Geneva

For some reason, it's taken us a month to post about our new year adventures in Geneva...go figure. Anyway, we arrived back home from Amsterdam on Saturday, 12/27, and turned around on Monday, 12/29, and flew to Geneva. Just enough time to do the wash and repack.

We flew direct to Geneva on EasyJet, one of the European low-cost carriers. It's similar to Southwest, in that you don't have an assigned seat and you board in groups. And let me tell you, Kevin just LOVES this type of flying--cattle-car style. It was the first time ever that we consciously waited and were the very last people to board the plane. Of course, this means the risk of not sitting together, but we lucked out that even though the flight was completely full, we got two seats next to each other in the very last row. It was only a 45-minute flight anyway.

We arrived in Geneva and were able to take the train directly from the airport into the city center. It only takes about 6 minutes since the airport is just on the edge of the city itself. Geneva is in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, so we did OK with the language and understanding things.
The famous water jet in the lake

The public transportation is really good. They have an extensive bus and train network throughout the city and region, and our hotel gave us free travel passes for our time there. We only used them a couple of times as we spent most of the time walking around.

Geneva is a nice city, but it was pretty dead while we were there. Most people must have been skiing or something. We had one day where there were no clouds and you could see the mountains around the lake.
Finally, we can see what's outside of the city!

It was a bit of a surprise for us when we went into a bar there for the first time for a drink--they allow smoking there. Apparently, a law was passed banning smoking, but someone sued under a loophole and won, so for the meantime, people can smoke in the bars. We have gotten so used to no smoking, that it kind of grossed us out. Not to mention it made our clothes and hair stink. Oh well.

Some of the trip highlights included:

A day trip to Lausanne, which is about 30-minutes away from Geneva. It's a scenic town also on the lake. We visited the cathedral, the city museum, and some really interesting Roman ruins. It was a nice day trip and good to see something outside of Geneva.
Lausanne in the background, with the lake hidden by the clouds

The Natural History museum was excellent. And it was free--even better! It was the type of museum where they had loads of stuffed animals, and it was a great French vocabulary lesson. There were a few too many children running around for our preferences (see previous post), but it was really well done.
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

A visit to the International Red Cross museum. It was really interesting to learn about the history of the organization, and some of the displays were really emotional. We also learned that the Red Crescent is the symbol of the organization in Muslim countries.
The Red Cross and Red Crescent