and, finally, the Alps...

You would think that after all that, I'd be ready for some rest. But no! Fear not! I then proceeded, after 36 hours in Amsterdam, to Geneva. First for a bit (2 days) of holiday with the family, and then for ECOSOC meetings.

Here, you see Albert and I standing inside of a glacier. Yes, inside. Yes, a glacier. Why? Because someone thought it would be a good idea to drill a cave into a glacier so people could go inside. Clearly. It was... cool. Sorry, I couldn't resist.

And here we are, outside of a glacier! Actually, the glacier is in the valley below; you can't quite see it. But, if we'd been there 100 years earlier, it would be poking up where the greenery ends on the mountainside behind us. It was truly alarming to see how quickly the ice is vanishing. Not that drilling caves in the glaciers helps much...

Finally, in the last stop on our Alpine adventure, we stayed in a charming town with charming cheese, both called Abondance. The only thing not charming was the fact that during dinner the river turned green. Not just a little green, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles green. For a while, no one knew why. So, we went on an expedition to find out. Still, we did not know why...

The next morning at breakfast, we were told it was a "test, water source test." Or, at least that's what we think they said, since our collective French is still not excellent. So it remains a bit of a mystery.

After that, I got to go back to work, at the ECOSOC Annual Ministerial Review. ECOSOC, by the way, is a UN body comparable to the Security Council whose mandate is to oversee all the economic and cultural bodies of the UN: WHO, UNICEF, UNAIDS, UNESCO (you know, World Heritage sites?)... all those agencies that are in the news all of the time are overseen by ECOSOC, the Economic and Social Council. The meetings were fine, with some good language about sexual health and rights included in the final declaration. It was a good experience, and gave me some things to think about for future years.

Now that I'm back in Amsterdam, I think I'm ready to stay (mostly) put for a while. Maybe a side trip to Cologne, but otherwise sticking around here until the EuroNGOs meeting in Riga, Latvia at the beginning of September. It promises to be a relaxing summer!