against the snow, against the falling snow

It is snowing today, delicate flakes twirl and float from a steel sky:  Church bells call the faithful to prayer. Even in the height of summer, Geneva can be a leaden kind of place weighed down as it is with banks, bureaucracy and its own self importance as it caters to plutocrats and kelptocrats alike. Despite this, in the spring and the summer, flowers bloom and music floats through the City of Clean streets and Dirty Money.

Somehow it all works.

Except on Sundays.

And except in the winter.

Sundays in Geneva are slow. All of the shops remain shuttered with the exception of a cramped, over-priced grocery store at Cornavin Station and a drugstore—usually crammed with internationals jostling to fill lost prescriptions on the fly.

The outdoor food market at Plain Palais offers some relief as does the patissierie across the street that serves up a chocolate chaud so rich and dark that drinking it evokes the pleasant aftermath of a wild romp with a loved one. The Bain de Paquis, a dry sauna and hammam down by the lake, also provides shivering pilgrims surcease from a day that pretty much all agree can drag even the most relentlessly cheery into Strinbergian gloom.

On Sundays Geneva cannot be viewed through the sunny prism of humane worship and civic duty that Rousseau so sparklingly evoked in his Confessions. On Sundays, Geneva is pure Calvin. Its eyes close, it mouth clamps shut between stern lines and it refuses to speak.

One wanders the old city—Carouge and Plain Palais—like a dry leaf driven before a bitter wind.