Part XI of XII of the interregnum: Geneva's underbelly

Dear Gentle Reader,

It's the last week of the e-interregnum!

I keep saying that I live in Gotham. 

I might even write about that, one day. But not today.

While I have not been offering written fluff, for three weeks, I have been providing a pictorial view of the underbelly of cities. 

Well, a view of only one city prior to this week. 

But, today, a third city. Today, Geneva.

Geneva (Genebra in Italian, Genève in French, Genf in German) is a fantastic city and was the previous stomping ground of your humble scribe, your Heroine, and your Hero. But the humble scribe has no time to write until May 18, as an e-interregnum is currently in effect as previously noted here.

So, instead, a head-level look at the popular art. And by popular art, I mean art by the populous. 

By the people.

A series of graffiti shots.

Your humble scribe may add commentary after May 18. We'll see. But, till then, each picture counts as 1000 words.

Tschuess,

Chris

As per always, 

on every post, 

on this blog, 

putting the mouse over the picture reveals the captions.

And these postings are all automated, 

as your humble scribe will not be back until 18 May.

But, 

I will be keen

to read 

what 

YOU

choose

to say.

Avoriaz and mates

Dear Gentle Reader,

So, you go to Europe. 

You do some banking in Geneva. You buy some chocolate. And some cheese. 

OK, you buy a lot of cheese and a lot of chocolate. And a lot of wine to wash it all down.

Then, obviously, you head into the Alps with your mate.

Your mate who is a photographer. And a graphic artist.

And he sends you back photos of him, and you, looking cool. Well. Him looking cool.

And then he takes photos of you, on skis. On flat ground. After you have been shuschhing and swooshing all day.

Makes you want to reevaluate your friendship, no?

These photos were taken with a cell phone from Avoriaz. Avoriaz gets about 8 meters (24 feet) of snow each year.

Avoriaz is part of the Portes du Soleil resort... 13 joined resorts, 650 km of marked runs, and 230 lifts, located in and across 14 valleys.

That translates to great skiing and lots of it. More runs than you can do in a week of hard skiing with no duplication. (Even though you have to tow your friend on a snowboard on the flatter traverses...)

(Note who has skis on in the photo...) 

(And that jacket? Mountain Equipment Co-op. 22 year old goretex and it is still going strong. I have no idea why your Heroine keeps bugging me to replace it. It works.)

(A further aside on Mountain Equipment Co-op... That brand is how Canadians spot each other around the world.) 

As you can see from the photos, the views in the French Alps are pretty nice when you do stop for a rest. 

One of the fun things about Avoriaz is skiing back and forth between Switzerland and France all day. 

Sure, it costs more, but you get to make a series of quick turns and then blame imperfections, when you gaze back, on the host country. 

Like what? Like "Ooh, you can see that when I was in France the higher tax rate was pulling at my wallet, which is why that series of turns were not Warren Miller perfect and symmetrical..."

These things seem amusing while skiing in the French Alps because of the food and beverage stops. And you can forgive the French their attitude and their higher taxes when you drink their wines and eat the food their better chefs prepare...

In Canada, I would not stop skiing until the lifts closed. In Europe, my partners usually want a break. 

With Emyr that break would be just after we arrive... but then Emyr is good to go.

But, this stopping is OK because there are great places to stop for rests when you ski in the Alps.

Here is a map of the ski section of the resort (le piste). 

In the first part of the map image, the immediately visible portion, you may note 33 restaurants. Some are just OK, some are culinary masterpieces.

Ski in. 

Ski or wobble out.

I actually thought this was barbaric when I first came to Europe. 

Stop skiing? To eat? Or to drink? It is called aprés ski for a reason, guys...

But on my first stop, I was converted.

And they say converts are always the most strident...

Tschuess,

Chris

Postscript: 

Emyr is the guy who saved me from the egg sacs of the Spiders of the Apocalypse.

And we're back... Mea culpa

Hello Gentle Reader,

And we're back... mea culpa... Or should that be mea culpa, we're back?

Venice was fabulous. Bremen and Hamburg, on our return, also fabulous.

And there are still stories from Cambodia rattling around.

