Hey, let's go to Switzerland!

Yesterday I went to Geneva Switzerland with a German exchange student that I know (Christian).  We had a  YFU reunion last weekend, and I was like hey, let's go to Switzerland!  Originally we would have been 3, but the other girl (American) ended up having something to do with her host family.  Christian came to my town Friday, we hung out in town for the evening and then early Saturday morning we left for Geneva!  It was about an hour and a half of travel on the train.  When we got there, we walked a ways to get to the Palais des Nations, an area that includes the seat of the UN  (didn't get to go inside but had a hundred or more flags to see in front!), some other fancy buildings, and the Intl. Museum of the Red Cross, our destination.  We spent some time there, and it was pretty interesting.  Afterwards we took the tram into downtown and managed to find the St. Pierre's (Peter I think..) cathedral.  It was pretty from the outside like the other buildings in 'Old Town' Geneva, but not as exciting inside.  We walked around some more looking for food and then we found a nice little restaurant right on the edge of Lake Leman (Lake of Switzerland).  Had some pizza and then set off again!  It was hard to be ready to leave the restaurant, because it was SOOO cold outside.  Really, very cold!  We walked to the Museum of Art and History, then to an old house called Maison Tavel that was actually tiny and took us about 245 seconds to visit.  Walked through a couple stores, and then we took the tram a little ways to try to find the Museum of Ethnography (Geneva has lots of little parks to visit, not just museum, but it was so frozen that the museums were a much better bet!)  It turned out the Museum was closed, and has been for a while judging by the walls and construction around it.  Instead we went to Starbucks and kept warm for the hour before it was time to go back to the train station to head home.
 
Funny story. Starbucks was packed, it was hard to find a place to sit.  Finally we were able to sit down across a table from a man and woman speaking Greek (don't worry, we asked first!).  We had been talking English, well, Franglish since we mixed French words in every few sentences, all day.  All of a sudden the couple across from us started talking English.  Okay, whatever.  A minute or two later though, they lapsed into German!  Now they were just showing off, I figured.  Of course Christian understood everything, and he looked up and smiled at the guy, who then realized he could understand.  He told me later that, in German, they were talking about how it's so hard to know what country people are from-trying to figure out where Christian and I were from.  So we started talking to them and they were really nice.  The woman is Greek, and she knows English and some German.  The man was German, and speaks English, French, and some Greek.  It was cool to talking to them, and it just goes to show, you never know who you might meet!
 
Let's see, what else is new.. This week is going to be a busy or at least mildly stressful one, because we have a Bac Blanc at school.  The Bac is the big set of tests at the end of high school to see if you have to redo the year or if you pass/graduate.  The Bac Blanc is a 'practice' test, but we still get graded on it to see how we're doing.  Here's my test schedule:  (you may want to sit down..)
Monday: 2 hours of litterature in the morning, 3 hours of English in the afternoon
Tuesday: No school for the students to visit colleges
Wednesday morning: 4 hours of philosophy
Thursday: 4 hours of history/geography, and then regular classes in the afternoon
Friday: regular class
Written out like that, for you it probably doesn't sound that bad, but these tests are all written.  No multiple choice or fill in the blank!  For lit. I'll have 2 questions to respond to in 2 hours, philosophy is one dissertation in 4 hours, history is 2.5 hours responding to one question, and then 1.5 hours filling in a map completely from memory on a subject like the Mondialisation or the Superpower of the US.  For the map, we don't even get the legend!  It's up to us to remember everything that should be on the map, and then to fill it in.

After this week though, I'll be halfway through my exchange!  That's why I had the reunion last weekend-it's the 'halfway and it's still hard' moment.  Don't get me wrong, there's people who are having a peachy time and everything's great, but most of us have little bugs we still are working out.  The reunion was good because it made us realize, it's NORMAL, there's others with the same kind of issues!  So that was reassuring.  We also ate good again!  The Americans didn't represent our desserts very well.. There's 3 of us in this area, 1 brought her dessert, 1 forgot to make a dessert and bought a French one, and I made apple crisp but then forgot it in the fridge.  My host family got to eat it though!
 
The weather last week was really good.. not too cold, not rainy.  I think I made the mistake of telling someone from home that 'the weather's great' because the last couple days, it's been freezing!  It was really windy at Geneva and in addition to the cold, it was unbearable to stay out in the cold.

That's all for now, talk to you later!