G is for... Geneva

is for... Geneva -- of course!

Apparently we've arrived the year before the bicentennial of Geneva's joining the Swiss Confederation!

To focus on books and writing, though, I've just learned that the city will host its 27th International Fair for Books and Press in the first week of May. And there's a weekly book market in the Marche de la Fusterie (which also hosts an artisans market on alternate days)!

As for famous people, there's of course the summer that Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin spent here, during which Mary wrote Frankenstein and Byron worked on a number of poems, including "The Prisoner of Chillon", inspired by a castle fortress on Lake Geneva/Leman. There's a great New York Times essay on Byron's time in Geneva.

I also saw a sign on a building near our apartment-hotel stating that Dostoyevsky had lived there for a year in 1867-1868, something I hadn't known before.

One thing I haven't figured out yet is the names of these trees:

They're everywhere! Does anyone know their names?