Hello again. Not many more updates to go now before the end, just Geneva, Madrid, Lima, and Cusco. For those of you who wish to see them, I have now put my Paris photos online, and the Geneva ones should be there by the end of today as well.
Geneva was a very interesting city. I didn't have nearly as much to see there, although the work that I got done there for my project was invaluable. I had the wonderful chance to meet with representatives of the World Health Organization, or WHO, which I will detail a little later on. I was also very happy to get to visit the headquarters of the United Nations and CERN, but outside of these three major things, there was no great amount of things to be done in this city. It was a gorgeous place, nestled on the banks of Lake Geneva high in the Alps, and it would be a wonderful place to live, no doubt, but as a traveler passing through, it only held a certain amount of appeal. Anyway, enough with my musings, and on to the update.
On the morning of the 28th of July I woke up around nine, checked out of my place, and took the Metro over to the Gare de Lyon train station in southeastern Paris. It was from there that I took a high speed train to Geneva, passing first through some beautiful French farmland and then on into the Alps and mountains of Switzerland. I even got to see my first real Medieval castle along the way. I passed most of the journey talking to my neighbor, a nice lady from Washington, D.C., and we soon arrived in Geneva, the capital of Francophone Switzerland. As a country with four official languages (those being French, German, Italian, and Romansch) Switzerland is, by necessity, a country suffering somewhat from multiple personality disorder. I found the sentiment in Switzerland to be much more federal than even in the U.S. People were very proud to be from whatever canton they called home, and proud to be Swiss second. It was strange to me, but not something I could really criticize in a country where one's neighbors might not understand your language.
Once I arrived in Geneva I walked the 10 blocks or so between the Cornavin train station and my hostel, where I checked in and was shown to my room. The room was fine, with the exception that the floorboards were very creaky, and possibly noisier than an entire herd of elephants. From the room I walked downstairs and had a stroll along the lake and the many parks that hug it. I also walked through the carnival which had set itself up on the banks of the lake during the summer. It was entertaining, if a bit cheesy. The lake really impressed me, what with its crystal blue waters, small waves, cold breezes, and a number of wake boarders to boot. The town was also very pretty, sitting right on the lake, although I did not go and explore the town today, as that would have to wait for another afternoon. I was fairly tired by this point, so I had a quick dinner and went back to the hostel to sleep.
The next day I woke up at a reasonable hour, and after getting showered and dressed, headed downstairs to the lobby, where I spent some time sending emails to Lima, trying to plan something to do there for my project. The emphasis of my time in Peru had always been my time in Cusco and the surrounding towns, but I thought it would be nice to try to work something out for Lima as well. Alas, I was mostly unsuccessful since the health system in Peru is very suspicious of inspectors from the US, even if they are only students. Once I was done emailing I went on a long walk up north of the city to the epicenter of international organizations in Geneva, which is quite a busy place, as you can imagine. Over 300 international organizations call Geneva home, and so the area is fairly built up. Chief among these organizations is the United Nations. Although it is also centered in New York City, it has a home in Geneva because this is where the League of Nations was founded, in no small part because of the influence of US President Woodrow Wilson (the man is pretty big in Geneva, with lots of streets, buildings, etc named for the great internationalist). Sine the UN was my point of interest, it was there that I walked first. I went to the Palais de Nations, or the Palace of Nations, where the League of Nations had its home for a while and now several important organs of the UN exist. I first had to pass through some intense security, including handing over my passport, and was then led to my tour group, in another, more modern, building.
Our tour was led by a very competent German man who had a very heavy accent. It was actually quite entertaining to watch the tourists who had come on the English tour because their first language was not offered try to understand this man. The effort was most often an exercise in futility and I had to help them with his accent. On our tour we first walked through the immense UN shop (if I say nothing else for them, they do know how to market themselves quite well) and then on into the chamber for the UN Council on Humanitarian Affairs, which was a large circular debating chamber. We then went on to the a larger chamber donated to the UN by the King of Spain, Juan Carlos. The ceiling of this room was filled with very vibrant, if a bit frightening, modern art. We then moved over to the older building in the complex, which had been built in the 1930's to house the League of Nations. After the League's collapse and the founding of the United Nations in the aftermath of World War II, the UN took over the Palace of Nations as their home. The building showed every possible indication that it had been designed in the 30's, but it was somehow still a charming structure. We paused on our way for a moment to observe a titanium structure donated to the UN by the USSR as a monument to mankind's dominance of space. From there we saw the original debating chamber of the League and the newer, much larger, chamber of the General Assembly in Geneva. This chamber is not used nearly as frequently as the other General Assembly chamber in New York, but it has still seen some important moments in international diplomacy, including most of the treaties and negotiating over the situation in the Balkans in the 1990's.
