrapped up what is – I guess – one of the biggest events Geneva sees in a year; the Fêtes de Genève. It’s a massive party along the shores of the lake for a week, with carnival rides, games stalls, food tents, performers, concerts; I was pretty impressed.

Geneva explodes in a riot of fireworks
for Fêtes de Genève

However, I was blown away on Saturday night. Nearly an hour’s worth of fireworks were blown up where Lac Leman meets the River Rhone in an awesome display of beauty, perfectly timed and coordinated to music. That amount of fireworks must have cost a – er – bomb.

I was reading in 20 Minutes yesterday morning – that’s the free Swiss commuter paper – that over 500,000 people turned out to watch it. Quite extraordinary given that I don’t think half a million people live in Geneva. 

The traffic jam afterwards suggests that there were that many people there, which is one reason why we took the train. I know that I’ve complained about Swiss trains before but, honestly, there’s no comparing to the Swiss for thoughtfulness and efficiency – Swissifficiency.

An hour and a half after the fireworks ended – 1.30am – and the crowd on the train station platform is ten deep waiting to get home. We were speculating who was going to get left behind, given we knew the trains that usually took us home won’t be able to hold half the number of people that were waiting.

2am in Nyon - crowds pile off a double
decker train thoughtfully provided by CFF

Just a minute late, a train pulls up – but it’s not the regular train type that takes the route through Nyon. In their Swissifficiency, the CFF (the French abbreviation for Swiss National Railways) decided to thoughtfully provide a double decker train that usually does routes to Zurich or Basel.

In just a couple of minutes, the platform is emptied and everyone is on board and on their way home. Until next year…

Chaos and confusion on travel

So I’m writing this while sitting on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic at 36,000 ft. I’m on my way to New York for work and on the way back I’ll be stopping in Madrid for a few days to take in the sights and to see my colleagues in Madrid. But today has been an observation in the barely organised chaos that is international travel. To get to New York, I’m going via Madrid, which is fine – I’ve taken worse flights than to have to make a slight deviation in direction for a stopover first. However, this morning’s flight from Geneva was delayed by an hour – not very Swissifficient that - and this afternoon’s flight from Madrid was also delayed by at least 40 minutes. It turns out though that by the time I touch down at JFK the flight should more or less be on time.

Airports themselves can be a really curious mix – unsure of whether they want to display the wares of the country people are leaving from, or what they think people want. Geneva airport, which is not a big airport by any means, has a mix of shops of both Swiss brands and international luxury brands. While you’re waiting for your flight to anywhere that is not Geneva, you can browse through Swatch, Montblanc, any number of Swiss watchmakers such as Raymond Weil, Frederic Constant or Omega, and buy as much Toblerone as you please. If your credit card limit stretches that far, you can also buy up a storm at Hermes, Cartier, Ralf Lauren and Chopard. (Seriously, Chopard? Who has the cash and the time to lay down $10,000 or more on a Chopard piece at an airport?!) The Swiss brands at Geneva airport make sense, as do the luxury ones given that Geneva is a city with some seriously wealthy people.

So after arriving in Madrid and browsing the airport shops while going from one delayed flight to the next, I was stunned. I thought I had maybe landed in some alternative Switzerland or a remodelled Geneva airport. The shops in this Spanish city’s airport were, in fact, all Swiss. The Montblanc, the Swatch of Geneva airport was to be found everywhere at Madrid airport; there was a predominance of Swiss brands and nothing Spanish. Startling. I had expected to find at least one shop selling espadrilles. But nothing.

But if airports are sometimes an object of curiosity, the act of boarding a plane can make people especially so. In Geneva, apart from the uncustomary delay of the plane leaving, the departure process was a model of Swissifficency. A polite boarding call, an orderly queue to board, people quietly finding their seats and sitting in them; no problems. But never have I ever seen anything so farcical as the boarding process at Madrid airport.

