Last day

Saturday now and only a few hours before I start my homeward journey.  

Not sure how well it will show but I have included a map which shows where I am. Nyon is on the lower and larger lake and then Lake Neuchatel is the one to the northeast. There are a few pics of Nyon coming to life in the morning, my hostellerie, the boulangerie and one of the butcher shops, there are 3-4 in the village.

I have put pictures of our outing on Thursday to Lake Neuchatel and you can see the lovely old home we were in for our meeting. In the house where we had our meeting, they had the large old tiles furnaces that are quite common in Switzerland and also Italy. There are pictures of two. The original ones worked with a fire but these I think use heated water. They are lovely to look at and I can imagine that the heat would be very soft, similar I guess to hot water radiators, but much larger and more of a feature in the room.

Nyon has markets on Saturday morning and they have been out there setting up for the last few hours, so I am going to do the whip around the shops and the markets before I do my final packing. There has got to be a good sausage out there somewhere waiting for me.

Meeting mode

I will try to do a bit of catch up here. Once I got to Nyon it got a bit more difficult to keep this blog going due to temperamental internet access at my little old hotel and too much to concentrate on at the meeting which I am going to every day.  

All of the people attending the meeting, around 30 people, are staying in two hotels in the village of Nyon on Lake Leman. This is near Geneva and right in the south-west corner of Switzerland which is surrounded by France. My hotel in Nyon is the same one I always stay in, Hostellerie Seis Siecle. It has a restaurant on the bottom floor and a very old style windy stone stairway up to the top floors. I have one of the rooms overlooking the street and the Patisserie, which is my favourite view.

The village of Nyon is built on an old Roman town. The streets are narrow and windy and many are still cobbled. There is a castle in the town and lots of lovely old houses. There are lots of lovely shops to look through but unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) I am away too early and back too late to make the opening hours.

In the morning we walk to the train and take a 8 minute ride to Gland and then walk to the IUCN building where the Ramsar offices are.  We are in our 4^th day of meetings and everyone is a bit tired because the topics are all BIG. Today we have moved to another location for our meeting because we visited a Ramsar site. It is on Lake Neuchatel to the Northeast and there is an historical house on the property and that is where we are having our meeting.

But tonight is the dinner and the Ramsar Raffle, my little contribution to the proceedings. Everyone brings something that is from their country and/or relates to wetlands and/or relates to Ramsar. Yes we do the stealing thing. All very fun.

Day2

Sunday morning and I managed to sleep through from 9AM to 4, pretty good. It is just 4.30 am here now so will try to do this quickly before the day begins. Sunday morning we were on our way early to Divonne which is only about 30 minutes away but in France, so we had to go through a boarder crossing, which these days is only a road marker and an office with no-one working there as it was a Sunday. All pretty relaxed in this part of the world. Lots of locals go into France to these markets in particular as the prices for meats and cheeses are so much lower because Franca has less subsidies for its farmers and there are many more small producers. You will see the evidence of this in the pictures. The range of cheeses, cured meats, poultry and seafood was pretty fantastic.

The town itself is very charming and has worked hard to reinvent itself for tourism. It used to have a mill in the town and although that is not working any more they have turned the building into somethi9ng and all of the machinery on the river is still there and working.

There was a lady there selling choux croute which Sara would have headed for straight away. Big mounds of saurcraut and various meats to choose from. Yes we got some and had it for dinner. There is a picture.

You will see the range of breads, salamis, hams cheeses in the pics. The salamis are very hand made and they had lots of samples available because there were so many different ones. One of the bread stalls had a lof with chocolate, but we did not choose that one, instead went for one of the many nut loaves, the hazelnut one. I am going to have that toasted thgis morning with left over salad from last night and a slab of gruyere (we are in Gruyere territory here and Sandra has a lovely one in her fridge.

Sandra is where we were in the first six months of our house with her framed things. She has very few things on the walls and lots of things still wrapped. So I have given my thoughts on where things could go .

Sandra’s village is 1244 metres up the mountain.There is a small red train that goes up and down the mountain from Nyon to St Cure in FRance. It takes 32 minutes to go up and down and is fairly steep in parts. I managed to do the up and down yesterday as well. On the way down at the second stop a group of very small boy scouts got on with large back packs coming back from a weekend trip. I had 3 come to sit in my little area and they were a hoot. They immediately pulled out a pack of cards and started a game of war, yabbering in French the whole time, and were in fits of laughter by the time we got to the bottom. The trip back up the mountain was much quieter.

Today we dive into the paperwork fully. We start 5 days straight of meetings to review the jobs everyone is working on and make the cvall on which ones can be completed in time for the Ramsar Conference of Parties in March of 2012. This is the big meeting where all the member countries come together to agree on and approve any new resolutions, which are all about doing more things to protect wetlands. Bu although that is a year away there are tight dates to get things done in time for the first level of approval and then anything that gets through the hoop has to go into the translation phase and then out to countries so they can look at it and develop their own briefing papers foior their delegation. So I suspect there is really only 4-5 months before things have to be ready for the first review.

That’s all for now, the rest of this blog may be way less interesting but we will see how it goes.