Clare went off the the other end of the lake this afternoon, to see a former colleague which lives on a hill among the vineyards near Grandvaux, not far from Vevey. I mooched around town for a while and then went back to find out what I could about ordering a copy of my criminal record file from the state authorities in Bern. This is part of the routine for obtaining a Permission to Officiate as a retire cleric in the Anglican diocese in Europe, something I proposed I would do once retired. I'd been told that an application could be done over the counter at the main Post Office, or via the internet, but I had a feeling it was not as easy as that, so I skipped the counter queues and headed home to Meyrin.
On-line, I discovered that I would have wasted my time queuing to get the paper forms, as these are now only available for you to complete and print yourself via the Swiss government website. You can pay at the Post Office in cash once you have the print out, then send off the receipted document, or you can pay on-line, which I opted to do. The current cost is CHF12. That's about eight quid. The government website in question is informative, accessible and quite well structured, in German, French, Italian and English. The latter has become the unofficial second language, not least because there are so many foreigners and Swiss nationals using English at work if not at home. After a careful read, I was comforted to think that it was going to less of a trial than I had anticipated, to accomplish the task on-line.
Clare returned and went direct to Petit Sacconex, where our friend Manel lives, and I went out and joined her there, using the tram and a connecting bus followed by a short walk through the Parc du Budé to reach her apartment. Our former GP Pierre and his wife, both memebrs of Holy Trinity congregation, were also guests, plus a colleague of Manel's just moving back into Geneva to the HQ of the UN HCR (High Commission for Refugees) after a posting in East Africa. He told us that the family's goods and chattels were somewhere out on the high seas, coming to Europe via Cape Horn rather than the Suez Canal these days, because of the threat from Somalian pirates. I bet that puts the prices up.
Manel took us up to see the roof garden of her apartment block. It has eight floors of apartments, plus a two storey garden with double swimming pool on top. There are grass lawns with daisies and violets, flowering shrubs and several mature trees flourishing up there. Located on the modest hill of the Parc du Budé site, the upper garden is by a fraction the highest point across the city. View in all directions are spectacular, especially on a variable cloudy evening as the sun is setting and rain threatens.
The Parc was, like most of 20th century Geneva, once farmland. Its original owners gave developers a 99 year lease in the sixties, to put up apartment blocks, a school, community facilities and shops on strict condition that some of the farm land and its buildings were retained in use for their proper purpose. And this is still the case, in the middle of a densely populated urban area. There's even a farm shop selling produce grown there! The original owners have retired and the farming has been taken over by two creative young men, who are in the process of optimising available land for food production. The first year, all was ploughed over using a tractor. The second year, they used a horse drawn plough - far less disruptive to neighbours, and highly educative for neighbouring school children. Brilliant.
Our little excursion to the roof was a surprise apèrtif before Manel gave us a superb Sri Lankan curry. She told us that she's applied for Swiss nationality now she's retired. Her family is spread around the world, and reaching them, starting from Geneva as home, is the best option, and of course, after a working life in UN HCR, it's where most of her friends and colleagues still live. There are people of every nationality on earth living in Geneva. Hosting all nations is something of a vocation for the genèvois. It's also a profitable busines to get right and continue to do well, as the needs of globalisation change. Yet it retains well its distinct identity as a city of the Suisse Romande. I wonder how much this is to do with the unique setting, the power of the landscape itself to shape its destiny and character as an unique place of meeting?
No comments:
Post a Comment