PALEO IS BACK!!!

Suzy

The sun is shining, the signs are up, the train corridors are blocked with tents and sleeping bags, Carolyn has arrived from Aberdeen, my room is full of other people

"Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl. With yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there."

Photos: Sarah Minchin. Reproduced with permission

This Barry Manilow song covered by Kylie Minogue at the start of her concert at the Geneva Arena on Friday night could have applied to Kylie herself.

She is a showgirl through and through. Not only did she appear with feathers in her hair, but corsages and wigs, various hats, thigh-length boots, elegant evening dresses, cute short-shorts, geisha dress, and many other outfits, all with gravity defying shoes. This evening was about fabulous costumes and fun.

If you are in the non-seated area, the Geneva Arena is a good place to see bands close up and personal. In many other major city arenas, Kylie would have been a speck in the distance. As it was, this small but perfectly formed venue is ideal for a small but perfectly formed artist such as Kylie. Addressing the audience in perfect French she won the crowd over in the first few minutes and then went on to give her all.
Minogue is a consummate performer, a seasoned trouper and gave the audience exactly what they wanted, dancing, audience participation, and singing most of her hits, in a great show. 

If concerts could be judged on excellent value for money then this was one of them. A 20 member stage act (including band and dancers) for a CHF79 ticket, in a show lasting well over two hours, worked out at approximately 65 centimes a minute. A bargain.

Lots of technical wizardry and spectacle included Minogue being lowered on to the stage atop a giant shiny skull. The grand finale resulted in thousands of gold streamers being released into the audience, and the train back into central Geneva after the concert was full of smiling, happy fans, the sign of a very good night out.  Showgirl supreme indeed. 

It all began innocently enough, my addiction to the confections of Tristan, the maitre chocolatier of the minuscule village of Bougy-Villars, in the hills above Rolle, just next to Signal de Bougy.

After all, who on this earth doesn’t love chocolate? And isn’t one of the prime pleasures of living in – or in my case, near – Switzerland that you get to indulge in  some of the world’s finest, anywhere, anytime you please? It’s the rare place in the world where you can get your fix in, of course, the finest boutiques in big cities like Geneva, but also on supermarket shelves, in tiny-but-luxurious shops, even in the gas station.

A considerate friend left a little white shopping bag very discreetly on my doorknob one day last December when I was out. I thought all the usual appreciative platitudes: It was my birthday, she remembered, how sweet …

Until I opened the bag, saw the three innocent-looking chocolate bars, wrapped very plainly in see-through cellophane, and nonchalantly began to munch.

What revelation was there!

What my friend had chosen for me was three of Tristan’s thick, plain, unadorned plaques, studded with big chunks of nut. You can choose from caramelized pistachios, hazelnuts, or walnuts, and you can take your pick of dark chocolate, milk chocolate, or  white chocolate. As always with chocolate, I am embarrassed to say that I vastly prefer the milk to any other type.

I say "embarrassed" because among choco-cognoscenti, chocolat noir is supposed to be the thing,  the top, the crème de la crème. Call me foolish, call me unsophisticated, but it’s not for me. However, if it’s for you, Tristan’s got plenty to make you happy, with a choice of 50% chocolat noir and 83% chocolat noir (the latter for those who like their drugs extremely strong!). 

What else does his tiny gem of a shop have to offer? There are elegant tablets of chocolate, studded with crunchy cocoa nibs, and slender batons of chocolate, plus gorgeous, artful packages and baskets for holidays such as Christmas and Mother’s Day, and truffes in a multiplicity of flavors ranging from the traditional (coffee, caramel, rum, champagne) to the cutting edge of the chocolatier’s art (green tea, whisky, even the eau-de-vie marc) The color of the green tea truffes alone is enough to let you know that you’re in no ordinary chocolate shop.

Best of all, small tasting samples of nearly everything are scattered in little dishes around the shop, so you can be an informed consumer, spending your francs and your calories wisely. Since a single hyper-addictive nut-studded plaque runs CHF10, a stop at Tristan’s can quickly add up. But although your bank balance and your hips may suffer, it’s well worth it, for a visit to Tristan’s is a little stopover in choco-heaven.

Tristan, Artisan-Chocolatier, Bougy-Villars, Switzerland; 021 807 21 25; www.chocolatier-tristan.ch

If you have a favorite market, shop, product, café, bar, or restaurant, or if you’re looking for a favorite item and can’t find it, let me know.

When I first moved here, in among the discoveries of the joys of lait cru cheese and good wine available for a song, was a completely unexpected revelation: tuna mayonnaise.

You’ve probably passed it right by on the supermarket shelf: those shelves of Thomy tubes full of mayonnaise, mustard, tomato purée, and even chicken liver paté. But the star of this particular show, as far as I’m concerned, is the tuna mayo. It might sound suspicious at first, but give it a try.

Just take a piece of dark bread, squinch a little squiggle out onto the bread, throw on a slice of Comté or Gruyere or some other hard cheese, maybe top it all off with a slice of cucumber, and voilà. Fast food, but very far from the MacDo idea of speed!

If you work at home, as I do, or simply have an office fridge and not much time, this is a culinary lifesaver. Some may balk at the idea, and when I smuggled a tube to a US friend, she confessed to have tried it, let it linger in her refrigerator for some months, and then eventually chucked it. But another friend, when she heard of my impending summer visit, was quick to say: "Oh lord, don’t forget the tuna mayo. What’s in that stuff, anyway? Crack?"