Where to start?

First, sorry for not hosting last week's my town Monday with the effable (by reading, and that is meant to be the opposite of ineffable) Junosmom.

There were a series of mini-disasters. One critical, the rest less.

All disasters, however, contrived to keep your scribe away from his virtual tablets. For techies out there, the option for e-inscription of epistles was deconfigured.

Such as?

Well, the mouse and keyboard for the desktop in Bremen stopped working. At about the same time that all stores closed. So typing in a new story was made more difficult, if not impossible. The critical issue here was that this was the desktop of the inlaws which your scribe had just jumped in front of. And it worked before...

Then there were laptop issues.

Then Blackberry issues.

Your humble scribe is happy to say that his Nokia's Internet capability seems to work. How "Blogger" works via Nokia, however, is an utter mystery. Compared to standard eschatological mysteries the Nokia interface is possibly far more ineffable (the opposite of effable), if not graver.

Your vaguely disconcerted scribe, about three days later, discovered that he also had not managed to turn the Internet connection off.

Speculation on your scribe's contribution to a private telecommunication bail-out plan, for these trying economic times, is intense.

In the short term, this may make the Nokia Internet issues graver than the eschatological issues. But, I hasten to add, only in the short term... nervously glancing over shoulder for lightning... And only between your scribe, your Heroine, and your Hero Pommes who is still wondering why not even one bottle of Piemonte Gaja wine was earmarked for his sole consumption.

That, in whole, is your scribe's excuse for not laying out more (any) coin(s or paper or plastic) in Internet cafes in Venice. Well, that and the fact that there were paintings and buildings and cheeses and wines all to be devoured...

But, as you can see from the introductory picture, we are now back in Hong Kong. So communication can re-commence.

I have mentioned before how Hong Kong is largely uninhabited and that the inhabited parts are quite densely packed with people.

Here is a shot from the plane of the part of Hong Kong near where your scribe, Heroine, and Hero normally live...

Sorry for the loss of clarity, there was some cloud between the ground and your scribe.

Also, it was really tricky to clean the outside of my window. Airline stewardesses start panicking when you try to use that handily positioned door.

A dirty window is an emergency for a photographer who cannot find the "down" button for the window controls. And I could not find any controls for my window. And the door was handily labelled "emergency"...

Even when your scribe pointed towards his squeegee-window-cleaning-device to reassure the airline stewardess that he was doing everyone a favour, no reassurance was, apparently, derived by the stewardess.

It is a strange world. Your scribe was not even asking for spare change to clean the window. As your Hero, Pommes, is wont to say, concatenating the Doors, people are strange.

Anyway, for comparison, here is the backside of Hong Kong island... (id est, the side that we do not see from our apartment windows.)

But planes are good for more than just taking photos. They are also good for transportation.

Some esrom, fol epi (with figs!), gorgonzola, leerdammer, tilsiter, appenzeller, pikantje gouda, grana trentino, reggiano, cambozola, chaumes, saint aubray, tommes de savoie, delice d'argental, fontina, three varieties of fresh chevre, and four varieties of brillat-savarin all made their way back to a new home in Hong Kong.

(Well, the Perigord truffle encrusted brillat-savarin is already finished...)

Along with the cheeses six wines, German breads, and a six-part selection of chocolates including some fantastic Swiss chocolates with a heady filling of Norman Calvados (apple brandy) that your Heroine mistakenly believes are for her alone all made it to their new home in Hong Kong.

Smuggle is such a dirty sounding verb.

I prefer relocate.

I have mentioned the wondrous Brillat-Savarin cheese before (here!) (while Brillat-Savarin himself was obliquely referenced here) and told you how fantabulously creamy it is.

This stuff has a minimum fat content of 78%. Mmm. Goodness in every lick.

Here is the second chunk of Brillat-Savarin that I am working on this morning.

Happiness by the half-kilo. (So you can buy happiness, and in one pound increments too...)

This is my powerplant.

This is my town.

Tschuess,

Chris, Regina, and Pommes

Postscript:

After posting today I went reading.

