Meet my people

So.....I don't really have a lot of stories to tell this week. I've been busy at work, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing after my contract's finished in exactly four weeks (yikes!), and I've been planning travels since I want to see as much as possible before I (might) leave in March. Oh, and I've been playing in the snow. It snowed last weekend for the first time all winter - thanks to the warm weather, there were flowers blooming all over the city up until about a week ago. Now everyone in Geneva is rushing to the mountains as fast as they can because the skiing's been so awful up until now.

Anyway, in lieu of interesting stories, I'll give you an introduction to some of my people here. A couple of weeks ago, a few friends and I had a get-together at my place to celebrate the new year, say good-bye to our friend Konsti and celebrate the fact that I've made it through the world for 24 years now & have lived to tell the tale. Since I never post pictures of my friends here, I thought I'd share a bit. Here's the Geneva gang:

Me, Stephan, Béatrice & Jean-Olivier


The lovely and talented Hélène:

Konstantine, who has sadly left us to go back to Vienna and finish his degree (pshaw I say...who needs an education really? His priorities are obviously all wrong.)

Another of the fantastic Québecois in Geneva, Daniel, who also happens to be the king of Romanian dance music sing-alongs:


I believe you're acquainted with the subject of this photo:

And finally, last but not least, the fantastic Jean-Olivier, who I'm so glad to have had the opportunity to spend quality time with while I've been in Geneva:

And that's it! Next weekend I'll be in London, but I promise to send a dispatch.

Big hugs,
Liz

Blame Canada

I just came across this video that Greenpeace & the South Park crew made last fall in response to Canada's refusal to support a UN-proposed moratoriam on bottom trawling.

Feel free to just enjoy the video, but if you want some background, here it is:

Bottom trawling is a fishing method where a huge net weighted with steel gates drags along the bottom of the ocean floor to scoop up bottom feeding fish. In the process, it also scoops and scrapes up other fish, plants, coral and everything that lives at the bottom of the sea. According to the UN, about 95% of damage caused to seamount floors is because of trawling, which is pretty horific given the tiny number of fish that trawlers actually catch - less than 1% of overall fish catch. So it's kind of like killing mosquitos with a nuclear bomb.

In the end, the moratorium that was proposed last fall didn't reach UN consensus, probably because of strong opposition by certain *cough cough* parties. Canada was happy.

Vivia Italia, part III
I just can't seem to stay away!

I had plans to go to Florence for New Year's, where J.O. was spending Christmas with his family. After my passport got stolen, I didn't think I would be able to go; however, it all worked out in the end. I was so happy to get to Florence, and I arrived Dec 31 bright and early after a 9 hour train ride. (Side note: night trains are totally the way to travel. They're cheap and you get a little couchette to sleep in, which is suprisingly comfortable. The conductors let you sleep through customs at any border crossings, and they wake you up in the morning with coffee and croissants. I am such a fan of the night trains.)

Here's a happy-sleepy Liz and a happy J.O., a little while after I arrived at the ungodly hour of 6:45am. Our my first day we walked around Florence, did some window-shopping and ate some gelato (yay!)










And then it was New Year's eve. Man oh man, the Italians love their fire-crackers, fireworks, and general merry-making. We had such a good time walking around the streets with thousands of other people, drinking wine, singing with drunk Italians (who suprisinly have a huge affinity for the White Stripes), and getting totally drenched with champagne at midnight. It was a great start to 2007!

On Tuesday, we decided that we wanted to visit the ocean, so we took the train to a small town in Tuscany called Viareggio. I love travelling in the winter - we were the only people on the beach! It was windy, but sunny and warm. In fact, while strolling around town I started fantasizing about buying a little house on the Italian Riviera and becoming a writer or something equally romantic. I could wear white linen, drink mojitos and start smoking cigars. I mean, how much fun would it be to live here:






The only drawback is that Italy tends to smell like sewer from time to time, at least in all the towns I've visited. And I've heard that it's much worse in places like Venice, where there's sewery water everywhere, and it seeps into the foundations of buildings. I guess the locals must just get used to it...they probably don't even smell it anymore. Meh - I'd still live there. What's a little sewer smell compared to a lifetime of ocean sounds, good food, great wine, and people saying "bambini" and "ciao ciao"?

After Viareggio, we went to Pisa to see the leaning tower. We made it just as the sun was setting and gave ourselves a whirlwind tour of the town. It's true - the tower really does lean, even more than it shows in this picture! As we expected, Pisa was totally touristy. I think I counted about a million of tiny marble replicas of the tower of Pisa for sale, and this isn't even tourist season.

On our last day, J.O., his parents and I all went to the Uffizi, Florence's most famous museum, to see Renaissance art. It was pretty spectacular, although I have confess that I can only look at so many paintings of the Madonna before my eyes glaze over. However, they also had a really great Leonardo da Vinci exhibit, focusing on his various inventions, his anatomy sketches and his work depicting one particular battle in Florence. I could have spent all day there, except for the hordes of elbowing people trying to make their way through the narrow exhibition space.

On another side note, during this trip, I learned one very important lesson. It's now been confirmed that I am totally addicted to Italian coffee. As much as I love strong Swiss espresso and the even stronger Turkish coffee they served in Tunisia, the cappuccino in Italy wins my heart, hands down. Italian coffee even beats Italian gelato, and sometimes I dream about the gelato here, because it's just that good. So you can see how important their cappuccino is to me. Sigh. I think I'm in love.

