Geneva is a beautiful place, but strange and enigmatic, a perfect LeCarre locale (from the good LeCarre of the old days), perfect too for the European home of the UN. The city’s very opacity, numbered bank accounts and endless black Mercedes with diplomatic plates mirror the Palais des Nations itself, a massive labyrinthine structure seemingly built to confuse. Yesterday, one reporter – mistaking me for an old hand – asked me the location of the Media Center. I grinned and gestured helplessly toward a dark hallway. “See you in two years,” I said. He laughed and disappeared. I saw him again several hours, wandering a corridor far from the Media Center.
Actually, the real Media Center, where the press is supposed to get information, is a paradigm of the UN. There was scarcely anyone in it on those rare occasions I could actually find it. When I asked the woman who ran it for help, to locate a delegate or some such, she would stare at me blankly and half nod like a character out of Kafka. Indeed, it is the great Czech who described the Palais des Nations better than anyone even without – as far as I know – ever seeing it, because the Palais is like nothing so much as Kafka’s Castle.
This was even more so in its post-Ahmadinejad silence. The conference pretends to be continuing, but everyone knows it isn’t. I am leaving Thursday for Los Angeles, a day earlier than scheduled. There is no more to do here. The Main Committee (whoever they are – no one has been able to tell me) has accepted the final statement of the conference. A panel on Islamophobia has mysteriously disappeared, though I have found no record of its actually being scheduled. So it goes at the UN. I spent the day wandering around Geneva with our cameraman Andrew Bridgewater. We video-taped the swans cruising on Lac Leman and ate dinner at a recommended steak place called Le Relais de l’Entrecote. As Hemingway would say, it was good.
Yes, Geneva is beautiful. But I’m not sure I want to come back soon.
UPDATE: If you haven’t seen this, check it out.
Beautifully written. And spot on.
Is it Durbin or Durban?
Geneva was the most boring European city I have visited. Tick-tock, tick-tock.
I was always happiest in the part of the country where Italian is spoken.
#3. john lynch:
Best transliteration was in local (the cartoon famous) Jyllands Posten:
Turban II (courtesy of JP’s blogger, our local Roger, Mikael Jalving). Do I feel stiffening of our EUropean spine? Certainly here in Denmark, yes!
swiss german is harsh on the ears, no?
I find it curiously amusing and ironically fitting that Ahmadinenutjob should be the one to shut this abomination down. Loved the video of the delegates walking out en masse; the only shame is that they were there in the first place.
Have a good trip home, Roger. Well done. If nothing else, you got a good meal out of it.
See the movie “Bread for Chocolate” to learn about the Swiss. Hell,
the sell you cheese with holes, and charge you for the holes.
When I was in Geneva — Lord, has it been twenty-five years already? — I thought it was an absolutely beautiful city, with some of the most unabashedly friendly people I met in all of my travels through Europe. I couldn’t afford the better restaurants, but the locals made sure I tracked down some really good food. (The two are not necessarily synonymous.)
Then again, it was the Reagan years, Dallas was extremely popular across the Continent, and I had the appallingly bad taste to wear a cowboy hat.
(Dusseldorf was more fun, though; I had a finger-gunfight with a railway worker across platforms at the Bahnhof; he drew down first, so I obligingly “died” for him.)