I imagine all MTM regulars shared the same shock upon moving over to the site of the founder of My Town Monday and finding out that Travis Erwin's house had just burned down.

An effort to help with a new house has been launched here...

Here I thought that Junosmom and I were finished our month of hosting.

With Junosmom, I will carry on cohosting My Town Mondays until Travis returns to take it back.

Travis' awful Sunday, and his diminished Monday, is hinted at here...

Junosmom introduces us to a woman in her town and to different culinary traditions of Kentucky

Chuck provides a chronological look at his town in Kentucky

Jennifer provides us with a glimpse of her town on Mondays, specifically Monday Night

Cloudia takes us into the inner world of harbour life

Debra takes us to the founding work of Peninsula, Ohio

Evil Winter takes us to Cincinnati for more sports

Laura Curtis brings us into the ubiquitous Korean market, but not the one you thought of first, and other places in her town

These are this week's MTM postings as of now. As we find more, Junosmom and I will post them.

And Travis, whatever you are doing, there are a lot of people wishing you strength and support.

Tschuess,

Chris

On the Origin of the Species ...

Dear Gentle Reader,

Your humble scribe flew to Europe the other day.

Your humble scribe flew into Switzerland; into Geneva in particular.

I know that the pilots amongst you would rather that I had said that I "landed in" rather than "flew into".

But, trust me, you were not on this particular flight, or, more importantly, on this particular "landing".

We flew into Switzerland.

Hard.

I am not sure how Switzerland is doing now; not so well, I think.

I think its a wonder the plane stayed in Switzerland; I was expecting us to skid or skip into France.

Skipping into France, from Geneva's airport, is actually easy because the airport (GVA) straddles France and Switzerland.

It is fairly hard to stay in Switzerland when you are in Geneva. Walk in a straight line, for a couple of kilometers, and end up in France.

If you walk a few kilometres in any of 270 directions from a total possibility of 360 directions (360° returns you to your starting direction), then, voila, you enter France.

Walking in most of the remaining 90° of directions will see you walking into the lake... Canton Geneva extends, like an amoeba's pseudopod, into the side of France, and most of the Swiss portion backs onto Lake Geneva.

The friend who was picking me up at the airport was a bit late, so I headed into town on the train to confuse him and to do some banking and stuff.

(Doing stuff means buying and consuming chocolate and cheese. Voraciously. My belt takes a beating every time I enter Canton Genève... Paradoxically, when I leave, I find myself having to tighten my belt...)

Happily perched on a bench by the lake, sipping hot chocolate and munching on some other chocolates, imagine my surprise at looking up and seeing the white blobs in the trees above my head that I showed at the start of today's post.

Not sure what those blobs are?

Let me give you a closer look...


See those legs in their formative state, coiled springily in those protective cocoons... ...Does that not look like the egg sac of a Spider of the Apocalypse?

It sure does to your scribe.

Imagine my horror.

If you are a newcomer to e-cuneiform scratchings, look up related posts via the keyword "Spiders" to learn more about these beasts that beset me in various lands and the revenge I have recently had on these blighters of the apocalypse...

Upon gathering my wits, both of them, I quickly called my friend who by now was at the airport, looking vainly for me...

"Emyr!" I panicked, "I am not at the airport anymore! Stop searching for me there and come and get me in town! We need to leave soon!"

Sensing my fear, Emyr arrived with alacrity and conducted us both to the safety of his farmhouse in France.

Pillowy blankets of snow covered the ground on top of the mountain where he and his partner live. Snow is good because Spiders of the Apocalypse are not warm-blooded. The cold slows them down.

I, however, spotted the breach in Emyr's defences; the entirely too large chimney...

Never fear, Gentle Reader. Your humble scribe quickly lit a fire and found himself a bottle of wine to empty and have at his side, as a weapon, should a Spider of the Apocalypse attempt to enter though the chimney.

As you can tell, we made it safely through that night. The bottles of wine did not.

Back in Geneva, today and tomorrow, I am on my guard. I will soon be heading out to find more bottles of wine to deaden my fears and any baby Spiders of the Apocalypse who attempt to burst out of their cocoons...

