Let me start this by stating that I have had an unfathomably good day. As I write this, it is 9:38 and I’m in my hostel room, topping the day off with a small bit of scotch (though I’ll have to be careful with this stuff, as I’m already exhausted).

After I finished writing I found myself on a cruise of lake Geneva. The sites were not much better than what I could have seen on shore, but I do love being out on the water. Consequently, Geneva has a great fountain that draws water from lake Geneva and shoots it 460 feet in the air. This makes the fountain, while its running, the tallest thing man-made thing in Geneva, and thus a great landmark. There’s something I find comical about navigating the land by a tower of water standing gaunt over the city.

What the cruise best persuaded me of, however, is that I needed to go for a swim in the lake. Have I mentioned yet that the weather has been dazzling? The weather has been dazzling. What this meant for me, is that postponing such a swim could be a mistake. Who could say when I’d see such sunlight again? So it was that I was faced with two problems upon my return to the hostel.

First, wandering around Geneva all morning had left me truly exhausted. It was a pleasant city to walk through, no mistake, but the land of Switzerland is not known for being flat. The second problem I was faced with, was a distinct lack of bathing suit, nor even a pair of shorts. I had two pairs of pants – the clean pair I didn’t want to wear because I wasn’t doing laundry that day. The dirty pair were jeans, and if you’re reading this and wondering what part of that makes them a bad choice in swimwear, you probably haven’t tried swimming in jeans before.

In the end, I decided that the best course of action was to ignore my exhausted state and give swimming in jeans another go.

I arrived at the man-made outcropping (otherwise known as a beach) around 5 in the afternoon, a time when many others were leaving. The water of lake Geneva was nice, albeit cold. It is mountain water, after all. I suspect it was also the cleanest natural water I think I’ve ever had the pleasure of swimming in.

That is, of course, if you can call what I like to do ‘swimming’. Though swimming is on my list of favorite things to do, I have the tendency to float that beats some corks. If I keep my body vertical in the water, as if I were standing only without the ground part, I achieve pretty much the same buoyancy that people strive to keep with a dog paddle. So I have never needed to actually expend much energy to move around in the water.

After about an hour and a half of some swimming and floating in the cold mountain water I finally made my way back to shore, and it was only there that I got even an inkling of an understanding at how incomprehensibly exhausted the whole thing had left me. I had to sit on the beach a good while, engulfed in the rosy glow of euphoric exhaustion that had found me, before I was able to summon the energy to move.

Tired as I was, though, it was becoming late in the evening, and I was starving. So I came home, dried off, changed clothes, and headed back out in search of dinner. I splurged on a very nice Italian place because it was close to my hostel and my hunger demanded immediate satiation.

The splurge was worth it, and dinner was amazing. Already in an exhausted state of euphoria, the salad of tomato and fresh mozzarella was a great way to start things. Following it up with a glass of red wine and a style of lasagna I keep finding around Europe which is both odd and delicious; well I was swept up by a tide of yum.

Such a state of utter contentment is basically where I am now. Yeahhh.