Geneva
Our original plan was to do a sunset cruise on the lake as I had found a good one leaving at 6:30 for an hour on Lake Geneva. The cost was in USD, but with the ad-blocking I do and the frequent VPN usage, I wrote it off as an IP anomaly. I paid the bill, and only the got the information on where we would have to meet. It was indeed Lake Geneva, but in Minnesota, not in the actual Lake Geneva. Say what you will about the Americans (and I do) they are very good at boosting their second-string place names to prominence on Google.
We got off at Bel Air (another place names Americans will be familiar with) and walked to a high-end barber, as I needed some Beard Oil as mine had run out day two and in the heat of the locations we had been in I was looking like a wild man. We stopped into Dandy’s Barber Lounge, and they didn’t sell Beard Oil. Instead, they offered their concoction that was almost a gel Being desperate, I decided to give it a go, and the barber almost sent me away with an open bottle from the display case that would have done bad things to the lenses in my bag.
We walked eastwards to the main city area and stopped in a random square with a selection of cafe bars. We regrettably chose one near the end that was also a Shisha bar, so had to put up with people smoking various noxious flavoured brews as if they were vaping.
We people-watched for a while, and then headed to Le Thermomètre for a late lunch or early dinner depending on your perspective. It is a family-owned location, and we only saw the older man and woman running it, both at least seventy. I had an excellent mushroom starter and a robust beef and fries for main.
It was here. I started to understand the issue I may be in with my camera. I’d not brought a charger as my battery typically lasts a week or two of hard use, and I had two with me. The main battery was only 7%, and I checked the backup, which should be fully charged and saw it was only on 68%. There was a minimal chance the camera would remain useful until the end of the holiday.
Moreover, the only other major city we’d be stopping at was Zurich for just a day. Geneva was the only chance to get a charger for my camera in a town. It wouldn’t be a speciality item, but checking the webshop, it would still cost about £50. My first hope was the shop would do a recharge for me, one battery at 100% would solve all my problems.
After dinner, we walked back to the number 5 bus stop and our original location for that was next to an ice cream shop. My hopes for sweet ice cream as a desert were ruined by the sign saying ‘Cash Only’ a strange choice for a pop-up kiosk, but perhaps that is being spoilt by Sweden. We were unsure if the five stopped at Bel Air but noticed the 5 to the airport going by. My mate said we’d never make it, but it turns out it stopped just a few feet away from where we were standing, so ended up with a quick journey back to the hotel.
Our plan for the day was well laid out, but as usual, it ended up being quite different than we had initially scoped. That’s something that can cause friction when travelling with someone who needs to set a plan and stick to it, but my friend and I were both very flexible and had travelled together a great deal.
We hopped on the number five bus from outside the hotel and went a few stops to Nation Place. An extensive bus terminal set at the front of the United Nations building. Standing in a courtyard before the UN building is a series of fountains; small versions of the Geneva arc of water in the bay and the Broken Chair. A massive sculpture of a chair with a missing leg that is splintered and jagged, highlighting the ongoing danger of land-mines, one of the UN’s most passionate areas of work.
The actual entrance to the UN building for visitors is about ten minutes walk around the corner past a ceramics museum and through some lovely gardens. There was no real queue when we arrived, and so we went straight through security, and I got issued an ID card and instructed that I was responsible for my friend. We then went down the stairs, passed another round of security and bought the tickets for the English tour that started in 20 minutes.
After a quick drink to combat the dehydration, we joined the tour. The tour guide was a strict Spanish woman, who was almost driven to distraction on the trip by a badly behaved boy, whose mother did not pay attention to him at all or stop him misbehaving. We were not allowed to wander off, pause, or generally be a nuisance to the UN employees who were still working. At one point, we walked through a crowd of them on a break from their meeting and could hear small parts of their discussions.
On the surface, the tour is not that interesting. We saw three main conference rooms on our tour, at least one you would have seen on television from time to time. The three rooms we saw were all quite different. The first was fairly modern with an impressive sculpture on the ceiling that had required a fairly significant amount of reinforcement to the roof to keep it stable. This is perhaps the main room at the UN building in Geneva, used as it is, by the Human Rights Council.
The second room dates back to when the building was owned by the League of Nations rather than the UN, who disbanded after WWII as they felt (quite rightly) they had failed in their mission. The room features a series of paintings highlighting the dangers of humanity and how the five key states can work together to overcome them. It is full of dark wood and green leather, and there is an old fashioned authority to it. The final room is the largest and simplest. The main general assembly is in New York, but the last place we saw was used on one occasion in the late eighties as Yasser Arafat was an attendee. The American government would not issue him a Visa to enter the United States due to their strong ties to Israel. Otherwise, it is used as a more general meeting room and for cultural events.
