Orchids for me!

Okay I lied. I didn't post on Saturday like I had promised. Mainly it was because we (and be we i mean Jorge) hadn't uploaded the pictures from Barcelona and I was procrastinating. Well the pictures are finally uploaded now but now I have to edit them which I should do by the end of the day (hopefully!).

I just wanted to write about a funny thing that happened before I forget it....

So the husband and I had come to an agreement before that the person that is home first would be the one making the dinner

(This would mainly apply to when we are both working or when I go back to school and am super busy)

So two Thursdays ago I had an appointment with Apple because my computer was acting up a bit and it ended up taking a couple of hours to get things uploaded and fixed. Jorge however got home a bit earlier than usual (around 6:00) and beat me home.

So according to our agreement he is supposed to make dinner, so he gives me a call to see how long I was going to take to get home and I tell him I am almost on my way and he asks me what I wanted him to make for dinner. I just tell him to surprise me and 10-15 minutes later I am out of Apple and waiting for the tram/bus to get home. By this point I am hungry because its about 7:30ish and I am thinking that I will have dinner waiting when I get home.

So I get a call from Jorge saying that he can't think of anything to make. I am two stops away from home and hungry and this does irritate me a bit because then I start thinking that if he can't handle dinner this once how is he supposed to do it on a daily basis when we go back to California. I am also half hoping that he was just kidding and he had in fact made dinner and just wanted to make me mad.

Well I walk into the apartment and no he was not kidding about not having made dinner. Well I wanted to be mad at him because it was his one turn cook mainly since we have been in Geneva but then he shows the flowers/plant he bought me while at the grocery store.

His explanation goes something like this:

Jorge: Well I didn't know what we had in the fridge (sidenote:and of course he didn't think about looking in the fridge either)... so I went to the store to buy stuff to make dinner but I was lacking imagination so I couldn' t think of what to make. So, instead I bought you these flowers so you wouldn't get mad at me.

And how am I supposed to get mad at that? So I let it slide this time and whipped up a quick dinner for the both of us but. He is a sneaky one.

I shall try to post the picture of the flowers today when I edit the ones from Barcelona

I am being lazy

It is raining cats and dogs outside. I don't think I will ever understand the swiss weather. One day it is hot like heck and the next day there is thunder and lightning and it's raining like crazy. Looks like it is going to be a very wet day today.

Anyhow I have been very lazy and haven't blogged anything in a while. As of right now my laziness hasn't gone away so I dont know if I will make a long blog (probably not) or if I will make one tomorrow. In this time, we did go to Barcelona which was tons of fun (post tomorrow I promise) and am currently attempting to make plans to go to Italy to see Edi because he is there right now.

Oh and we decided not to go with the apartment in Geneva, it was too expensive. But that still leaves us with no permanent apartment. I spent all day looking online if there are any potential apartments for us but no luck as of yet. Okay well I will continue either later today or tomorrow.

Swiss side or French side?

So for everyone back home, you probably dont know this but it is pretty much impossible to find housing in Geneva. There is like a 2% vacancy and there is tons of people coming in and out all the time so people are trying like crazy to find somewhere to stay, and Jorge and me are not the exception. When we first go here we were living in the French side in St. Genis de Pouilly, which we completely hated only because their transportation system kind of sucked. There was only 1 bus an hour, so if you missed it then you are pretty much screwed until the next one comes and hour later. And let me tell you Jorge and me (mainly my fault) nearly missed it plenty of times and had to run pretty much the whole way from the house we were staying in to the bus stop.

Here Jorge is waiting at the bus stop at posing for me in front on Champion

That and the fact that we were living in house were other CERN people were staying for random amounts of time made us decide to find a place as quick as we could so that we could have some privacy.
That is when we discovered that finding and apartment here is hard. We ended up getting an apartment (or actually studio) that is a bit small but enough room for the two of us in Meyrin, Switzerland, which is where we live now. Now, only thing is that since it is a CERN apartment they only allow you to be here for a maximum of 6 months and Jorge is scheduled to be here until at least October 2010 so in other words we need a place for longer than 6 months.
Which brings me to the point and where we are now. We met up with a couple on Sunday who also work at CERN and are from California that told us that they were leaving their apartment/studio next month and if we wanted to they could put in a good word to the landlord for us to try and improve our chances of getting the apartment (because it really is impossible to get an apartment unless you know people who are moving out). So we sent and email to the landlord and she wants to meet on Friday so that we can discuss details (which I think means we might have a good chance of getting it).
So I set up a list of pros and cons for the apartment:
Pros:
•it is in the Swiss side, which means better transportation
•it comes furnished
•it would mean we finally have somewhere stable and no more searching for housing
•it comes with tv (so I can finally have something to watch)