First, according to the flight departure boards, the flight was on time, then it wasn’t, then it was, then it changed gate, then it didn’t. Second, they don’t make announcements to make you aware of those changes. In the end, while boarding commenced on time, it certainly didn’t end so. There was one solitary lady that was processing the boarding passes for the entire full plane load of mostly Spaniards and Americans. Being a Transatlantic flight, the plane is not a small one either.

I don’t know what it is, but as soon as the purser looks even close to announcing the boarding call, people congregate outside the gate as if they must be first on the plane – even though they will simply sit on the plane for the next 30 minutes while everyone else boards too – or as if it will leave without them. So this seemingly innate instinct in some people naturally caused a small crowd to develop around the gate. Then, when the actual boarding call came, it became a mob. And with one lady checking the boarding passes of over 350 people, boarding quickly became a mess. Americans complained loudly, both to each other and to the poor Iberia check-in lady. Spaniards also complained, in quiet, albeit mildly irritated, accents. The immigration policies of the US before leaving the country of departure also don’t help, with anyone not American or from the EU pulled out and asked to provide more details.

The 'queue' at boarding at Madrid airport

Once I actually managed to get through boarding at the gate, I was met with the ludicrous sight of not boarding a plane, but a bus. Turns out that they suddenly had to switch planes and the new one was in a different location. On the plane, it didn’t get any better, with passengers haggling over seats. The seat allocation on the boarding pass is actually supposed to prevent this, but it still didn’t stop a group of people debating in the aisle next to me over whether they could swap seats with other people just so they could sit next to their friends, while already pissed off people from the delayed flight and farcical boarding process got even more pissed off at being further held up. Honestly.

I enjoy travelling, and even when it goes wrong it pays to have a sense of humour. As a people watcher, I find it also pays to have an appreciation of the idiosyncrasies of others – in fact vital, as it can make things quite entertaining when you’d otherwise just be joining them in being frustrated, pissed off and annoyed. And that’s not meant to be part of the travel experience.

Update - 10 June

So about a week after I experienced those delayed flights and a few days after I posted the above, the situations has gone from farcical to hysterical. I was supposed to leave New York for Madrid last night at 9pm, but with severe thunderstorms, many flights were delayed, and incoming flights were diverted to other cities, including the one that we were meant to fly on. So with our plane diverted to Pittsburgh, our flight from JFK was inevitably cancelled. But that was just the start. There was confusion on where to collect the bags from. We were told that the buses to take us to the hotels would be leaving at 10.30pm. Five buses were needed to take all the passengers - I was next in line to get on the third bus when I was told it was full, and actually ended up being the very last person to board the last bus, at 11.45pm.

The scene at JFK while waiting for a bus to
take about 200 passengers to hotels

It was nearly 1am by the time we got to the hotel; because ours wasn't the only cancelled flight, all the surrounding hotels were full, so we had to schlep out to Long Island, over an hour away. I managed to get a room at the hotel relatively quickly having used strategic tactics to get towards the front of the line. Finally I get to sleep at 2am.

The next morning, we're told that the buses will pick us up to take us back to JFK at 12 noon, but being Iberia, they don't show up and leave until nearly 2pm. Which means that the 3.30pm time the flight was going to leave is now not possible and after boarding the plane at 5.30pm, we finally take off at 6.30pm.

I'm sure you can't blame me, if, after all that, I say that I refuse to fly with Iberia ever again - except to get home to Geneva of course. Stay tuned for the inevitable disasters on that leg...

Lessons in moving

So admittedly I’ve been a bit radio silent lately. You could hardly blame me after the constant moving about of the last four weeks though. What a debacle. We’ve certainly learnt lessons along the way – and so you can profit from them, I’ve listed them in gory detail below – but the important thing is that we’ve finally moved into our permanent apartment, and don’t intend on moving anywhere for a rather long time!