We also paused by a few windows to look at the outside sculptures; the first in a pond was a working model of the constellations coated in gold. The mechanisms have long since broken, however, and the gold has gone. There is irony there that regardless of losing its gold and its function, it continues to be an obvious statement. The other is a mobius strip made of 193 stones, one for each member state.
Once we finished at the UN, we were instructed to walk out to the exit ourselves across the courtyard and through the gate and not to wander off. Considering the high level of security that was in place to get into the building including passport checks and orange lanyards to identify us, it was strange to be stripped of these and told to wander around to the exit unescorted.
We then jumped on a bus and headed to a camera store as I had found the Wifi SD card I was using was hitting my battery hard and I was at 8% remaining, and the backup I had with me was only 65% charged. I knew I would need a charger, and I knew it was going to cost me. £50 later I had a charger in my bag….
We found a great pizza place for lunch near to the camera place, and the waters edge called La Gondola, (a city isn’t complete unless there is Red Lion pub and an Italian restaurant called La Gondola. The pizza was genuinely excellent, and it is a bit of a shame that the best pizza I’d eaten on this trip was in the French part of Switzerland.
After food, we impulse decided to do a boat tour. We had been planning to take a boat for an hour around the lake during the evening. We checked some times while we were eating and instead decided to take the boat ride immediately as we could get there and do the chores without a fun reward later in the day.
We took the passenger ferry to the other side, it is a small motorboat that is part of the public transport of the city, much like the ferry in Gothenburg, though strangely much smaller. We got to the other side just in time for the tour and the boat we wanted, but they didn’t seem to be operating, the ship was nowhere in sight, and the ticket office was closed up.
Instead, we walked along the quayside and found a different cruise company who was offering a 3h 20-minute cake tour along the lake. We booked that, and the cakes on the photos looked delicious!
We had an hour to kill before we had to board the boat, so we went to the nearby Mausolée Brunswick for a brief look, its quite impressive, facing the waterfront in a small park. We then went to another side of the river where the boat was moored up and had a glass of wine in an outdoor cafe to waste the rest of the time before cast-off.
It turns out the boat wasn’t a tour, more of a ferry cruise. We went up to Hermance, Yvoire and Nyon and back to Geneva, but there were no commentaries on the boat or suggestions of what to look at, it was what we could see while travelling. We did cross into France during part of the trip, and we stopped briefly at the three stops to let people on and off.
The cake was not what we expected from pictures. It was good, a somewhat nutty loaf, but the images of the cakes were more the high-end artwork kind of cakes, rather than something from a mid-class bakery. Adding narration would have improved the tour by pointing out elements of interest as we travelled. However, 3 hours on a boat on a lake in lovely weather is a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.
Only one waitress was working, who also had to set the tables for the dinner cruise as well as her other duties. She was accommodating, but you did have to find her to order as she had some much else on. The wine choice was excellent on board and quite reasonable in price.
We saw a couple of castles as we were sailing along and even from where we reached at the end of Yvoire, Les Arc of Geneva was visible over the tree-tops, which is a remarkable feat of engineering.
When we finished, we checked out the nearby launderette ahead of doing our washing, it was OK but very far from the bus stop, especially on the way back as the return was on the other side of the station. We went back to the hotel and found another on Google in a better spot with dinner options nearby as it was going to be quite late and quite a few places shut at 10 pm in Europe we had found repeatedly.
The new place didn’t take cards like the first one we had visited, which was an unpleasant surprise. I had planned for this somewhat as a cynical individual and had enough coins for washing two machines full of clothes and enough washing powder for both. We did not have enough to dry the clothes, however. I left my friend to keep an eye on the washing and headed out to get some more coins.
It is quite hard to find an ATM in Switzerland on Google. Most banks are not for ‘customers’, but still show up on Google when doing an ATM search as they are banks. I finally found one down a side street and got out 20 francs. I then went to Starbucks as I knew I could ask for as many coins as I wanted as they’d have excellent English and a requirement from central management to be helpful to people who ask awkward questions.
Coins in hand, I got back with 20 minutes to spare. We ran the clothes through the tumble dryer for 15 minutes or so and then headed out to Lillo, a restaurant I’d passed previously on my cash machine hunt and that we knew was open late. It was quite quiet in the restaurant, but we got excellent seats out on the terrace, and the waitress was very attentive. We’d both had a reasonably big lunch so just went straight for mains. I had a genuinely excellent beef and spinach ravioli with flavoured oil and then followed it with a passion fruit cheesecake just because the main was so good.