Redeemed by God, fulfilled by Allah and refreshed by the Genevan waters that lie inbetween?

So last Sunday I was blissfully exposing my hide to a few cancerous UV rays lakeside on the rocks beside the Geneva Baby Plage, aka Baby Beach, i.e. beach for small screaming children, when suddenly a rambunctious and festive entourage of 80 or so Africans (unfortunately I have no idea what country they might have been from) dressed in gorgeous traditional summer attire and bearing all kinds of African drums and miscellaneous instruments "invaded" the baby beach ... whose size is just as baby as the kiddos who use it. With small children moving aside like the parting of the seas, the entourage settled in (aka indiscriminately took over) for what was to be a ceremony of several hours, full of dancing, praying, music, singing and, sorry - but I have to say it, what can only be described to the cultureless ear as "shrieking".

Quite frankly, it took me ... and the other two hundred gawking onlookers ... all of two hours to figure out exactly what kind of ceremony it was. Was it a funeral? A birthday? A birth? A family reunion? The light finally went on when three men wearing white gowns waded waist deep into the lake and began systematically dunking another forty white-clad people into the cold water. Most definitely a baptism; and a really cool one at that. My opinion? We should go back to having baptisms held in natural bodies of water. No more of this sterile cup over the head/indoor basin business. Let's get back to the truly praise-worthy, awe-inspiring, natural, settings.

I diverge. What really made the whole thing fascinating and truly unique, I think, to Geneva, was the intermingling of people, cultures and religions ... I've mentioned before the tremendous number of Arabs who make Geneva their summer home and indeed, as the festive baptism ceremony was going on, there was a group of teenage girls enjoying a dip in the lake as well ... in full burka dress. It was really a cool sight to see such diversity all in one kit and kaboodle and I was dying not having my camera with me.

That said, it was somewhat disheartening when the girls, clearly oblivious to anything else that was going on, happened to swim across the 10 foot gap of water between the dunking and the beach-bound witnesses ... only to have one of the witnesses run down, frantically screaming for them to "moooovvveeee!!!!" Was the girls' being in front of the baptism on a public beach ruining their pictures of the event or, as I fear may sadly be the case, was he fearful that having a Muslim in so close to their holy water might "curse" a Christian baptism?

Either way, it once again left us all saying "only in Geneva" ...