After the tour I left the UN complex and walked across the street to the headquarters and museum of the International Organization of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. Although I still begrudge the fact that these organizations were so opposed to allowing the Red Star of David to exist, I did decide that a visit was in order. I walked downstairs to their museum, which was small, but very interesting and full of information. It was not as enthralling as the UN had been, but the documentation of the history of this organization was still very neat. The organization has won numerous Nobel Peace Prizes and continues to do important work to help those injured by war or conflict. Following this I walked back to the hostel, where I had a light dinner and spent the rest of the evening on the computer.
The next day was my meeting day in Geneva. I had set up a meeting with two representatives of the World Health Organization, through my own persistence and the assistance of Dr. Buch from South Africa, who does extensive work with WHO in the region. I woke up early and went to Cornavin train station, where I got a taxi over to the international headquarters of WHO. Once I arrived, and got over the shock of the horribly 1970's building, I walked in and told the security guard about my meeting. While I waited I watched people wander by, all of them seemingly intent on doing their important jobs and not really paying any attention to anything around them. Eventually my host for the day, a Mr. David Evans, arrived and took me on a brief tour of the complex. We walked down to the library, the cafeteria, the bookshop, and a few departments (Immunology, Infectious Diseases, Tropical Diseases, etc) until we came to his department and took a seat in his office. He was previously the Director of WHO's Global Programme on Evidence for Health Policy, but since 2004, he has been Director of the Department of Health Systems Financing. We spoke in his office for a while on his work and the work of his department in fighting health inequities and inequalities in the world. His work mostly focuses on analyzing the deficiencies of various national healthcare systems in providing equitable care to all sectors of their populations. His department mostly focuses on statistic analysis of such problems, while a department that he works very closely with works to provide suggestions and solutions to the governments that ask for them. After our interview he led me down the hall to the office of one of his team members, a Ms. Priyanka Saksena. She was a very intelligent woman and we discussed in detail a specific problem that the department has been tasked with fighting, financial catastrophe as a result of seeking care. This situation arises when seeking and receiving care for an injury, infection, or malady is necessary, but would cause the person or people seeking it to become destitute or to fall into such massive debt as to affect subsequent generations of the family. Ironically enough this is mostly a problem of the middle class in many countries. The poor are very often given free or very subsidized care while the rich can afford the care that they need, leaving the middle class in a no man's land of not enough benefits and not enough resources. It is a sad situation, but the discussion we had was very enlightening, especially in regards to what I had observed in India. I spent the remainder of the day doing work back at the hostel.
Saturday was a fun day for me. I woke up early and got on the tram out to Meyrin, where I caught a bus and was dropped off at CERN within sight of the French border. CERN, or the European Center for Nuclear Research, has been for quite some time a very intriguing site for me. I had always wondered about the environment in which scientists from around Europe were breaking the barriers of our knowledge of the universe. To that end I traveled the 30 or so minutes out of town and took a day trip there. First, having entered the lobby and been directed down a hallway, I visited the Microcosm, or the official museum of CERN. This museum started off simply enough, with the four basic forces of the our world (gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear), but it very quickly accelerated in complexity and before I knew what had happened I was in way over my head. I wandered through the modestly sized museum for more than an hour absorbing every detail I could. Nuclear physics has always been somewhat of a side interest of mine, and now I was being indulged. It was all a bit too much, to be perfectly honest. I was very excited by what I saw, especially the details of the work being done by the scientists at CERN.
After visiting Microcosm I went across the road to the Legion of Doom, or at least a very close approximation of it. Inside was a conference center and a temporary museum which was housing an exhibit based on the Power of 10 video, examining how perspective can change our understanding of the world around us, from being massive combinations of infinitesimal to being insignificantly small members of a universal existence. There were also exhibits on the Big Bang and on the ideas behind String and M Theory. It was, once again, very interesting. I had lunch at the CERN neighborhood restaurant, where I had some delicious, and cheap, smoked salmon pasta. After lunch I went back to the information desk, where I joined a tour of ATLAS, which is one of the detector units of the Large Hadron Collider. The tour guide was a bit long winded, but getting to see the scientists at CERN conducting their research on the spot was very cool indeed. The ATLAS was a huge device, and we watched a video about its assembly, which took almost as much engineering know how as the LHC. After the tour I went back to the hostel.
The next two days, Sunday and Monday, were relatively uneventful. I spent most of my time in cafes doing work on the internet and catching up with my journal. This is, as I said, not a very exciting task to write about, so I will spare the details. On Sunday, though was Swiss National Day, and there were many fireworks to be had that night. The Swiss don't do national holidays very well, since they are less of a nation than a confederation, and so it is up to each municipality to decide how to celebrate. There is no speech from the Head of State, or parade in the capital (Bern), or anything of that sort. Geneva had decided that fireworks were in order, and I greatly enjoyed them. The following day, Monday (my last in Geneva) was a day off for government workers, and so I was precluded from doing any more interviews at WHO. As I said, I took the time to work online and work in my personal journal. Switzerland had been a good place to go, especially for my research, but I was ready for the next stop on my journey, Madrid.
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