Snowflakes

When I woke up this morning, with my eyes stuffed I couldn't see what I realized on my way back home - Geneva is surrounded by white mountain tops. What came down as icing rain in the city all yesterday was snow above 400m!

Le temps fait bien noir sur Genève.

It's strange that there hasn't been any updates on this blog since I moved to Geneva at least, bearing in mind that I have had three entire weeks to waste.

Well, anyways here I am in the middle of Europe encircled by mountains in all directions. After a week at Line's place I found a house share just at the very edge of my poor student budget and moved in with a Russian guy who does a PhD at CERN and a German girl who does an internship with the UN Environmental Program. The flat is in a nice enough area, a bit like "La Cité" but I can walk home safely at night. I can see the airport from my window, and the Juramountains just behind. Also, I live on 7th floor so I have a good view-- over the primary school seven floors below. Every hour during the day I have 10 minutes of joyfull children playing, then the bell rings and I can enjoy another 50 min of snooze. Luckily the primary schools in Geneva don't have classes on Wednesday.

Today I completed the final stages, or what might seem like it, of my battle with Swiss bureaucracy. The Swiss are well-known for their army-knives, clocks and banks, trains that run on time and ehh, efficiency. Let's say that my most recent adventures with the cantonal administration have made me believe that this is just pure fraud. The immatriculation of the University of Geneva finally proved that. It was ridiculously slow and badly organized, and involved an awful amount of waiting for so to move the documents that you'd posted in your application, along with loads of other useless sheets of paper from one desk to another. I see why the Swiss do not let whoever enter their country, but you have to believe that people don't forge their diplomas from high school. But obviously not! So I am going to wait for a good while to get my final residence permit and so forth, but at least the formal procedures are done.

This weekend is the great weekend of meeting new people from my class and to make friends with our future colleagues. I am staying in tonight, just too tired from having slept very little before today's exhausting bureaucratic adventure. Also, I got pretty soaked walking home from the tram last night. I'd rather be in great form for my excursion tomorrow, my Belgian friend from CERN is bringing me to IKEA so I might get a desk and a decent chair. Then the master studies can just begun!

There is a bad weather forecast for Geneva this weekend, le temps fait bien noir sur Geneve.

Well, in summary Ingo is doing good in Geneva in spite of all these tiny obstacles on the way. Next week we'll be ready for the masters and what I am looking most forward to is Tuesday's lecture with Andrew Clapham!

-J'ai un peu vecu pour toi-

Club Lecky

It's the last week of term and club lecky is, like always filled with girls who think they are hot and guys who think they are cool, but now they're actually studying. Unlike me.

Walking on sunshine

I don't know if anybody really bothers reading my blog, but my life seems to busy that there is very little space for this type of activities at the moment. I am doing fine and that's what matters at the moment.

The sun goes down on Galway bay, your daughter goes down on me

Just a quick update in the rainy days of January before I am running to class at 3pm. Life is going great these days, but I suffer from constant lack of sleep. Nobody else to blame, so I'll take it myself.

The three months of trial are now expired and I think I am going to keep him.

IT takes a fool to remain sane

Due to the constant lack of internet access in my new and fabulous house share, the absence of updates here seems omnipresent. I am hereby doing something about it.

At the moment, Ingo is stressed as a mess and wondering if she will ever really get there. Dublin is just no quite the same anymore and the future seems so far away. I am going to train judo now, even though I don't quite want to.

Hi to all of you faithful readers out there.

Oh my darling Clementine

Since it turns out that some people are still reading my blog, I shall now prevail the honour of updating it a little bit.

Ingo is back in Dublin since Oct 1, and she is now doing judo!