What's been going on...

The Longhorn Slug

from my hike on the Saleve

The girls out out for Sharron's birthday

Me and Sharron

The Party

I know I haven’t written in a while—keeping up seems to fall by the wayside in the rush of all the other things that go on in a day. Here’s a rundown of the things that have been going on lately:

--We’ve started potty training Henry. He needs to be out of diapers by the time we go to Hong Kong, so we have to get it done. I didn’t realize how much and how often a child can pee—this morning, Henry peed twice on the toilet and twice on the floor, all in about 2.5 hours. I was amazed.

--Alessio has learned to say my name, but it comes out as Bitsy instead of Betsy, which is really cute. He learns new words every day, and he’s always trying to imitate Henry.

--Last week, Henry said he loves me 'this much' and held his arms open as wide as he could.

--Two weekends ago I went to the Lake Parade, which is basically a parade in the afternoon of floats with DJs playing techno and mobile bars. In the evening, the stages and bars all stopped and set up next to the lake, where all of the revelers (me included) could dance and drink all night and into morning. It rained all night, which made things feel very elemental and a little wild, not to mention cold on the bus ride home. A short video of one of the stages is below...

--My food experiences have been interesting lately. On Thursday night, my friend Pamela, who is Chilean, cooked Polish food for Sharron and me. On Friday night, I went out to a Chilean restaurant with Pamala, Sharron, 2 French girls and an Italian guy. On Saturday night I had Lebanese tapas, before going to a festival which had a booth trying to serve authentic Mexican margaritas. Oh this international city.

--The festival referenced above is the pre-festival leading up to the big Fete de Geneve. This pre-Fete involved a stage for live music and outdoor bars erected all around. The actual Fete begins August 1^st and lasts 2 weeks—there will apparently be even more bars and 5 stages of live music, playing every night of the week. I’m really hoping for fantastic weather and some fantastic bands. I’m going to use this to cope with my sadness over not being able to go to ACL Fest this year in Austin.

--I’ve met some interesting, fun people lately, but I’m still making an effort to expand my friend group. It was suggested to me that I find someone to do a language exchange with—we would get together every so often and spend some time speaking French, so that I could practice, and spend some time speaking English, so that the other person can practice. This is obviously good for developing my French, but also is a good way to meet some local people. It’s something I’m going to look into.

--European men are very often creepy and overly aggressive. I don’t know why this is, but it’s by turns appalling, funny and/or gross.

--I miss home sometimes—the familiarity, the ease of always knowing where I’m going and what there is to do, and knowing that my family and friends are close. But, I’m really starting to feel settled here; to feel like this is my life now, not some blip that will soon be over. It’s nice. I wish my family and friends could be here for me to share it with them.

That’s about it for the last little while. I’ll do my best to do better at posting, but life is rarely predictable with toddlers running about J