Suiza: Part REALLY Overdue #2

Yes, Jenne, this is extremely overdue, but thankfully I don't charge myself overdue fines and neither does Blogger. :D

Day Three:

Friday was an extremely busy day. We went a bunch of places and took hundreds of pictures (that's not an exaggeration, my trip to Switzerland produced over 650 pictures). Here's the brief synopsis with fun stories thrown in here and there:

First, the reformation wall. The reformation wall depicts a bunch of the Protestant Reformers and has different quotes in different languages that have to do with the Reformation. This wall was designed by Charles Dubois, Alphonse Laverriere, Eugene Monod, and Jean Taillens, sculpted on the campus of the University of Geneva by Paul Landowski and Maurice Reymond, and finished in 1909. (how cool is that Jenne, I actually looked up my own facts!).


On our way there, we passed by the Geneva opera house, the Grand Theatre, and a park with chess sets and a cool swinging thing that I played on after all the school kids left.

Then we went to the Old Arsenal (which had cannons),

Town Hall (where Caroline scared Erin),

the Tavel house (the oldest house in Geneva, rebuilt in the 1300's after a fire destroyed it in 1334),

St. Peter's Cathedral (which we thought was a Catholic church but apparently is Protestant and has "Calvin's chair"),

the English gardens (with a cool, year-round botanical clock),

the Jet d'Eau (the world's largest fountain with a water volume of 500 L/sec to a height of 140 m at a speed of 200km/h),

the Red Cross Museum

(I went in there while Erin and Juan toured the United Nations and Kimmy and Caroline went into the Ariana Museum [ceramics]),

and then back to our campsite. Quite the day, eh?

Amusing stories:

While we were in the Tavel House, the elevator decided that it hated us. At first it didn't want to close it's doors and then when it did, it wouldn't go to the floor we wanted it to. Not only that but we had the embarrassment of always having the doors open up with the same people standing there waiting to use it but not being able to since the five of us filled it up. Grrr. Eventually though it cowed to our will and we arrived where we wanted.

When you're at the Jet d'Eau, there's a little pier that goes out past it that you can walk on. Depending on the day and the direction of the wind, you can either remain perfectly dry or you can get soaked.

Thankfully we had good luck and were able to make it out and back fairly dry. On the way Juan told us the following story: Apparently a man decided that he wanted to go out with a bang. So one morning before the Jet d'Eau was turned on (it's turned off every night, some nights earlier than others), he went out on the pier and stood on the fountain. With the aforementioned qualities of this particular fountain, you can imagine what happened to him when the force of the water connected with his body. He died, of course.

Before we went out to the fountain, we stopped to feed the swans and ducks crackers. Let me tell you, those buggers are persistent and will try nibbling your shoe if it looks tasty. Also, they're not afraid of catching your fingers in their beaks as they go for the food. And a swan's beak hurts more that it looks like it would.

After the fountain, we had our little PMS incident. All of us were really hungry but we couldn't decide what to eat and everything just kept looking really expensive. Finally Kimmy had to tell Erin to chill out and then told Juan that we were stopping at the next sandwich place we saw. This plan had an upside and a downside. The good part was it served really good panini. The bad part was that I ended up paying 8 francs for a sandwich and 3 francs for a bottle of water that was bottled just on the other side of the lake (for those that don't know, Evian water is bottled on Lake Geneva). After that I left the group for a little while to go on a yarn store hunt. Fortunately, I found the address that I had written down from my web search. Unfortunately, the web does NOT know all, and it wasn't a yarn store like it said. So instead I spent my pennies on chocolate bonbons in an attempt to consol myself (since it was really good and I was able to buy yarn at a different store, my efforts worked).

The Red Cross/Red Crescent Museum was pretty cool. Small, but interesting. One aspect that I liked was it had all the files of the WWII POWs displayed. I was able to find one of our ancestor's last names listed, although I have no clue if we're related or not. Kinda cool to think we are.

Another aspect I really liked, but hadn't thought about much was the emphasis the Red Cross puts on the work to eliminate land mine use. Here's one of the posters they had displayed that I thought packed a punch, to borrow the colloquialism.

After the Red Cross Museum, we had a little "situation." We were all supposed to meet up again on a particular street corner after our different expeditions to different places. Side note for those wondering: I didn't go into the UN because it cost a little too much for me and I figured a picture out front was good enough. Anywho, I came out of the Red Cross Museum and met up with Kimmy and Caroline who were waiting where they were supposed to be. Since Juan and Erin hadn't shown up yet, I told them I was going to go browse through the ceramics museum really quick since it was a free museum. While I was in there I found a monkey for Jacque.
After I came out, Erin and Juan still weren't there so I joined Kimmy and Caroline on the bench and we proceeded to wait. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes went by and no Erin and no Juan. At first we were just frustrated but then as time continued to pass, we began to get nervous. Had something happened? Was Juan really the nice guy we thought he was? Had they gone somewhere else and not told us? We ended up waiting an hour before we went back down to the tram stop to look for them. Once there, we waited for ten minutes before returning to the original meeting place. We decided we would wait another 45 minutes before returning to Juan's house and seeing if his dad was there and if he could call Juan's cell and find out what was going on. If his dad wasn't there, we were going to wait till he came home and then if calling Juan didn't work, we would call the police and REALLY start to worry. Thankfully none of this came to pass. Ten minutes before we would have left, they showed up. What had happened was they joined the last tour of the day and then other tourists kept not following directions or asking stupid questions and the tour went a LOT longer than it was supposed to. But it all turned out okay in the end and since it wasn't their fault they were late, we forgave Juan and Erin. Then we made our merry little way back to the campsite where we parted ways and Erin and Kimmy spent the night in the bathroom as Caroline and I "snuggled" in the tent in our sleeping bags.

Yay for pretty Geneva avenues!