come on, come on, we'll dance all night

I seem to be on a posting time delay! If I were up to date, I would be posting about how I am spending the second long weekend in a row on the Jersey Shore, and am putting my wicked plot of not working a full week between now and Labor Day into action (this coming week will be Week Three of this). But I am dumb and have neither taken any pictures of the Jersey Shore nor brought my camera cable along, and I never posted pictures from my business trip to Switzerland, anyway, so that is what I shall do.

At the end of June/beginning of July, I spent about a week in Lausanne, Switzerland for work. Lausanne is a ridiculous place to try to work, because it looks like this:

     

We were staying in the Hotel Beau-Rivage Palace, which certainly didn't help matters.

     

Let's put it this way: the amount that my room cost for a week and change was a decent-sized chunk of what I make in a year.

Pretty hard to argue with that view, though.

     

     

Lausanne is a very cool city on a hill with multiple levels of walkways and hidden squares. The metro line we were on ran straight up a hill into the city center -- so very directly uphill that you could feel yourself sliding off your seat when you headed back down.

The Saturday I was in Lausanne, I spent five hours in a copy shop. This was the copy shop (through the archway):



The Swiss thought I was the weirdest thing they'd ever seen, especially since I spoke basically no French and could not properly explain what the heck I was doing there in the first place. Random American making 800 Swiss francs worth of copies? Extremely bizarre.

After the work part of the trip was over, I went and visited my former roommate Inga and her family in Trossingen, which is pretty much directly on a parallel with Freiburg, only the Black Forest is in the middle. I am a fan of the Black Forest.

     

Inga's family also has a seventeen-year-old cat named Idefix. Idefix really loves to rub all over you and let you stroke his head and back until the point when he decides he is done with you and bites.

     

After a couple of days in Trossingen, I headed to Frankfurt at the behest of the partner who'd asked if I was interested in transferring there. (Yes! I said. Yes, I am interested!) I was sort of . . . underwhelmed by the city. I'm thinking about moving from New York to Frankfurt??, was basically the way my thoughts went. But my law firm's office is in the Main Tower, which is pretty neat. And the town is cute enough.

     

(That first picture is of the Römer, which I think would be cuter minus the sound stage!)

The Frankfurt transfer is pretty much totally official, by the way. I'll know timeline details by Wednesday (approximate timeline details, anyway, since it's all still dependent on the visa process) and after that I will be going. A little bit scary but mostly very cool. Also, at a party at the Naumanns' new shore house the other night, half the Naumann clan decided they are going to come visit me in early December to hit up the Christmas markets and the spas at Baden-Baden. Should be a delightful and hilarious time.