Raclette, Le Pont, Nyon, and Givrins – February 6-12

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On Thursday we had a raclette dinner with all the host families in the Nyon castle. Raclette is delicious. For those of you that don’t know it is essentially just cheese and potatoes. They melt/brown the cheese under a heat lamp (a huge cheese wheel) and then scrape it off serving by serving onto the potatoes (see the pictures for a better idea of what it’s like). We all ate sooo many servings! Cheese overload (I didn’t know that was even possible).

This weekend we decided to be good students and stay in Geneva since we had a paper due the next week. Mine was about HIV/AIDS, and specifically AIDS orphans, as a threat to global security. It was actually really interesting to research and write! I had an interview with the HIV/AIDS advisor for Medecins sans Frontieres. Kind of anti-climactic I have to say. I don’t know what I was expecting, it was just an interview. For a long time I have had a secret plan to work for them in my future (okay, not exactly secret) so I of course was excited and nervous when the one expert that actually replied to me out of the many that I emailed was from MSF. It was interesting to see the building and the energetic atmosphere, and Dr. Lujan provided a lot of great information for my paper, but it was still, after all, just an interview.

While we’re on the subject of school, I’ll tell you a little about my French class. I lucked out – there are only 4 of us in my level and our teacher is great! She is very patient with our inability to pronounce anything correctly and does a good job of getting us to talk and review grammar. We have class 3 days a week for 3 hours each time (Wednesday and Friday afternoons we have off).

On Saturday I went with my host family to Le Pont to go ice-skating. It is in Switzerland but we had to drive in and out of France and through the Jura Mountains to get there. The drive was half the fun, winding through little towns in the snowy mountains. And the sun was even out! Ice skating was fun, but short-lived due to the cold and wind. The lake was 5 kilometers long and a surprising number of people were out there despite the cold – I would be curious to see how full it gets on a warmer weekend. The rental process was interesting – a number of people were just out on the ice with boxes and boxes of skates that they rented out by the hour. Parts of the lake had snow so it was kind of an adventure to skate around the snow so as to avoid becoming intimate friends with the ice itself when our skates got stuck in the snow and sent us flying. It was lots of fun and then we went to a little chalet for some hot chocolate and bison sausage. There was a bull bell hanging from a rafter. I’ve seen cow bells before, but this one was absolutely massive! I guess it makes sense so that you can hear it from far away, but I would hate to think of how much it weighed… Apparently the cows have smaller ones and the bulls have larger ones so you can tell when the bulls are coming from the deep ringing and get out of the way!

Sunday I went for a hike in the woods around Givrins with my middle host sister, Sabrina. It was a lot of fun and a nice sunny gorgeous day! Then of course I spent some time working on my paper before we had a movie night.

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Photos

Raclette dinner
My host mom and sister, and Erika and her host mom

Raclette cheese
Repeats, I know, but they go along with this entry...

Le Pont
Ice skating at the lake