Lesson #1: If you think you think you need to extend your sublease, then do so!
So our problems started when we realised that our new apartment (which is just that – brand new, therefore under construction) wasn’t going to be ready as soon as we’d hoped. We’d signed a lease in early February and were told we could probably move in mid/late March, although our lease, to be on the safe side, was dated from 1 April. Our sublease in Sticksville ran out on 21 March and we thought we’d probably be safe. Wrong. When we realised that we needed a place to stay for an extra week, thinking we could move in on 27 March, it was too late to extend our sublease.

So we had to move out and we spent the next week shifting between friends’ place in Nyon and a temporary sublease for a few days in Geneva. Then on the Thursday before we were due to move in, I got the bad news that it was pushed back by an extra week to 1 April, April Fool’s Day. I wish it had been a joke. It wasn’t.

Not able to stay where we were, we had no choice but to find a hotel for the week, an expensive prospect to say the least. After an ultimately fruitless search in which neither the web, asking in hotels directly, or just asking at the tourist office – where we discovered there was not a hotel room in Geneva to be had for love nor (anything less than an exorbitant amount of) money – we gave up and headed for Lausanne for three nights, before finding a bed in Geneva for the last two before finally moving in. Glad to be in our own place at last, but the fun had only just begun.

Lesson #2: Don’t buy IKEA furniture in bulk
Of course, a brand new apartment is usually unfurnished, so we needed furniture. Ergo, like any good expat in Switzerland who needs furniture, we took ourselves off on a trip to IKEA.

To kit out our apartment, we needed to buy up big. BIG mistake. I love IKEA and - most of the time - their furniture. I have this mild obsession with anything Scandinavian, so usually that's enough to ensure my favour - the price, functionality and design is a bonus.

But good things need to come in small doses. I've spent the better part of the last 10 days on the floor putting things together - dining table, chairs, tv cabinet, lamp, bedside table, bed, bathroom cabinet, and joy of joys, a Manstad fold out sofa. We usually don't have problems putting together IKEA stuff, but this sofa is proving to be a nightmare.

You can have the chaise lounge left or right; they provide the instructions for first right, then left. We've chosen to put ours on the left, so it's meant that a couple of times we've put bolts on the wrong side and had to take them out again because we've looked at the right-side instructions first, which are wrong.

Then there's the end part which we're supposed to fasten to the seat, but the part in the hole that the screw goes into fell into the end part, rendering it useless. We took another trip to IKEA to get a replacement part, but that hasn't worked either, so we now have a half-finished sofa lying in pieces all over the living room. After two phone calls and two more visits to IKEA, it’s still not fixed. I’m not impressed at the lack of Swissifficiency (a hack word of Swiss + efficiency that I’m claiming I coined). I love IKEA but I've learnt a good lesson - don't buy it and put it together in bulk!

Lesson #3: Be prepared to fit your apartment out with just about everything – except the kitchen sink
So the above may be a slight exaggeration, but I was nonetheless startled to find that we need to fit our own light fittings in our new place, plus things like curtains. I thought the bare light bulbs (or no light bulbs, in the case of the kitchen) were going to be replaced, but it turns out that if you rent an apartment, you often have to bring or buy your own light fittings and curtains, etc. Each to their own, but I was a little surprised; that’s just not The Done Thing at home in Australia.

View from my new apartment - Alps
in the distance!

Lesson #4: Be prepared to sit back and allow your amazing surroundings to sink in
After all the hassles and stress, it’s important to stop for a moment and let things sink in. A couple of days after moving in, I stopped for lunch out on the balcony. It was gloriously sunny and (for early April) ridiculously warm. I was finally in my new apartment – it dawned on me that I won’t have to move again for a very long time. It’s brand new, so it’s a blank canvas, complete with shiny new kitchen toys, including a dishwasher (hello Empress Eats blog!). And then I looked up – and saw the French Alps, rising above Lake Geneva. No matter how long we live here, I don’t think that’s something I’ll ever get tired of.