Genève: La Première Partie.

After our week abroad we came back home to Geneva.  Here are some pictures of Beth and Reece's cute apartment in the city.  Bethy has done a wonderful job with the decorations, and making it feel like a nice place to call home. She made paper mache deer antlers and a faux chalkboard wall right next to the curtains that is just fabulous, she is a creative genius!

This is their cozy little kitchen.  When you don't need it, it conveniently folds up to look like a wall of cabinets which you can see in the picture above.  I thought that was pretty niffty!

The night we got back from Annecy, Zurich and Bern was the night of the biggest halloween party in all of Switerland.  It's a pretty well known event and people from all over come to celebrate the holiday.  Bethy and I had to get pretty creative with our costumes since we didn't have too much to work with, but in the end we looked pretty cool even if you couldn't really tell what we were.  I wanted to be something the resembled a peacock in some way.  So Bethy did my awesome make up in purple, blue and green, I wore a peacock green shirt and we tied green ribbons in my hair.  Bethy wanted to be a butterfly so she did her make up in pretty pastel sherbet colors and we cut out paper butterflies, colored them in all different color combinations and she pinned them in her hair.

I have a very beautiful sister!

It took us a little while to get into the party since they stopped selling tickets by the time we got there so we spent a lot of time out front.  We saw some good costumes while we figured out a way to get in, I loved the Cruela Devil and her dalmation puppy costume duo, the scottsman is pretty good as well.  Finally we found a way in!  The party was so fun! There were thousands of people there and soooo many good costumes, Europe knows how to be creative and classy with their halloween costume choices

Bethy's butterflies glowed in the black lights, a very cool feature of her costume that we hadn't planned on!

Right when we got in they were having the costume contest.  Each contestant had to dance for 30 seconds to show off their costume.  In the end the third place winner was a girl who had an amazing Shiva costume, sponge bob square pants came in second and a group of crazy doctors took home the grand prize.

This is kinda of a bad picture but one of the contestants had a very good Edward Scisser hands costumes, I wanted him to be in the final three, he really looked exactly like him!

The DJ was on a big stage that was decorated to look like a huge sunken pirate ship!  It was really cool

Blurry but fun!  Probably the best halloween dance party I have ever been to

The next morning we slept in, big time!  We were exhausted from all our travels as well as from dancing the night away.  When we finally did wake up Bethy made us the most delicious monte cristo sandwhiches ever!  She actually used freshly made french toast for the bread!  I basically ate my entire sandwhich in two bites, it was that good!  Such a great way to start the day.

After a relaxing morning and afternoon chilling at the apartment and taking our time to get ready, we  packed a cute little pic nic and lots of swan food and headed down to the lake front of Lake Geneva to see the famous jet and to feed some ginormous swans.  We went at such a beautiful time of day. 

Then it was swan feeing time!  To be honest this was one of the things I was looking foward to the most out of the things Bethy had told me she was planning to do while I was visiting.  I love feeding swans, ok fine, I love anything that involves any kind of animal.  These swans were ginormous and aggressive, I was a little nervous I was going to lose a finger! But I think swans are such beautiful birds, I would have them as pets if I could. I started out feeding a couple of swans that were near me, then in no time I was surrounded by a swarm of big, white hungery birds.

Then we strolled along the water front and crossed the street to one of Bethy's favorite places in Geneva, it is a huge park that reminded me a little bit of central park.  There were numerous varieties of trees, vines and bushes that were all dressed in their most vibrant fall colors.  There were huge grassy fields were games of ultimate frisbee and soccer were being played, there are a couple of chateaus and manors scattered about on the grounds, there were also a few different themed gardens and waterfalls along the winding path.  It is a very beautiful place.

Bethy lead us to her favorite bench in the park which is facing a pretty little waterfall, here we sat and enjoyed our cute little picnic.  We had cheese and chocolate of course, salt and vinegar chips, kiwi foam yogurt and hard boiled eggs.  I loved the hard boiled eggs in Geneva, they are sold in grocery stores and the shells are painted different colors based on what kind of package you buy.  Bethy and Reece buy the package that have their shells painted red and we would eat them for breakfast, lunch or for a snack.  I wish they sold them in the stores here in Utah.

After our picnic we walked home to bundle up and watch a fun halloween movie!  Leading up to halloween we watched Arsnic and Old Lace, The Corpse Bride, Young Frankenstein and Hocus Pocus to get into the Halloween spirit!