And thus was born our new nickname for our favorite product: Crack Mayo.

I’m not sure Thomy would approve, but I’m addicted.

If you have a favorite market, shop, product, café, bar, or restaurant, or if you’re looking for a favorite item and can’t find it, give me a shout.

Photo, courtesy Nestlé

The monthly Sunday flea market in Nyon usually attracts a fair-sized crowd and 27 January was no exception.

Despite a chill in the air, visitors and townspeople were down by the lake pottering around the stalls looking to pick up an unusual antique or bargain at the Marché aux Puces.

There was much to chose from. Beautiful blue bottles to Bakelite radios to colourful sewing threads. Furniture laid out like a sitting room on the lakeside, china, tea sets, beads and toys, all for sale.
It’s worth going to at this time of year as it can get very busy in the summer. In winter you get time to chat to the stall holders and get a good look at the goods on offer.

Who knows, you may just stumble across a real find as one lucky customer did at another flea market a few years ago. He picked up an old painting in the Plainpalais market in Geneva, only to discover it was most probably a Van Gogh self-portrait. Listen to his story on youtube.

Finds like this are rare but you never know.

The next market is Sunday 24 February.

More photos in the GenevaLunch photo album "Nyon flea market."

‘Tis the season of the office party. A chance to let one’s hair down, to share inhouse jokes, a meal, a few drinks and recount embarrassing work moments from the previous year.

However if you work from home you don’t get to participate in this annual event. The only contact you have with other professionals is in a virtual world via email, or at best, the sound of a voice at the end of a phone line.

For some, NOT having to go to a party is a godsend, a welcome relief from bad taste jokes, the delights of drunken colleagues and having to wear a paper party hat. But for those that don’t want to miss out on the yuletide fun, the answer is to organize your own night out.

So just before Christmas a group of us from Nyon got together and held our own "not the office" night out. In the group were writers, journalists, doctors, lawyers, editors, journalists, consultants in health care, environment and other professions. All specialists in their own field, all slaving away over their laptops for twelve months and all looking forward to logging off for a few hours. Oh, and we are all women too. It’s not that men weren’t welcome, it’s just that they somehow didn’t make it on to the list.

We began the evening with a pre-dinner drink in Geneva, followed by delicious food at an Indian restaurant in the centre of town.There was the obligatory "Secret Santa" present giving, a little bit of networking perhaps, but all in all we were there to relax and have fun. We didn’t play party games but we did ask each other the following question: If we could invite just two people to dinner who would they be? The criteria included famous or non-famous people they be could dead or still living, a real person or a character from fiction.

There were some varied answers. Some invitees had gravitas, such as Nelson Mandela or Charles Dickens. Somebody chose Victoria Wood (a British female comedian) to liven up events, another the actor/traveller Michael Palin. But when most came to giving their second choice of guest, the overwhelmingly popular vote was Mr George Clooney. More than 60% of of all the professional women round the table that night would choose to have the Hollywood hunk sat round their own. There was someone who broke ranks and said David Beckham would be their favourite, but on the whole, Mr C won out. It was very apparent that if he had driven up over the St Gotthard pass from his villa in Italy to join the party that night, he would have been most, most welcome. 

(by Erwin Rose) Many of the international organizations with offices in Geneva are involved with climate change.  As a result, living in Geneva offers wonderful opportunities for getting insider views on the latest policy developments.

On 29 November, I went to a Geneva Environment Network roundtable on "Priorities for the Bali climate change talks" at the Environment House. Speakers included Christophe Bouvier, Director of the United Nations Environment Programme Regional Office for Europe, and Ambassador Thomas Kolly, from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment.

Most of the session focused on expectations for the negotiations underway in Bali for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.  Tragically, governments are still debating the outlines of the negotiations even though the current Kyoto commitments end in 2012.  Considering how long it takes to negotiate and ratify multilateral agreements, it

If you are like most
people, you dread the thought of ever having to step foot into the office of a
psychotherapist to sort out problems of the mentally and emotionally perplexing
kind. So now you don’t have to. The psychotherapist comes to you on GenevaLunch,
in the privacy of your own home or office!

Have you ever wondered
what a session with a therapist is like? Have you ever wondered whether it
could truly be helpful; asking someone to help you solve what seems to be an
unsolvable problem that has always existed and always will exist? How could
anyone help you change what seems to be a permanent character trait that has
been passed down for generations in your family? How would you go about finding
a psychotherapist that’s right for you? How much should you pay for a session
with a shrink? Does your Swiss insurance cover these services? What modality of
therapy would be right for you; cognitive behavioral, person-centered,
solution-focused, psychoanalysis, Jungian, transpersonal, etc…? What are the
latest approaches to healing disturbing memories?

These are some of the questions which will
be the subject of Shrink Rap in the coming weeks. Join us in the discussion!

Ed. note: this is the first contribution from GenevaLunch’s new blogger, David Schiesher, one of a small number of professionals, journalists and experts who make up the GL blogging group. Visit his web site to learn more about him and his work.

(This article is reprinted with permission from the GWIT web site.)

Be open to opportunities, ask for what you want, build up your contacts and find a mentor – that