Mommy's visit pt Deux

Hey Kiddies, here's the exciting conclusion of  adventure time with my Mom and Aunt. Before I get into that though, I have confirmation of an increase from four loyal readers to a whopping total of five. Hey Lauren (Pardo, of course, everybody else back up off her shoutout lol) :D.

So yeah I know its been a while since I've touched my blog or tumblr (mmalachi.tumblr.com) but I'd rather take my time and write these entries rather than just shovel some boring drivel out every other week like my mom would prefer. She pretty much wants an update every week. Honestly, I don't think anyone wants that because when I'm not traveling or playing the highlight of my week is if Killian and I reach a new level on the new Zombie map, Ascension. 27 is our current record, in case any of my nerd friends were wondering. However, luckily this is the second part of my mom's visit to France and we did a lot of traveling.

On Monday (March 14th) was the beginning of our adventure. Pierre agreed to take me and the two evil sisters to Annecy to walk around and take in the beautiful day. It was around 65 degrees and sunny so spending a day in Annecy walking by the lake and through the town was an ideal situation. Of course, before we went to Annecy we had to stop and get Kebabs. Even though my mom doesn't eat meat she enjoyed the awesomeness of the vegetarian option kebab. I also introduced my Aunt to the beer Desperados, which is made with tequila and she fell in love. The rest of the week she spent trying to find Desperados and would get semi upset if the place didn't have it.  My Mom and Aunt agreed that the Kebabs were awesome and even began to think about if there were any places we could go back home to enjoy this delectable meal. I've gotten to be pretty cool with the guy who runs the Kebab shop as I'm in there no less than once a week, and once he learned that my Mom and Aunt were visiting he gave us some Turkish sweets to try. They were amazing, this was the first time I had them and they did not disappoint at all. After we had finished stuffing our faces along with drinking our wine and beer we headed off to Annecy. On the way there, about a 30 minute drive, both my Mom and Aunt fell asleep. Once we got there they both finally stopped snoring and we spent a great day walking around the city and shopping because of my Aunt Jackie and her need to go into every shop that she sees. I'm not too upset about that though because it led to the buying of my beret, my FB friends know what I mean already. For pics of our adventure and pics of me in my Beret, check out my tumblr, (link above), because me describing the beauty of Annecy lakeside won't do it justice but the pictures do a pretty good job.


On the way back from Annecy my Mom and Aunt realized that Geneva is really close to Aix Les Bains, roughly an hour away by car or train, so we made plans at dinner to get up early and check Geneva out.
Early Tuesday morning we hopped on a train to Geneva. Now my 5 loyal readers will remember last time I said I'd go more into detail about Geneva and here it is. We took an early train to Geneva and found a nearby place to sit down and have breakfast. Where we realized that we had no idea about where anything in Geneva is but we had goals for the day. The first was to hit the United Nations building and check out a tour. So after asking the people where we ate for directions to the tourism office and wandering around Geneva for about 30 minutes trying to find it, we finally, well I (common theme on this trip) finally figured out the city layout on the map and reached the tourism office. Of course the quickest way to reach the UN is to hop on a bus or tram so we walked back to the train station and hopped on a bus that would take us there. (Walking is another common theme of this trip, which both my Mom and Aunt complained about to no end) Luckily when we got to the UN a lady who was on her way to work directed us where to go because once again we had no idea where we were going. Once we got through security and actually went on the tour it was really enjoyable, if you're a history nerd like my Mom, Aunt, and I are. We got to see an actual meeting from the rafters and check out various meeting rooms throughout the building. The UN has amazing artwork decorating the halls that each of the member nations has donated to the collection. The coolest one though was a Chinese tapestry of a temple(I forget what the name is but its one of the more famous Chinese temples). The cool part was that it was optical illusion and no matter where you stood in the room and looked at the picture the walkway would always be in front of you, following you no matter which angle you looked at it. After the tour we decided to check out the rest of Geneva so we found the tram and went back towards the center of the city. As I mentioned earlier Geneva is baller central. I told my Mom and Aunt about all the exotic cars Kevin, Killian, and I saw outside of the car show last time I was in Geneva. Once we hit Pont Du Mont Blanc they saw exactly what I meant. Everywhere you look on this street you can see evidence of Geneva's wealth pretty much everywhere you look. Pont Du Mont Blanc is one of the main streets and bridges in Geneva and each side of the bridge has its distinct feel. On one side is a bunch of banks, luxury hotels, and of course the cars you see are jaw dropping. On the corner in front of The Four Seasons hotel there were a collection of Aston Martin's, Bentley's, Land Rover's, and the worst cars being Benz's. Most of the cars also had the drivers who were waiting and keeping watch over the car. On the other side of the bridge is the shopping center. Rolex, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Vacheron Constantine, all types of ridiculously expensive stores are along this strip. On this side of the bridge is also the old town of Geneva and the Promenade du lac, my favorite part of Geneva. The old town of Geneva is pretty cool, standard old european city but the promenade du lac has been one of the highlights of my entire time while here in Europe. Honestly I love that place, theres the flower clock where they plant flowers to make a clock face and have hands to make it an actual working outdoor clock. The million dollar view though is lakeside. Lake Geneva has a huge fountain that shoots water hundreds of feet into of the air and at the Promenade du Lac you get a front row view of this. I fell in love with that spot and we spent the last hour or two chilling on a park bench just soaking in the moment. Obviously no trip to Switzerland would be complete without stopping in a store to get some Swiss chocolate and we made our stop before we hit the park. When you get a chance  go to http://maps.google.com/ and put in Pont Du Mont Blanc, Geneva and check out what I mean.

Wednesday was our slow day of the week. The highlight of the day was that Joe the head coach of the team, a fellow American, invited my Mom, Aunt and I over for lunch at his house in Chambery. Joe served up Raclette which I don't recall if I've ever described this meal but it's one of my personal favorites here in France and it quickly became a favorite of my Mom and Aunt. It's a fairly simple meal: boiled potatoes, a spread of different cold cuts and raclette cheese. The cool part is that in the middle of the table is the raclette machine which will be hard to comprehend unless you've already seen one. There's not really anything I can compare it to back home in the states but for a better idea just go to google images and put in raclette machine and that should help. Anyway there are two tiers to this machine the top one is to keep what ever you want warm, such as the boiled potatoes etc. The second tier is where you put your cheese to melt and once its done melting you scrape it off your personal metal pan to spread over your potatoes and meat. So simple but awesome at the same time. It was a really good meal my Mom and Aunt got to know Joe a little better because they wanted to know how he ended up coming from philly to coaching football in France and vice versa. It went really well and after lunch we went back to Aix to have the final dinner with the family, which was an adventure like all of the previous ones and get ready to head to Paris by train in the morning.

I'm going to make this three different posts because Paris needs its own post. Hopefully I'll do it soon 'till the next time pals :D