Bikes, Bars and Hookers

Classes are in full gear at the start of the fourth week. We only have 14 weeks of class, but we go all the way through Christmas Eve, which is an absolute travesty in my opinion. Who ever heard of going to school on Christmas Eve? Not me.

I had my first ever presentation in French in front of my International Relations seminar last week. I hate reading presentations, so I tried to just talk to people and make eye contact with the class like I would do in an English presentation. It did not go quite as smoothly as it would have in English. My mouth got really dry, my armpits starting sweating, and I stumbled my way through the presentation. I got my point across, but I was certainly anything but the smooth talking presenter that I normally am. I will have to work on it, because I still have two more presentations this semester in my other two seminar courses.

Last weekend I went out to a bar with some friends I met this summer. My roommate offered to let me take his bike, so I took him up on the offer because the buses and trams take quite a while to arrive to where I wanted to go. I must have biked about 9 or 10 miles in total that night, but I cannot remember the last time I had so much fun on a bike. I am not really sure if I followed the proper biking rules of Geneva, but I tried to stay in the bike lane as much as possible. Then when the bike lane would disappear, I just kind of cruised in the middle of the road. That may have been the wrong decision, but the streets were relatively empty at 3 a.m.

We went out in a pretty dodgy part of town. Geneva has a rule that prostitution is legal as long as there is no third party involved (a.k.a. a pimp), and the area we were out in was more or less Geneva's red light district. The bar was pretty interesting too. There were a lot of girls who looked pretty manly, and after seeing the sizes of their calves, it becomes pretty apparent that they were not actually girls. But that is the life in free-thinking Geneva I suppose. If you do not want to see that, then go out in a different part of town.

This is my first Fall since 2005. As unmanly as this is going to sound, I really enjoy seeing all the leaves changing colors and falling off the trees. In Miami that does not happen. With the cold weather, out come the scarves. People here absolutely love scarves. I go to class, and everybody around me is sporting a scarf; even in class they do not remove the scarves. I have three scarves in my wardrobe. I think I need to up that number to at least nine to fit in around here.