I write this from (checks in-flight screen) 33,000 feet, 1,638 miles from Geneva and 2306 miles from NYC.
Yesterday, our last day, I first walked into town to buy more coffee pods and a selection of pastries (Simon asked for a baguette of his own instead). Then we asked the kids where they wanted to eat for lunch and dinner.
Leo chose the Indian restaurant for lunch. I told the waiter that Indian food in France wasn’t spicy enough, and he brought me a little dish of a hot-chili condiment to stir into my chana masala. Perfection! We also ordered cheese naan, and that was interesting—we expected a stuffing like paneer, but instead it was something unctuous and mild. French cheese? Do not know.
Leo returned his rental bicycle, and we all agreed to consider renting a bicycle for Leo on future trips to anywhere he could conceivably use it to get around.
Mark took another hike. I cleaned out the fridge. We opened a bottle of wine we still had in the fridge and drank it. We all packed almost all our stuff, Mark weighing the bags on a portable luggage scale and moving things about as needed to keep under the weight limits.
For dinner Simon chose the mead place, L’Hydromel, with the American-style smashburgers and fries on the menu. Funny, isn’t it, that our last two meals in France should be food of a sort we can easily get at home? But let me tell you, my double smash cheeseburger was good. As were its fries and salad. It would have been completely at home at our favorite bar-and-grill places in Minneapolis. Sometimes a burger is what hits the spot.
I did have a glass of mead. Theirs is excellent and it is harder to find in the twin cities.
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Now that I am actually on the plane, especially since there will be a second plane, I am eager to get home. Milo has put food in our fridge: milk, yogurt, cheese, deli meat, and (he added) some cold fried chicken. I still have about 12 hours to go before stumbling into our house, and the thought of my own bed entices me.
Driving to Geneva this morning was a little hair-raising, just because we had to do a weird maneuver where we returned the rental car in the French sector of the airport, but needed to depart from Switzerland. Geneva is a weird city, a major city in a little arm or tentacle of Switzerland that protrudes into France, surrounded by French border. Switzerland isn’t EU, so it’s like a real border; it is in the Schengen area, so you can drive across easily, but customs is necessary for some cargo; the infrastructure of checkpoints and fencing is still around.
The Geneva airport runways are just barely inside Switzerland; leave the runway in an emergency landing and you might well skid to a stop in French fields. The airport terminal buildings are all physically located in Switzerland too. But they’ve worked out some kind of deal with France: there is a “French Sector” of the Geneva airport that functions as a little sealed-off bit of France. It has a rental car return, which was crucial for us as we rented the SUV in Nice and had to return it in France, or at least in “France.”
At least from the direction we were driving, we entered the Switzerland peninsula first (sailing through the first customs point), then executed a series of sharp turns that took us under the runways, back up into France, through another customs point, then back going the opposite direction on the same road under the runway—now in a sort of tunnel of barbed-wire fence. It was really giving West Berlin, as the road was physically in Switzerland but legally, I guess, French.
Mark maneuvered the SUV beast into a car return slot. I picked up the courtesy phone and figured out in Franglais where to return the key. We walked in… Mark checked us in with his phone so we’d have boarding passes (we’d read that you needed them in hand to do what we were about to do)… and we followed signs to a door marked Toute Sortie Definitive and just walked out of France.
I guess the main reason that Geneva has the French sector is that the airport is a major hub, so lots of people fly from French cities to other French cities by connecting through Geneva. The sealed-off French sector allows these passengers to get off their plane, find their gate, and get on the next plane without having to go through Swiss customs or passport control. While we were eating sandwiches in the airport bar before our flight, we could watch passengers crossing over our head in a sort of glass tunnel that I am pretty sure was “France.”
Something to tell MJ about, to file away under “interesting examples of commercial/civic interior architecture.”
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Not much else to report, although this has been a pleasant way to kill some time on the flight. I wonder if I can keep this up at home? Probably not every day; writing will be competing with exercise for my morning motivation and energy.
I wonder what I’ll write about? I’m not sure.
I let blogging slide in part because the stuff that was occupying my mind for a while there was largely stuff I didn’t want to put out into the public, and I also had this sense that I needed to be more careful with my half-formed thoughts.
It isn’t prudent, I think now, to test and refine them by exposing them publicly and seeing what reactions and replies come back from just anyone. Someone might shame you and call you out for them, of course, and maybe you don’t want to do that for some thoughts you are not committed to because they’re still developing. Or you might go viral, which is its own problem if you don’t particularly want to, even if you get a really positive response.
But I think the most important reason to be a little more cautious about just throwing stuff out there is that you might inadvertently be thoughtless, careless. You might feed the disinformation machine, if you toss off some theory about who did what to whom, or repeat something that sounded plausible, without really checking. You might perform a clinical analysis of the right and wrong thing to do in a difficult situation—but you might forget to think about the real people who face such situations, and fail either to couch your discussion with appropriate sensitivity and humility, or to consider whether you ought to consult some of them before opining, or whether you ought to opine at all (perhaps it’d be better to elevate a variety of other people’s words). You might tell a story that rightfully belongs to someone else, betray a trust, give away too much.
I once years ago wrote a blog post about a local news article that mentioned a local couple I didn’t know personally. I literally don’t remember what the story was about. One day, multiple years after I’d written the post, a person mentioned in the story contacted me and asked if I would please take it down, because my blog post was one of the first hits when someone googled their name. I did take it down, because I didn’t have any emotional investment in this one-off post about local news. They hadn’t done anything wrong or shameful, certainly nothing that deserved exposure, they were just tired of the post showing up in search results. Even the original newspaper article didn’t show up anymore.
I’ve never forgotten that, just because it was a reminder that things we write that are just another day of content to us, even innocuous-seeming content, might actually bother someone and feel like a problem to them. This isn’t an argument not to write posts that are reasonably critical of public figures—that can be important speech in a country where discussion is the best way to find consensus—but it is a reminder that it is always important to remember the real people you’re writing about, and the real people who will read what you say and maybe take it to heart; and decide what’s worth saying in the light of all those people. Could be an argument for or against hitting publish. But it isn’t good to forget that the people matter.
So I hope to find a balance, be true, even biting if necessary, but not careless. That seemed really hard for a while. I might be ready to try again.
bearing blog 