le week-end en suisse: fondue, trains, and beer in plastic cups

I'm not going to lie-- Geneva is a snooze. Take a city in a country obssessed with order and stability, and make it the world's capital for order and stability, and what do you expect to happen? But I had been warned of this by various people, including Cheryl, the friend I traveled to Geneva this past weekend to see. A little bit of backstory: Cheryl and I met several years back in DC thanks to a mutual friend who noticed that Cheryl had done a Fulbright in the Philippines and I was about to do the same. So I knew going in that this wasn't going to be Carnaval, and shortly after I landed I explained (reassured?) Cheryl that my motivation was 95 percent hanging out with her and 5 percent seeing Geneva.

That's not to say we didn't have a whole lot of fun. Cheryl took me to some unexpectedly grubby places that served beer in plastic cups, we ate fondue by the lakeside, we had a minor scrape with the law for riding a night bus around 3 a.m. without a valid pass. We meandered around the city and a charming suburb called Carouge. Aimless wandering is not my usual travel mode, but I really enjoyed it.

We also went to a film festival that, quite coincidentally, was showing lots of Filipino movies. The film we saw was a fictionalized documentary of a Filipino "reality" show that shamelessly moves in on a family in the aftermath of the murder of the oldest son. The movie had a lot to say about the artificiality of television, the mutual manipulation of the family and the TV crew, the schadenfreude of the viewing public, and the Philippines' complicated views on homosexuality. Parts of it were deliriously funny. After the first 20 minutes, which were almost entirely footage of people bawling, I leaned over to Cheryl and remarked that "this is either awful, or brilliant, and I can't decide which." The verdict: brilliant. I feel bad saying it, but neither of us were expecting that level of sophistication in a Filipino film. The audience received it well and had a lively Q and A afterward with the director, who had flown in from Manila.

On Sunday, thanks to efficient high-speed Swiss transportation, the two of us plus another friend of Cheryl's got to see a fair bit of the country. Through some Swiss friends, Cheryl got her hands on all-day rail passes that were valid anywhere in the country for just 30 Swiss francs apiece(about $25). I don't know if I have ever been to another advanced country that suddenly and completely switches languages part way through. Most of the country speaks German, but the Western quarter (including Geneva) speaks French, about a tenth of the population speaks Italian, and a few places speak some language I'd never heard of, called Romansh. Even the trains seem to obey the invisible linguistic borders; at some point between Geneva and Bern, the screens inside the train announcing the next stop switched from French to German.

We spent a few hours apiece in Bern (pronounced "bearnn"), a small and picturesque capital city overrun with fountains and clocks, and Luzern (Lucerne), which I had expected to be bumpkin-land but was surprisingly slick and urban instead. A short selection of photos:


Wall of the Reformation, Geneva. The city is proud of its role in the Reformation and was for a time the home of John Calvin. Among the figures honored on this wall is Roger Williams.


Cheryl and me in Bern. Yes, I am pretending to take a bite of her head, because at the top of this fountain is a statue of a guy eating babies. Apparently there is something sick and twisted hiding beneath that placid Swiss psyche...


Swiss timekeeping at its finest.

This tower is part of the 14th-century wooden Kapellbrücke (chapel bridge), which is Luzern's most famous landmark. Again, stereotypes about the Swiss are confounded: instead of taking the shortest route across the river, the bridge zigs and zags. The shop called "Joe's Souvenirs" (I am not kidding) inside the tower was also a rude awakening.

the fulbright lives!

I've been in essay-writing mode pretty much since I got back to Cambridge, and in the process of writing one of those essays I made a rather unexpected discovery. The essay in question was for my class on Globalization, Big Business and Developing Countries, which I mentioned in my ode to Peter Nolan. The topic was whether large firms in developing countries could "catch up" to their multinational, Western-based rivals, and I wrote on Jollibee, a Filipino fast food chain that has trounced McDonald's in head-to-head competition. Fast food in itself is not a topic that I get especially excited about, but Jollibee does appeal as a David and Goliath story, and one of the things I have realized in this course is just how similar the dynamics of business are across different industries. Here's my brother Casey with a statue of the Jollibee mascot at the restaurant next to my former apartment building (sorry Casey, I cropped you out of the photo for the version I put in my essay):




At one point in the paper I needed some statistics on migration from the Philippines because I was discussing Jollibee's strategy of targeting its overseas stores in locations where there are lots of Filipino expats. Instead of going on a tedious search for the data I needed, I decided to cite my own paper from the Fulbright. (The Development Studies program is actually keen on us citing our own previous work.) And in the process of googling my own paper, I made a pleasantly unexpected discovery: my paper has been cited in several articles and books. I wrote it explicitly for a policy audience, rather than an academic one; before I left Manila I presented it to a bunch of government agencies and NGOs and then assumed it disappeared into the memory hole after that.

This finding did make me feel a pang of regret for not trying to get some version of the paper published in a journal, especially because one of the academics who used it had e-mailed me while I was in Alaska and said he thought I could get it published. (I felt even worse at the beginning because I thought I remembered him offering to help me with that, but I checked our e-mail correspondence and found that he hadn't actually offered any help, just his opinion that there was publishable stuff in there.) I should mention that sending the paper isn't as simple as its sounds; it would have required several days of work. There wasn't really time while I was still in the Philippines, and I did think about resurrecting the project from time to time while I was in Alaska, but when would I have had the time then?

At any rate, I'm happy that my report has been useful to somebody. I always thought my year in the Philippines was an enormous success as a cultural exchange and pretty indifferent as an academic venture, but this tips the balance a little more in the positive direction for the latter.