Hopefully I will stay one step ahead of the spiders. I suppose it is better that I now know where the origin of the species, the Spiders of the Apocalypse, is.

Who knew I was this close to destruction when I lived here?

For those of you who live here still, do not be fooled by the sign saying "Festival of Lights" in the trees. Obviously all of the other installations are in fact man-made.

But these egg sacs in the English Garden by Lac Leman (Lake Geneva in English)... ...obviously they are spider made. Obviously this is the Origin of the Species of the Spiders of the Apocalypse... Do not go gentle into that good night, nor into that good wood...

Consider yourself warned...

Tschuess,
Chris, Regina, and Pommes who informs me by SMS that he is now happy that he stayed behind in Hong Kong...

Swiss cow belles

Dear Gentle Reader,

Maybe I should round out my comments on the Swiss and on the remarkable bravery of one particular Swiss which I made in a previous posting on spiders in Hong Kong.

Originally, the Swiss were fighters. 

There was nothing to do in the mountains, so they fought.  

They thought it was hard to sell their cheeses, so they sold their men as mercenaries, and they were good. (The men. The cheeses were pretty good too, but they hadn't made a market for those, yet.)

Actually, the Swiss were too good.

In the end, everyone hired Swiss pikesmen to be their mercenaries, until a particularly violent battle where the main contestants on both sides were Swiss mercenaries, hired from the same villages, and the Swiss overlords said "Enough".

So the Swiss ceased being fighters and, eventually, the Swiss became lovers.

Not as quick as the English... ...not as good as the French... ...but, lovers nonetheless.

Of course, what the Swiss loved were cows.

And bear in mind, that I am not talking about Swiss belles, who are very belle indeed.

While much could be said about the Swiss predilection for money, much more should be said for their enjoyment of cows, and things that come from cows.

Namely cheese and chocolate.

(Though some could say that their thirst for banks, corporate headquarters, and OPM (Other Peoples' Money) is also an offshoot of their love for cows, in this case, cash cows. Hmmm...)

One of the biggest holiday festivals in Switzerland is their cow belle festival.  

This is the festival to welcome home the cows at the end of summer.  

In spring, Swiss cow belles (and bulls and heifers too) climb into the alpine meadows with their cowherders and cowherderesses, looking for love, tender shoots of grass, and alpine flowers.

At the end of summer they return to their home village, sated in every regard.

Here is a quick clip showing a typical, wild, Swiss party... when the cows come home...

What fine flanks. Such luxurious tails. And what great, big bells.

But, again, the reason that the Swiss love these cows is not for their fine physiques, it is for their milk.  

For Swiss cow milk can be turned into Swiss cheeses and Swiss chocolate now that the markets have been made.

Below is a traditional folk dance and song detailing the love Swiss have for their cows, and how everything else must be relegated to obscurity, even dreams of being troubadours, as the Swiss abandon everything else to go to their cows, their lovely and much loved cows, and put their cows into their fields.  

I note that this traditional Swiss folk dance and song is in French, and is a bit long. No need to watch the whole thing.  Your humble scribe will not know, so no embarassment will ensue... But, catch the leg movement.  You can see how this might predate those interesting Bavarian feet-slapping, knee-knocking moves...

Hopefully I have now given you a fuller and more accurate understanding of traditional Swiss culture, dance, and their bovinephillic society.  

(For clarity, as Swiss slang (aka Matin Bleu Editorial French) is a tetch bit on the hard side to understand, "fokj' rentre les vaches" is actually "Il faut que je rentre les vaches" which means "I have to take the cows back to the stable/field" although in popular parlance it means "I have to go".) 

(The French-speaking Swiss have obviously been taking spelling lessons from the German-speaking Swiss to come up with "fokj'". The German-speaking Swiss, of course, take spelling lessons from no one--and they really ought to not give any lessons either...)

Fuller posts on Swiss cheeses might arise from time to time. It depends on the predilections of the muses when they visit your humble scribe. But your humble scribe has been told to keep post-lengths down, so they cannot fit in here.

But this still does not explain to me why Fab was so unafraid of the giant death-spiders of Hong Kong. I still have no idea how this fearlessness could be so. 

