Update
Looking North from my bus stop at Veyrier-Douane to Annemasse, a decent-sized French town that I very briefly visited just after moving into my apartment.
Here's some friends I sat with at a section fondue last Wednesday. Professor DuBois (my "Integration of Europe" teacher) is certainly awing the young man next to him with his incredible linguistic skills (he's fluent in at least 7, and I guess you have to know at least as many to study the multi-lingual European Union).
Here's some more friends at the end of the table. Our "restaurant" is actually a sauna/swimming area along a narrow peninsula that juts out into the lake and ends with the lighthouse you've seen in some of my other pictures. I don't suppose they get too many customers who want to swim these days, so they've converted the place into a restaurant.
My consternation at finding seeds in the grapes in our dessert launched us into a lively conversation about genetically modified foods and their acceptance in the US, while Europeans tend to still be leery of them. I was pushing the frontiers of my vocabulary as I attempted to explain that a suitable compromise has been found. One can simply cross-breed (rather than actually manipulating the genes) major varieties of vegetables/grains/fruits with certain wild variety counterparts that have desirable attributes to contribute, such as more vitamins, or resistance to some blight, etc. etc.
I'm not sure if I made myself clear: one of my friends asserted that in 10-15 years, when I started growing an ear out of my elbow or whatever, I would be forced to admit that the Europeans were right all along to put warning labels on GM food and avoid it in general. Ha. Ha. So be it. I love those super-huge strawberries too much to defect to the European stance on GM food.
Wow! The Alps on Saturday morning on our drive up to Lausanne and then on to Bern. It would have been a better picture had I not been in a moving car, but you get the idea. The whole drive is just about as beautiful: rows of crops following the curvature of the hills in the valleys nearer to the road, forests in the higher places and then the mountains up beyond. There are scattered concentrations of houses throughout, some part of little villages with church steeples jutting up from a central high point. I saw a few castles from afar, and look forward to visiting a few some day.
SNOW! In Bern,with a group of friends from church, I got to see snow for the first time in a few years. Here's the closest thing we have to snow in Louisiana.
Another beautiful day in Geneva. This is the view from the porch of my school and I took this photo while we had a short break during my Intl Law class. Dr. Clapham is an excellent teacher, but as he attempts to give us an even more "nuanced" understanding of Intl law, I end up feeling that things are even more complicated than the already "not simple" explanations in the texts. Admittedly, increased proximity to reality tends to increase our perception of its complexity, but what I wouldn't give for an Einstein of International Relations that would disperse the current clouds of pedantry with brilliant, straightforward, and comprehensive truths. But I suppose that might put a lot of clever people out of work. ; )
Here's some friends I sat with at a section fondue last Wednesday. Professor DuBois (my "Integration of Europe" teacher) is certainly awing the young man next to him with his incredible linguistic skills (he's fluent in at least 7, and I guess you have to know at least as many to study the multi-lingual European Union).
Here's some more friends at the end of the table. Our "restaurant" is actually a sauna/swimming area along a narrow peninsula that juts out into the lake and ends with the lighthouse you've seen in some of my other pictures. I don't suppose they get too many customers who want to swim these days, so they've converted the place into a restaurant.
My consternation at finding seeds in the grapes in our dessert launched us into a lively conversation about genetically modified foods and their acceptance in the US, while Europeans tend to still be leery of them. I was pushing the frontiers of my vocabulary as I attempted to explain that a suitable compromise has been found. One can simply cross-breed (rather than actually manipulating the genes) major varieties of vegetables/grains/fruits with certain wild variety counterparts that have desirable attributes to contribute, such as more vitamins, or resistance to some blight, etc. etc.
I'm not sure if I made myself clear: one of my friends asserted that in 10-15 years, when I started growing an ear out of my elbow or whatever, I would be forced to admit that the Europeans were right all along to put warning labels on GM food and avoid it in general. Ha. Ha. So be it. I love those super-huge strawberries too much to defect to the European stance on GM food.
Wow! The Alps on Saturday morning on our drive up to Lausanne and then on to Bern. It would have been a better picture had I not been in a moving car, but you get the idea. The whole drive is just about as beautiful: rows of crops following the curvature of the hills in the valleys nearer to the road, forests in the higher places and then the mountains up beyond. There are scattered concentrations of houses throughout, some part of little villages with church steeples jutting up from a central high point. I saw a few castles from afar, and look forward to visiting a few some day.
SNOW! In Bern,with a group of friends from church, I got to see snow for the first time in a few years. Here's the closest thing we have to snow in Louisiana.
Another beautiful day in Geneva. This is the view from the porch of my school and I took this photo while we had a short break during my Intl Law class. Dr. Clapham is an excellent teacher, but as he attempts to give us an even more "nuanced" understanding of Intl law, I end up feeling that things are even more complicated than the already "not simple" explanations in the texts. Admittedly, increased proximity to reality tends to increase our perception of its complexity, but what I wouldn't give for an Einstein of International Relations that would disperse the current clouds of pedantry with brilliant, straightforward, and comprehensive truths. But I suppose that might put a lot of clever people out of work. ; )
posted by Ben at 3:18 PM
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