Demi Lune

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Demi Lune is a bar restaurant in the old town of Geneva. Quite popular among the international crowd in town, I hung out once here during one of the UN drinks at the early days of my staying as an intern. After that I only dropped by a rare couple of times through the years that I fortunately (or unfortunately) got to stuck around to kick off my career.

I can’t explain exactly why. Maybe it symbolizes that transitional period between graduation and finding a job, with traumatizing 50 shades of gray. I guess I could have appreciated some many spots in this city more than I actually do. Maybe I could have even appreciated the whole town more than I actually do. Demi Lune is one of them. I decide to explore them and give a comment on each visit, starting from Demi Lune’s classic bar restaurant menu that varies from burgers to tartare, and from Spritz to Brooklyn Lager. They were delicious, but would not be outstandingly impressive to anyone who’s spoiled by the New York City.

The revisit to the place with C made me remember the first time that I came here. It was on a Thursday night with a bunch of UN people, mostly kids at my age sitting in a smoky dazed air who considered themselves entitled to all with their multiple easy-get masters yet victimized by systems of bureaucracy. I soon found the dialogues too mimic to stay engaged. Girls don’t like each other, or only like each other for the alignment in order to stand against other groups, in a word, still to not to like each other. Boys are often popular since they are proportionally under represented.

I remembered Sev, an Azerbaijani girl who shared a same office with me during our internship , she fell in love with C the first day she arrived and always called him “Sir”. She was a strange little thing, I was the only one who became friend with her and liked her, so did C, he found her funny and amusing like a character from Charlie Brown.

Sev was not feeling fitting in at all with that crowd, and she stayed for less than five minutes. I was not surprised. The other girl in our office, Liu, who often found herself in conflict with Sev and I stayed, regardless our shared homeland, we shared no common language. Trying too hard to fit in a crowd, as did Liu, is sometimes worse than belonging to no crowd, I think.

That short night at Demi Lune, has fixed the tone of the following days of ours. I sensed something interesting and sad about the fragility of building social relationship. I realized that most of us, are constantly facing the similar two options: adapt to fit in, or off alone to stay original.

Days passed, then months, then years gone. All these people left, most of that crowd has now split in different corners of world. And I sitting here again for an early Sunday dinner with C brought me back to that crowded night, it is indeed a very strange feeling. I know I liked Sev, I do not remember any of the “smart people” from that time, but I remember Sev, for she stood out exactly because she did not fit in, yet she struggled with unrecognition by the majority around her. As the sad reality Nietzsche once pointed out — ‘In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.’



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