Geneva

The way the plane lands in Geneva, you come sweeping in over Lac Leman and the farms and the vineyards just like a camera panning over the countryside at the beginning of a film. I got here on a drizzly day, which made that descent even more gorgeous, with all the colors of the green fields and the red rooftops and yellow squares of flowered meadows showing up solid without the sun to blind you. It is beautiful, like they say, "enchanting." Also: tidy, quiet, on occasion, quirky. Feels like proper time travel, coming into a new country that way, through a curtain of cloud. I'm staying in the "red light district" of Geneva, which is really kind of a diet version of red light, if I ever saw one. On one block, there are some skeevy-looking cabarets, which I didn't visit (but maybe should have, in the spirit of getting writerly experience etc, if I were Hemmingway, I would have, you know what I do instead? I go to chocolate shops), but otherwise it just looks overall about an inch less elegant than the rest of Geneva. Like, the Swiss version of "red light" just means "not exactly beautiful."

So, Day 1 is spent sleeplessly trudging through gorgeous Geneva to fight off jet lag, I walk one million footsteps up and down the cobblestones of Vielle Ville, grasping at French, saying the couple words I remember from Belgian childhood repeatedly as though I could assemble my three easiest phrases into a whole language "je veux, je veux" "merci" "avez-vous" "avez-vous je veux merci, oui, oui, n'est-ce pas," and did have an entire halting conversation with a museum security guard about "la lune dans une [whatever the word is for painting, peinture?]" the moon in a painting that looks at you no matter what angle you stand at, like the Mona Lisa's eyes. Security Guard asks where I am from, "Brooklyn, New York," and he says "ah!" and lights up and says things in French that I don't remember, something about having been to Miami, New York, Chicago, and, wait for it, Iowa City. "Ah!" I say, and fumble en francais, "J'ai... attende.... universite.... en Iowa City!" He says else something in French I can't recall, so I just say, "Oui, c'est tres belle, Iowa City," like a kindergartner. That's all my French.

Apparently I look French enough, or urban enough, or something, (it's the trench coat) because people in the city keep asking me for directions. "Vous etes de Geneve?" I throw my hands in the air, "um, uh, Americaine! Je suis desolee."

Museum, monuments, chocolat chaud, one full hour spent among a crowd of French tourists in a tiny belfry, where some leader amongst them plays a tiny piano wired up to the massive network of bells in the top of St. Peter's Cathedral. I say nothing, they think I am French and part of their group. He seems to be asking the group if they want to play, and people take turns plunking out scraps of Freres Jacques, etc, on the keyboard that rings the bells, and I wish that Katie Hathaway or Adam Gwon was with me to play one of our musical theater songs all over Geneva from the bells of St. Peter, maybe one of the waltzes? (We have waltzes in both shows. Adam's waltz is about the triumph of love, Katie's waltz is about the lie of it.) But if I have only a fraction of French, I have even less piano, so I content myself to watch the other tourists play the little keyboard that turns the gears that pull the wires that move the bells big enough for God.

Two hours of sleep around sunset, then I'm up all night, and the next day it's off to Rive Gauche for Mission 1 of the Mary Shelley tour: Villa Diodati.

To be continued.