Week 6

I don’t have much of an update on my work at GSF this week. I continued my project on Ukraine and revisited some loose ends from Nepal. Nothing new.

I have not written about my non-internship activities in a few weeks, though, so I’ll provide a few details here.

Last weekend, I visited fellow intern Aurora in the Netherlands. She proposed a lovely idea: a bike ride from her place in The Hague to nearby Leiden, about 18 km. I was excited because the route took us along the North Sea, past sand dunes, into little forests. Unfortunately, our ride coincided with the hottest day the Netherlands had seen this year, close to 90° F, so we arrived in Leiden in rough shape. Nonetheless, we enjoyed wandering around town and stopped for a leisurely lunch on the canal.

We spent the next day exploring Utrecht, a larger university town than Leiden. Utrecht boasts some fabulous architecture: the 14^th-century Dom Tower, St. Martin’s Cathedral, and Utrecht Library, to name a few spots.

Hear me out on the library. Built as a post office in the 1920s, the library contains the most fantastic arched entryway. A series of skylights runs the length of the room; light wafts in and bounces off the yellow glazed brickwork, leaving the interior gleaming; footsteps echo across the geometric black and white stone floor; sturdy pharaoh-like statues keep watch from the walls. My best attempt at describing the style is ancient Egypt meets art deco, but not in a tacky way.

Back in Geneva, I discovered that John Calvin’s former haunt, Cathédrale Saint-Pierre in the heart of the old city, is currently hosting an international organ and carillon festival. I showed up yesterday evening for an organ improvisation marathon: twelve organists of different styles and generations, fifteen minutes each. The musicians slid seamlessly into each other, one after the other, for three hours. Since the organist in a cathedral like Saint-Pierre sits up on an organ loft, out of view of the audience, a screen was installed in front of the altar to display a livestream of each musician. A camera even provided a view of the their feet on the pedals.

I stayed to hear four organists. The first opened with Bach’s infamous Toccata and Fugue in D minor, a piece that typically conjures Dracula and Halloween and spookiness. Organist #1 riffed on a few bars from later in the piece, reworking them into new sequences and injecting fresh chords. Along the way, he ventured through the Pink Panther theme and Beethoven’s Für Elise before returning to Bach.

I went to the organ throwdown on a whim, but it was exactly what I needed. Few things rattle your bones like a 95-rank pipe organ blasting Bach through the nave of a medieval church. It turned out that I needed some rattling that day—a jolt out of the sticky summer doldrums.