48 - Week 7 4ieme: Work, Life, Bilans - Geneve

Thursday, April 10 

Today was my first and only full day at the 2nd site.  I'd originally had about 4 hours of meetings planned but my colleague made sure that I ended up spending 8 hours meeting people at the facility.  First, I'm grateful that he was willing to put so much energy into ensuring I met almost everyone for my last day at this site, but secondly, it was exhausting 😂  That being said, it was super cool to see a very wide range of perspectives in the company and different tools of the trade.  I had one particularly funny moment about a door in the perfumery department opening automatic; I'd thought it was related to things just happening according to the perfumer's will 😆.  I even ended up talking to someone quite high up on the train ride back to Gare Cornavin, turns out she'd spent several years working in New Brunswick, NJ!

After work, my colleague and his wife had invited me to join them at their house for dinner, which was an incredibly kind gesture.  It was great to meet their daughter, see what a real apartment in Geneva looks like, and enjoy a delicious meal 😋  I'm so thankful for how great they've been during my time here, I don't think I had a hard time adapting to Geneva this trip but having such welcoming people helps a lot.  

In the bus ride to dinner, I was thinking out loud about how quickly these two months went.  He asked me if I was homesick; the truth is that I miss the people I have in the US, but I wouldn't say homesick in the sense that I'm clamoring to get back to Jersey City.  It'd be great if I could pack up everyone I care about and bring them with me 😆 Perhaps the limited time frame of my trips helps keep things in perspective and allows me to enter into a, potentially, unsustainable mode of discovery.  The key (as it was when I came back from France) will be to bridge the gap between the me I've become here with the me in Jersey City; I don't think there's a large gap as they're both organically me, but I guess there's a difference in stimuli and boundary conditions.

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