No sooner did we get back to Switzerland than are we leaving again! The week has as usual gone by really fast, and we leave for Lugano in the Italian part of Switzerland this Sunday. First a sidenote regarding food, since that’s a subject I love to talk about. One of my new favorite things here is caramel pudding or caramel flan. If you go to a grocery store in the States you’ll usually see an aisle or at least small wall dedicated to yogurt. Well, here, they have that as well as a small wall dedicated to desserts. This isn’t just Jello pudding snacks my friends, this is vanilla chocolate and caramel flan, plus all those flavors of pudding, and a whole bunch of other desserts that come in little plastic cups just like yogurts. It’s pretty much the most delicious thing ever. I was also talking to my host mom today about pumpkins, and she was telling me how sometimes people will carve out the pumpkins then make pumpkin soup and serve it in the empty pumpkin. In November she’ll be making pumpkin soup and other fall goodies and selling them below the church in Nyon to benefit missions.
To add to the cool stuff my host mom does (if I didn’t mention it already, she makes her own jam and honey, in addition to our little garden and the awesome tarts she makes… turns out she learned how to cook from going to L’école d’hotelière when she was young. She wanted to be a nurse but was to young to go to nursing school when she graduated so her dad told her to go to hotel school for a couple years, which includes like cuisine and cooking lessons and stuff)… while I am gone this week she will be en faisant du tour au vélo, or biking to Vienna with this other little old lady that I met. I was pretty much amazed… I mean Renate is definitely over 65 and I’m sure her friend was at least 70, and the two of them are just biking to a city in Germany and then Vienna for the week. Tonight we had fish for dinner and I actually liked it – it didn’t taste like fish at all. We also had it with a Vaudoise (Vaud is the canton I live in… sort of like a state if you were to translate it to a U.S. equivalent) vegetable that sort of had the texture between an onion and a potato, but more onion-like I think. Anyway at first I didn’t really like it but then I realized that what I didn’t like was the sauce it was cooked in, which tasted distinctly of tarragon. The vegetable itself I think doesn’t have much taste, but I ate it even in the sauce because it wasn’t that bad, I just didn’t prefer it. In addition to my acquirement of taste for fish, I’m also pretty excited that I’m starting to appreciate wine. It’s rather disappointing though because I won’t be old enough to go wine tasting in Napa when I get back – how much does that suck?
This week has been rather unexciting compared to Paris, but we have done a few interesting things. We’ve had a series of briefings at the UN. Monday the Deputy Director of UNDP (UN Development Programme) talked to us, followed by someone who worked at UNHCR (UN Human Rights Commission… gotta love all these abbreviations, right?). Tuesday we had a couple guys talk to us from UNCTAD (UN… I don’t know what it stands for but basically it has to do with trade and econ). Of course I really enjoyed that lecture because it was econ and development related, but I think the speakers did a good job of engaging us in the talk as well, since even people who don’t usually like econ were interested. Now that I think about it I also had some kind of Vaudoise specialty sausage this week that I thought was okay but didn’t love. It was pretty awkward to eat because you can’t eat the skin so I was like scraping off the inside of this sausage lol.
Wednesday we just had a review session and used the day for research… And today I signed up for a WTO Public Forum on Harnessing Globalisation so I went to that instead of our last UN sessions with humanitarian workers. It’s a two-day forum but I was only able to attend the morning session today since I had French in the afternoon. It was a pretty cool experience, I felt so important walking into the WTO with all these other real workers, lol. I met a guy from Britain who lives in Spain with an American wife and works in trade in services, and a girl from Costa Rica who does something related to trade… I felt so stupid though because when everyone was talking the first thing they did was exchange business cards, but I didn’t have one. Not that I know what my business card would say… Ashley Carreon, student? LOL but hopefully I will have cards to exchange soon enough. The conference was pretty big, it brought together “all parts of civil society” IE people from all types of organizations and business that had to do with trade, and then of course students like myself. We got to use the cool earpiece things that you probably see people with like in the UN and basically any international organization, and at first I was really confused when the speaker started talking and I couldn’t hear anything. But you put the earpiece on your ear and then pick a channel and you can hear what he’s saying in Spanish, French, or English (in our case… in the UN there are much more languages! 7 official ones, actually). Anyway that was pretty exciting. At the opening session the WTO lead guy (I don’t know his official title), President of Finland, Minister of Foreign Affairs in Liberia, and a Dean from a university in Singapore each talked for like half an hour about globalization, trade, and poverty… I thought they all had pretty optimistic attitudes about what trade can do to reduce poverty but I guess that’s partly because of the subject of the forum, the fact that most of them were officials, and the fact that we were at the WTO after all. Tomorrow I plan to go to a couple of the sessions about individual topics that will be more like discussions; they should be more interesting. Anyway, now that I’ve talked your ear off I should probably shower and work on my “short essay” IE 12-page essay that is due on Monday! Bisous (kisses)!
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