All in all, I had a really lovely New Year's. I'm so happy that I was able to travel and spend time with J.O. and his family in Italy. (So take that, guys who stole my passport - I win!) I hope you all had a fantastic start to 2007 and I wish you the best in the coming year!

Eid Mubarak - Christmas in Tunisia!

So my mom and I decided to head south for Christmas, to spend a week in Tunisia. Although the trip definitely ended on a decidedly more drama-filled note than I would have liked, overall we had a really great time. My mom was kind enough to share her pictures with me, since my camera was stolen, so that I, in turn, can share them with you all. Without further ado, I bring you Liz and Leslie's Christmas adventure:

La Marsa

This is where my mom and I stayed for our first two nights in Tunis. La Marsa is a pretty wealthy suburb of just north of Tunis, right along the Mediterranean. There are a lot of diplomats and expats living here, and some embassies pretty close by. We were lucky enough to stay in the empty summer apartment of some friends of my mom's, who live in Vancouver but are originally from Tunisia.

Although a little chilly in the winter (no heating or hot water!) its amazing location more than compensated - right on the edge of the Mediterranean. This was the view from about 10 metres from the apartment:

There were a lot of stray cats everywhere we went, but they seemed to especially love populating La Marsa. My mom wanted to feed them all. I made friends with a scraggly cat with a limp that lived right outside our apartment.

Sidi Bou Said

Sidi Bou Said is a town just north of Tunis, known for its spectacular view of the Mediterranean. Everyone we met told us that we absolutely had to go see it, so on our second day, we set off. In the course of our travels, we met a fantastic and hilarious ceramics-seller named Ramsay. After we'd concluded our ceramics-buying business, he gave us a tour of his bosses' private museum and then took the afternoon off to show us all around town. He also offered my mom 6 Ferraris for my hand in marriage, but I'm not holding my breath. (Apparently it's a really old Tunisian joke to offer to trade women for camels. Of course, there are some tourists who actually believe these stories - I think the locals really get a kick out of exploiting gullible foreigners.)

It started raining halfway through our tour, but we still were able to see magnificent views of the ocean, along with all of Tunis. Sadly my mom's camera ran out of batteries and mine has disappeared into the void, so I have no fun visual aids from the top of the town. I can, however, share my mom's pictures from the bottom of Sidi Bou Said:

Sousse

After two cold and rainy days with no hot water, we decided to head a few hours' further south, to the popular beach-side resort city of Sousse. We were hoping for sunshine. Sadly, we only found more rain. So we decided to make lemons into lemonade, and holed up in a fancy-schmancy 5 start hotel (with ridiculously discounted mid-winter rates), to pass the time with spa treatments, hot showers, Tunisian wine and buffet meals. Not a bad way to spend Christmas day which, incidentally, is also my mom's birthday.


We also ventured into Sousse's old walled city, or Medina, to shop in its legendary market. Although as a Canadian, I find it hard to get used to the popular Tunisian sales tactics of arm-grabbing, hand-waving, yelling, begging, and sometimes outright lying, I think my mom and I came out on top. It turns out, we're fabulous hagglers, especially as a mother-daughter team. And I even started to get used to the incessant shouts of 'la gazelle! la gazelle!', which is what Tunisian men call young eligible women.


El Jem

About an hour south of Sousse, El Jem is a tiny little town built right beside the ruins of an ancient Roman Colosseum. You step out of the train station, hang a right on the one main street, and there it is, right in front of you, looking completely incongruous.

But of course, it only looks out of place to my mom and I because we're new around here. Locals walk past like it's no big deal, not even bothering to glance up. Two thousand year old ruins don't phase them at all, maybe because there are so many scattered around the country.

Tunisia was part of the original Roman Byzantine empire, which is why you find Roman ruins all over the place. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see the ruins at the historic city of Carthage since our trip got a bit disrupted at the end, but the amphitheatre at El Jem more than made up for this.

It's unbelievably huge, and since it was low tourist season my mom and I practically had the place to ourselves, aside from a handful of other tourists. The whole place is a bit eerie - you can walk around the underground tunnels where they used to keep prisoners, Christians, and the lions to feed them to.

To make our way back north to Tunis my mom and I took a louage, a shared taxi, a private taxi, and then a train. I think the louage was my favourite. They're really common in Tunisia (and many parts of the world, I think) and are, in my opinion, a totally ingenious idea. A louage is essentially a shared long distance taxi, where you pay your money, get in the van, and when it's full, it takes off. We paid about 2.50 dinars each for an hour long ride and waited for about half an hour till fill the louage with the required 8 people, much less than the several hours we would have had to wait for a train. Our driver was an amazing multitasker - he drove like a madman, answered his cell phone every 5 min, bent over to find money in the change tray, swore as other drivers, and didn't even get us killed once!

The last two days

Once back in Tunis, our plan was to stay in a downtown hotel for our last 2 nights. We wanted to see the ruins at Carthage, eat couscous, and be close to the city center. However, our plans were thrown totally off kilter when I got mugged in a train, both our passports are wallets got stolen, and we had to spend our last couple of days going back and forth between the Canadian Embassy and various police stations, trying to get emergency visas to go home. All I can say is, thank god for two wonderful people we met in Tunisia, Sonia and Joe, who helped us out, took us in and yelled at the necessary people in Arabic for us. As the daughter and son-in-law of the friends whose apartment we stayed in, they had already been fantastic hosts; however, this went completely above and beyond.

I seriously heart these people:


And thus concludes this exciting episode of Liz and Leslie's Christmas adventure! Stay tuned for Liz's Italian New Year's adventure - coming soon to a blog site near you.

Much love,
Liz