My First Week
Well, it’s officially been a week of work out here… and what do I think? It’s pretty neat.
It kind of dawned on me yesterday that I walk from one town (I found out I actually live in a town called Prevessin) to another town (Ferney-Voltaire) and then I catch a bus that takes me from France to Switzerland… so I do go from a town to another town to another Country and back again every work day. It’s neat to think about it that way.
Work itself is neat… I’m pretty much the only IT person there so nobody really understands it when I cheer when I figure out a stored procedure or speak in nerd language. However, it does allow me to have creative freedom with what I do. So, I just sit there getting the rust out of the gears while the intoxicating tunes of Jill Scott, Lauren Hill, India.Arie, Digable Planets (currently on my mp3 player) massage my brain back into shape. I’ll admit, my programming doesn’t seem as sharp as it used to be but it’s coming back to me now. The people I work with are a hoot too… everyone’s a character and since everyone is from a different Country, they all have such interesting characteristics and accents. I must say, one of the things I like most about being here is that it’s like home, where it is more multicultural. The other day, on the bus home, the couple in front of me were speaking Kiswahili, the couple behind me were speaking Amharic, a small group of students were speaking chinese, and the rest of the people I could hear were speaking French… It was like having people from different corners of the world all crammed into this sardine can on wheels. I love just thinking about things like that on the bus rides. One of these days, I’m going to bust out my Kiswahili with somebody on the bus… I’ve learned quite a bit of it since I was in Tanzania.
Anyways, I just got home from the Saturday market in Ferney… picked up some tomatoes, strawberries, and of course Bread :). I think I’ll just take a walk around the countryside today. I’ll leave you a couple pictures of food… since that’s all that I’ve really been involved with out here.. hehe. Oh yeah, for all you haters out there, I’m slowly becoming un-vegetarian now… started eating fish (as seen in the picture) and I plan to be back to fully omnivorous before the end of summer. So you can stop calling me a hippie now 🙂
Tags: Europe
cheng.ev
June 16th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Hey well I’m happy to see that your workweek is going really well and that you like the people you work with. I guess that switzerland and France isn’t too bad a place to start eating meat either, so good choice on both career and joining us normals with meat eating again. Hopefully that doesn’t mean that I’ve gotta be a vegetarian, cause I mean I could be I just don’t really wan’t to. Best of luck.