Once you finally find yourself some mates in Geneva, you'll need to quickly get up to speed on the city's social event of choice - the dinner party. Popular among the bankers, the UN civil servants, and the diplomateratti alike, the dinner party is standard issue when it comes to life in Geneva, and comes in all shapes and sizes - from snooty networking dinners to gatherings at a friend's tiny studio, for which you're usually asked to bring a chair or sit on the bed. Yet, invariably, the conversation always comes around to one of a select few topics. New Yorkers have money and politics, Londoners have football and the weather, Sydney-siders have weddings and property, and we in Geneva have...

Geneva
For a comparatively unexciting, drab, city Geneva gets a disproportionate amount of airplay amongst its inhabitants, who have a kind of twisted love-hate relationship with their place of residence. At just about every dinner party you will attend, Geneva is likely to be the topic of choice for a considerable proportion of the evening. Geneva-related conversation will be predominantly skewed towards whinging about the following things:

- how expensive everything is

- how hard it is to find/keep accomodation

- how annoying it is that the grocery stores close at 7pm

- how strange the Swiss are

This may sound entirely negative, but in fact it is just an enjoyable hobby that many expats living in Geneva like to indugle in. The pleasure you get from complaining about Geneva is not unlike that you get from scratching a rash - even though you know it's not doing you any good, it feels great at the time.

All things UN-related
Before I moved to Geneva, I had this strange, baseless fantasy that people in this town spend their evenings debating the cosmopolitan vs. communitarian debate vis-a-vis the role of the United Nations in humanitarian disasters, over a glass of fine Merlot, surrounded by leather-bound books in apartments smelling like rich mahogany. The reality is both far from this idyllic picture and also scarily similar to it. Okay, the apartments tend to be filled with second-hand paper backs and smell like curry and the Merlot is not exactly fine but rather bought from the Tabac for a cheap-as-chips 9 CHF, but chances are most conversations will come around to the United Nations sooner or later.*

To be honest, however, discussions are more likely to center on a) what a bureaucratic labyrinth the UN is, b) how many meetings about having meetings about having meetings have to be had until anything gets done, c) today's depressing example of how politics, yet again, has got in the way of actual progress and d) who is sleeping with who's boss.

The sad fact about the experience of living in Geneva and working within and around the UN system is that it both crushes every hope you ever had about the potential for change and unprecedented solidarity in the world, thereby debunking your desires to participate in the hulking, ineffective machinery that is the United Nations, and at the same time -- like a bastard ex-boyfriend -- offers you occasional glimpses of hope and promise so that you continue to kid yourself that this might just work out after all. The weight of these contradictory phenomena bears down on just about every dinner party you attend here.

Unless it's solely populated by those other expats living in Geneva, the bankers, in which case conversation will no doubt turn to...