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The reformation fathers, and among their ranks Cromwell, a known scoundrel and tyrant
A summary of the first week of school:
ONE: Bureaucracy. Course registration last until the end of the second week in school, so people are still free to take up or drop classes as they please. Of course, the professors do not care whether you come for lectures or not, but the most important bits were still covered in the first lecture, so one is in a bit of a rut if he was busy in the first week and has no one in class to whom he can flood questions.
Residence permit is finally settled, on my third try of applying to the Crissier population office.
Bank account with PostFinance is now fully functional. They gave me my account details over the counter, then mailed me a cute calculator device for the e-banking, then mailed me me the e-banking number and password, and then the card, and then the pin, all in separate servings. This is just being extremely safe. In comparison, Nordea mailed me everything at one go, seven days after my application, and in Singapore one could get his card over the counter, and people just looked at you funny if you braced yourself for any more paperwork.
TWO: Courses. Materials semester project, Lithography, Biomaterials, Photovoltaics, Wood, Graph Theory and Numerical Analysis, in this order throughout the week. Textbooks from La Fontaine (bookstore in Swiss Cheese building) and free leisure reading from La Riponne.
There will be a class presentation and my subject would be on a Swiss pine, though I wondered sometimes if only I could present on a tropical species and talk about a tree species that is closer to heart, like teak or something similar.
THREE: Geneva. We went to Geneva to crash Szu Yu's kitchen for dinner. Before the dinner we scoured the earth for cheap restaurants and chocolatiers and luxury-brand stores that the gang stared hungrily at but never stepped in. The season being winter, we wound up spending much of the afternoon indoors in a glassware and ceramics museum, which had free entrance.
The city was a stronghold of the Swiss reformation. It held a peculiar air, as if the statues of the Reformation fathers are suddenly alerted to my presence and are now glaring judgmentally at this intruding vestige of the old faith all the way across the city. This is in contrast of the feeling one gets when with the Finnish Lutheran fathers' statues (e.g. Agricola), who radiated only apathy.
FOUR: Church. It seems that going to the 8pm mass is a bad idea, whether at the Basilica or at St Francis. So few people were at Saint Francis yesterday that only the side chaplet was open. It so happens that there was a Parish special guy in the service, who instead of offering the Sign of Peace to just the people in the immediate vicinity, offered it to the whole church while the priest waited patiently for him to finish. The priest had an Iberian accent and he seemed almost, at times of weakness or distraction, to lapse back to Spanish or Portuguese or whatever it was that he spoke before he took up French. Mass in English are available once a month in Saint-Sulpice and once a month in Bussigny, rendering people like me wandering, parishless folk.