It baffles me.  

Fab must have the blood of mercenaries running through her veins.  

I have it on good authority, hers, that Fab was out hunting wild mushrooms just the other day with the inimitable Jean, Chef Extraordinaire et Pére to the redoubtable Fab.  

And everyone knows how tricky hunting wild mushrooms can be.  

Ferocious little beggars; one wrong bite and you could be a goner. 

So maybe Fab's feckless fearlessness of poisonous spiders comes from her history of hunting down wild (not tamed, domesticated, or farmed, mind you, but wild...) mushrooms.  

Maybe.

For those that are interested, here are the only pictures that your scribe can find on his hard drive from our life in Geneva, hiking in the mountains, visiting alpinage festivals (the return of the cows) and so on and so forth. Two portraits of your humble scribe and the fearsome warrior Fab are found, on the back balcony of our flat in Geneva, and one portrait of your heroine. The tag lines (as always, run your mouse over the images) tell the full story.

Tschuess,

Chris, Regina, and Pommes (labouring to open a bar of Toblerone in the back room)

A museum & the Plague

Hello again,

DISCLAIMER Lord love a duck, that horrific time absorber from HK is back online and clogging up bandwidth again.  Sorry, I'm just built this way, apparently... DISCLAIMER END

So, this post is a bit unlike some of the previous posts; it is serious. Troy in Spain complained about a lack of substance to these posts (he apparently missed the rainpersimmon jam on my windows (see Update No. 5; now there was substance) so, today we delve into death.  I mean, if I am going to be serious, I might as well head straight to a big issue like death.  

(The cover piece, "The Triumph of Death" by Pieter Breugel the Elder is here simply because your Scribe loves it and a post on death is just too good an opportunity to skip for sharing this great painting (click here (and then click again on the image in the new site) to visit a site where you can see it in full screen-sized glory).)

So, back to Hong Kong. 

Your heroine and your scribe found a great museum focused on death (or hope, depending on your perspective) a while ago.  Your hero, Pommes, was feeling a bit under the weather and stayed home, but Regina and your scribe recently(ish) visited the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, tucked above and beside Soho in Hong Kong. 

The museum is housed in an old medical laboratory and is quite nice, although the walls run with mould and algae in the building out back due to the rain, heat, and humidty. 

Your heroine and your scribe had to wonder how many samples and analyses were contaminated by mould and algae in times past (Sorry Dr. Chin, the ingrown toenail biopsy came back... apparently the patient has a significant algae problem.  We recommend two sucker fishes, leeches, and a good bleeding...), but that is not what was so interesting about this museum.

The Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences is located very close to where the community of Tai Ping Shan was before it (the community) was levelled physically and metaphysically. 

In the 1890's 97% of Hong Kong was Chinese, and (so sayeth the museum) most lived in squalor in Tai Ping Shan; no electricity, no running water, no sanitation.  

Well, that was common for much of the urban world of that time period, but Tai Ping Shan was very, very, tiny with a phenomenally high population density. 

If you were (relatively) wealthy for a rather poor Chinese gentleman in 1894, you could buy a license to keep a pig in Tai Ping Shan, as an occupant of Tai Ping Shan yourself.  

The only catch was that you could only keep the pig in your own flat or apartment.  With a pig in the place, you might think everything would be flattened. But no, with livestock in the house comes rats and other things, like waste. So things get lumpy, not flat.  

Now after a while of people having pigs in homes, the story becomes interesting.  

In 1894 the Hong Kong government diagnoses 3 cases of Bubonic Plague in one day. One hundred cases are diagnosed the next day... ...and things only get worse from there.  Thousands die, tens of thousands flee.  

Japanese medical researchers are invited to Hong Kong Island to hopefully determine the cause of the plague; their brief is to determine the vector which allows for the spread of the plague disease.

A Swiss doctor also comes over to Hong Kong because he studies the plague too (everybody needs a hobby; what is yours?).  

The Japanese researchers were not happy with competition so they, allegedly, pay off the hospital to deny the Swiss doctor access to the laboratory, the morgue, the cadavers, and everything else.  