Cons:
•it is pretty expensive
•it doesn't come with an oven (okay not the end of the world and I could live without and oven but it would be nice if it had one)
•it doesn't come with a balcony so no more grilling for us
•We would not buy a car after all

So then I started reconsidering living in France because it is cheaper to live in France and I saw a place advertised so heres a list of Pros and Cons there:

French Place:
Pros:
•it is about half the rent of the other place
•we would be able to buy a car since we would save more money
•also comes furnished
•comes with internet

Cons:
•it is in the French side (I think biggest Con yet)
•there is crappy transportation there (although if we have a car perhaps it will be less of a big deal, but I haven't told you that parking in Geneva is a nightmare)

I have no idea what we are going to do. I guess we will talk about it more when Jorge gets home and we can finally make a decision before this weekend since we are leaving to BARCELONA this Friday and won't be back until Tuesday.

Here are a couple random pictures from Geneva:

This is Jorge and our friend Matt playing on these lifesize chess boards

This is us in Geneva when we explored it by ourselves for the first time

This is a super yummy Gelato that I had right by the lake. I still had long hair then!

Almost 2 months into our move

on our walk home to St. Genis de Pouilly, France
Well it is going to be 2 months since we first arrived in Geneva and somehow at this moment it doesn't feel like it has been that long. Ideally I should have started this blog 3 months ago so that Jorge and me could write down what we experienced and saw during our stay in Europe but because of mostly laziness I never got around to it. A lot has happened since we first arrived here and now that I think about it I do wish that we had written down our experience when we first got here. It was interesting to say the least.
From the time we set foot in Geneva things started off kind of rocky so we should have known that was to come for the first couple of weeks. Our first complication was trying to get a phone card to call home and let our parents know that we arrived okay. The task started out easily enough with us buying the phonecard but as soon as we attempted to dial is when we realized it wasn't as easy as we though. First the operator on the card was speaking french (which I know virtually nothing of) so I had no idea what was going on but I just knew the phone call wasn't going through. We tried telling the ladies at the window that the card didn't work and they were actually really helpful by trying to figure out what was wrong. Thirty minutes later they couldn't figure out what exactly was going on but told us that the lines must be down for that company and let us use their phone to call our families.
Our next task was to try and get to the house we were supposed to be staying at in the French side. We put all our crap in the taxi and gave him what we thought was the correct address and a general map of where the place should be and he drove us out to St. Genis Poully, France. Once we got there we realized that the address didn't really have an address and we were just kind of driving around random streets (which is no good since we were in a taxi and they charge an arm and a leg). We ended up knocking on doors and asking if they knew where the house we were going to could possibly be until we ran in to a very nice man who coincidently also worked at CERN and had some connections so he called a few numbers until he was able to reach someone who was able to give us the correct address. We finally arrived at the house ($76 dollars in taxi fare later!) and dragged our luggage to the room we were staying in upstairs and I proceeded to pass out. Jorge attempted to go to CERN to try and get himself registered but wasn't able to so he went back to the house we were staying in and then jetlag kicked his butt also and he passed out. We ended up waking up like at 9pm and realized we were starving since our last meal had been a cold pasterie and juice and yogurt we had gotten for breakfast on our flight over. Well apperantly the French or Swiss do not believe in having stores open past 7pm and our chances of buying anything to eat were pretty muched over. Although I don't know what good it would have done at that point if there was something open since we didn't know where anything was anyway. Well one of the people that was also living at the house was kind enough to offer us some of his potatoes. So we took some potatoes, some rice that was left over from a previous rommate and some consume (which is chicken bouillon) and made a sort of soup that was not exactly my best work but hey it was food and we were hungry.
The next couple of weeks were kind of pain since Jorge was not able to register because he needed a form signed from the US and we couldn't get our CERN ids without it and pretty much couldn't do anything without getting him registered. After getting Jorge registered things sort of started working themselves out.
In these two months we have already moved out of the house we were staying at and moved into a studio that isn't very luxurious but its at least a place for just the two of us thus making us both feel more comfortable. We have finally gotten internet so that I don't have to go to CERN everyday just to check my emails and have some connection to the outside world. We have by no means become fluent or close to semi fluent in French but we learn a bit more day by day but we shall see how that goes. We have travelled to a few places (which I will blog about more later). All in all its been an interesting couple of months.