Sunday, May 29, 2011

PS5 Highlights, WHA, Mont Blanc and Bern Temple

Soooooorry I've been MIA. It's a little crazy over here, but excellent. We're loving every second, and pinchin our pennies like crazy cuz everyone else must be bajillionaires here. Ie: groceries cost 3x as much as Provo... yikes. But don't get be wrong, it's gorgeous and fun and different and I am making friends with people from all over the world, and I love it. :) I've been utilizing the photoshop program Jordan gave me for graduation last year. I messed with some of my favorites (you've seen most of them) and thought I'd throw them on here--

Notre Dame, Paris

The Louvre

In a park just past the Louvre

You know this one!


 

Probably my favorite part of the Paris trip-- drawing the Nike of Samothrace!

So gorgeous.

The Palace of Versailles... 

Eiffel Tower Round 2

A night in with yummy French pastry desserts

Back in Geneva-- with the Jet d'Eau







You can see the Jet d'Eau in the back if you look closely

Biking around Lake Geneve

LDS Temple in Bern-- we just went yesterday!

Well, those are some of the highlights so far. This week there is a national holiday on Thursday, so I'm taking Friday off as well and we're going with a bunch of other intern friends to Cinque Terre, Pisa, and Florence. It will be a whirlwind, but it should be fun! Here's a pic of us with Davina and Pascal, some of the friends we'll be driving with. We had them over for dinner to plan the trip!


As for Public Health related stuff.... well, the WHO has lived up to its reputation. It's a bureaucracy. Though a well-intentioned one, which is definitely a good thing. I really like Director General Margaret Chan, who seems to really be focused on impacting individual lives, and trying to facilitate a working relationship between top-down/bottom-up approaches. Probably my favorite part of the World Health Assembly was when, in a Q&A at a technical meeting, one of the delegates accidentally addressed her as "Director General Margaret Thatcher." Boy, was that a choice moment! Everyone was in tears. :)

Here's one of me with some fellow interns at the World Health Assembly, in the Assembly Hall of the UN:

As for Jordan, he has been very busy keeping our flat in order, studying for the GRE, and training for his upcoming marathons. He signed up for a marathon that runs up the base of the Matterhorn, at Zermatt.

No, I'm not talking about Disney's Matterhorn:
 
 That's in sunny California.

I'm talking about this Matterhorn:



Where hopefully he won't run into one of these:

We'll just hope Disney didn't get it right, huh? Anyway, Jordan is awesome and training all over the place, and regularly runs up the Saleve, a mountain range that sits right behind us in France. 

Here you can see it behind the Jet d'Eau
 


And just last week the owner of the house we're living in asked Jordan if he wanted to come up for the afternoon to their Chalet just outside Chamonix, a town at the base of Mont Blanc. Of course he accepted, and said that running up there (he went for about 3 hours) was completely breathtaking. Here are a few pictures he was able to snap while up there:





As a result of all this running around and hiking, his feet have been permanently chaco-fied:



He has also been busy climbing in the bouldering gym in the house :)





And last but certainly not least, we were able to join our LDS English Ward (church group) on a trip the the LDS Temple in Bern, Switzerland yesterday. It was, per usual, beautiful! The session was done in Italian, so I left off my translator headphones and did the whole thing in Italian! It was wonderful. I love that language! :)

On the bus to Bern

In front of the Bern Temple!