Dr. Alexandre Yersin, the itinerant Swiss doctor, (and I am guessing that "Eureka" moments are occurring for a great number of you right now) is offered space in the hallway, where everyone is passing by; not precisely the best place to conduct medical research on the Black Death.  

So the good Doctor from Vaud (he grew up in Morges!) builds his own straw hut outside the hospital and obtains plague corpses for a fee. Hey, he's Swiss.  He knows what makes the world go around.

Dr. Yersin identifies the "buboes" of the Bubonic plague as the likely site of infection. Buboes are dramatically swollen lymph glands, see below. 

By taking samples from the buboes, Dr. Yersin identifies what he thinks the culprit is, a bacteria. Our good Swiss Doctor then isolates the bacteria and injects it into rats.  

The rats get buboes and die. The good doctor takes samples from the rats' buboes and he cultures, looks, and finds the same bacteria as he found in the humans.  

Dr. Yersin repeats this a few times with a few changes, and, upon receiving the same results, within seven days of his arrival in Hong Kong, Dr. Yersin has (a) solved the five and a half century old mystery of what causes the Plague and (b) identified that rats are a vector for spreading the bacterial infection.  

Wow.  

Who knew that up until 1894 nobody had realized that it was a bacteria, now named Yrsinia pestis (that should have been your Eureka moment), that was responsible for the plague? And no one had realized that rats carried it.  

Wow.

This whole bit of history was just fascinating to your heroine and to your scribe. 

Your hero, Pommes, lost all interest in eating rats when he read your scribe's initial report.

Now it would take a few more years to realize that there was an important intermediary, fleas, that transmitted the plague from the rats to people, but still, this knowledge allowed the government to legislate public policy for public health regarding rats.  

Today everyone knows that rats can be dirty and can spread disease, but everyone didn't then. Your humble scribe supposes that a fair bit of people's modern day antipathy to rats is tied up with their being connected with the plague, the Black Death.

Simply finding a vector for the transmission of the Plague, in a metaphysical way, was a bigger deal than realizing that the actual vector was rats. 

The Black Death was big, and no one knew what caused it. It would rise in the population from time to time, and take away significant percentages of people; between 30% and 60% of Europe is estimated to have died in the first strike of the Black Death into Europe which started in the 1340s.  

The Black Death was a Capital Letter Concern, and demonstrated the sway of the unknowable.  

The terrifyingly swift and massive death toll was seen as a punishment by God; many pogroms against "others", such as thriving Jewish populations in Europe, commenced after the onslaught of the Black Death to "appease" God.

The clergy (the Western Christian Church still being monolithic at this time) were decimated by the disease, suffering even higher mortality rates than other folk, because monasteries and churches were places of refuge and treatment for the afflicted.  

The rapid decline of the clergy meant that an equally rapid increase in the clergy was necessary, but a rapidly replenished clergy was not as well educated, and the educators were dead.  

A decline in the education level of the Church's leadership would let inevitably let in some rot, which would fester, and eventually (ostensibly) lead to the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation, and a whole new round of bloodshed (cue up Geneva again and the acolytes of John Calvin, although Huldrych Zwingli out of Zurich was much more aggressive, ideologically speaking).

Wow. Was your heroine and your scribe ever pleased to have visited this lovely little museum in HK.  

Oh, and there are also two tiny pictures of "teeth worms" in the museum that were allegedly blamed for caries (cavities) for thousands of years. Very sweet.

Right, there you have it. Serious and informative.  Hopefully informative.  Let me know.  Show me love. Refer the blog on (higher readership "tickers" yield higher writer satisfaction).

And that is probably enough for today. 

Tschuess,

Chris, Regina, and Pommes

Postscript: 

If your humble scribe understood correctly, bubonic plague is still a problem in Hong Kong, albeit at very low levels. 

Further, the Hong Kong government has long had a policy of checking caught rats to determine if and when the problem is resurgent.  

There are certainly many signs indicating highly poisonous rat bait throughout Hong Kong and others noting that people should not touch the killed rats. 

And you thought that chocolate-covered mango margaritas and avian flu were all you had to worry about when you visit us...