Prologue

As I write this, I sit in a Geneva flat.  Any logical person who knows the least bit about me would do well to ask how I ended up in Geneva.  That is the story I will attempt to tell.

In May of this year, I graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa with a degree in Computer Science.  The plan of record was to take a job in China that I'd found through a friend.  Originally, I expected to start soon after graduation, but since little progress had been made by the company towards getting me a work visa I planned a month of travelling around the States to visit and farewell friends and family.  July 4th weekend found me in Austin, TX for Austin Blues Party, and for various reasons I decided to extend my Austin weekend by about a week.  During my time in Austin the China job officially fell through, and shortly thereafter one Emily Wolfe, another dancer and recent acquaintance of mine, asked if I would be interesting in travelling to Europe with her.  Emily's theory was that she wanted to go on the trip but did not want to travel alone, and I, being currently unemployed and an all-around friendly-seeming chap, would be an ideal person to accompany her so as to minimize her chances of getting mugged or terribly lost in a far off foreign land.  Having already had over a month of vacation at that point, I decided that signing up to stay on vacation until the end of the year sounded like a fantastic idea, even more so because I was feeling PTSD about my last year at Grinnell to the point that I had a physical aversion to Computer Science and programming.  As an aspiring programmer, my options for employment were thus curtailed.  Well, Emily seemed nice enough, and Europe sounded exciting, so plans were laid to travel starting in late summer.

There's still a lot of room in the story between my first trip to Austin and my first visit to Switzerland, but I fear my writing is already barely coherent so I shall content myself with promising another update after I get some sleep.