Category Archives: Lakes & Water

Nous avons des velos! (We have bikes!)

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So its official – we have moved into our new permament apartment. Since our stuff has been on an ocean liner for the past two months, every time I opened a box, it was like receiving treasure.

Some of my treasures were:
-food storage ( I had been saving tin foil & baggies and reusing them to Gabe’s disgust)
-our own silverware
-the rest of my clothes since I’d been wearing the same thing for 8 weeks solid

Some of Gabe’s treasures were:
-the Apple TV
-the wireless router (yes, a treasure for me too!)
-our bikes

In fact, when they pulled the bikes off the truck, he went for a ride before they could take into into our apartment. And, on Monday, it was a Swiss holiday for Pentacost, so his office was closed and he worked from home. We went on a bike ride mid-morning for a break.

One of the coolest things we saw was a windsurfer park his car, assemble his apparatus, and then set sail on Lake Geneva. It was pretty chilly this day although you can’t tell from Gabe’s attire.



We look forward to many great rides and me hopefully not getting hit by a car, since I am not the most graceful on a velo!

A walk in the park

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One of our goals in Switzerland was to spend more time in the Great Outdoors. We are able to do this in force in our temp house as our TV only has 2 English speaking channels – CNBC and European CNN. Since the news repeats itself every 20 minutes, then that is basically the limit I have watching it.

The really nice thing is that Geneva has wonderful parks. There are at least 6 large ones that are less than 10 minutes away.

In fact, we can use our public transport pass to take the little ferry from the Botanical Gardens at left, to the Parc des Eaux Vives below near our place….how cool. Visitors, you can be sure we’ll be doing this when you come over!

When we were in Paris last Fall, I remember my mom making a comment regarding the different lifestyles between what was common at home and in Paris. Basically, in urban life, particularly in Europe, most people don’t have yards, but they treasure/share/use the public parks just as though it was though their private backyard. I love this idea and look forward to using them. Below, see a snapshot of a few of our “backyards” :

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Parks featured:

The Parc des La Grange, I fondly call this “Internet Park” and adjacent Parc des Eaux Vives

The Jardin Botanique

The Baby Plage, baby beach, right across from our temp apartment

The Jardin Anglais, home of the flower clark.

The Parc des Bations, taken from our first trip in January

More on the park adventures later!

Date Night on the Lake

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When we announced we were moving to Geneva, people usually had a word in mind that they associated with the city. I’d say the most common ones were related to its role in humanitarian and worldwide efforts – “The Geneva Convention” or “Red Cross headquarters”. What followed next was “expensive”.

And the expensive part is true. Geneva always ranks somewhere in the top 5 most expensive cities to live in the world, far more so that New York, Paris or London. However, for that expense, the Swiss enjoy the highest standard of living than anywhere in the world – Zurich being #1 and Geneva #2. Gabe and I are trying to learn the balance of this – to embrace the high quality of life available here, without going broke!!

In the US, there were so many restaurants that we loved that had entrees in the $10-$20 range. So we could frequently go out, have drinks with dinner and have a bill under $50 for the both of us. However, inexpensive dinners like this simply don’t exist in Switzerland. A hot dog on the street is about $10 CHF and lunch side salads average about $20 CHF. Thus, a mid-range dinner would cost about $100 CHF and a nice one around $200CHF, for two. Prior to moving, we planned 1-2 meals mid-range meals in order to manage our budget.

Our entire first week, I have made all our meals at home and we had our one budgeted meal for the week for Saturday lunch. We needed to get out of our little 1 BR flat and decided to get a bit creative and make a picnic to take and watch the sunset. We sat on the rocks by the baby beach to eat.

Later we moved up to the grass for a softer spot to watch the sunset.

We enjoyed the evening so much, we were questioning why we never picnicked in the park in the US since our home was so close to the largest park in Charlotte. We concluded it was because eating out didn’t seem so expensive enough to drive us to be creative. Thanks Switzerland for this lesson!