Just fishing and thinking

First, the thinking part

This week has been so taken up with getting the new Lake Geneva news site up and running that I haven't been able to look at other people's blogs or write much here. GenevaLunch is now functioning more or less as it should and next week's focus is to start building the content - links to other sites, events, community reporting and so on. It's a great project to work on and I think the community will find the site very useful, once the basic material is in place. There are one million English speakers in the Lake Geneva region, most in Switzerland, some over the borders in France and Italy. The Internet houses a lot of useful information for them, but it's dispersed and the GL goal is to bring it together, point people in the right direction and generally make sure they have the information they need.

That gives me some reporting to do and reminds me that some of us become journalists because we are essentially curious about everything. It's great to have a good outlet for that. Yesterday I spent an hour interviewing the CEO of the region's only Swiss chocolate manufacturer and I learned several new things, even though I have researched and written about chocolate before. It didn't hurt any that I had to exit by way of their relatively new boutique, and sample some of the chocolate.

Now for the fishing

While the rest of us run around working or trying to find work or studying or just keeping our lives organized, the official professional village fishermen get up early and go out to the middle of the lake and just fish. I don't like to fish myself, but I love to watch these men, year in and year out, in the same green fishing boat they've used for the 20 years I have lived in this village. It looks peaceful, and if we all pause now and again to watch them I think some of that peace will rub off on us.