Geneva, Day One

26 November 2013

There comes a point for me in every vacation where I feel as if I'm just killing time.  After yesterday's euphoria, it's hardly surprising that today's the day the ennui set in.  That the wind was blowing at something above anything a roadie would go out in didn't help either.  The first thing we did when we left the hotel was find me a hat.  That helped a lot with the cold but not with the time-killing.

I'd made a list of everything we wanted to see, and found it all on the map the hotel gave us.  Two of those things, along the lake, were missing.  The much-ballyhooed Jet d'Eau, the 140 meter tall mid-lake fountain, was hibernating.  The Jardin Anglais, with it's famed flower clock, was also very much not there.  So much for the touristy stuff.

Here are the lake's choppy waters:

The wind was so strong that I had trouble holding my hands steady for this zoom of cormorants:

The tailwind pushed us back inland, where we found ourselves facing a Mont Blanc pen shop. I want to write that we've seen more pen shops in this city (at least three today) than we've ever seen before, but, really, until we went into the one in Zurich, I'd never seen a pen shop at all.

So here we were, being buzzed in and then escorted by elevator to the second floor.  Once again there were outlandish pens behind cases.  Not to be outdone by whoever it is who made the Sylvester Stallone pen, Mont Blanc is hawking the Mahatma Gandhi pen.  Yes, you read that right. Mahatma Gandhi.

Once more into the breach, up the hill into Old Town, where the streets were almost empty.

We were looking for the Cathedrale St-Pierre. We encircled the whole thing, somewhat chased by a small street-sweeper whose driver was being very thorough, before we found the main entrance.

Photography wasn't forbidden in this church (once Catholic, then one of the birthplaces of Protestantism).  This might be the first time I've been in a church when the sun was shining through the stained glass windows.

Here's a window...

 

...and here's the pattern it made on the wall opposite:

What you can't see here is that the wind outside was shaking branches, which was making the light dance on the pillars:

Next door was the Musee Internationale de la Reforme, all about the Protestant reformation in the 16th century.  Again, I knew almost nothing about this, good uncultured atheist that I am, until today. The lesson was made all the more interesting by having to read almost all of the labels in French, as only a handful were in English.

I read French far better than I speak it, but while Jack was having fun looking at more pens at our second pen shop of the day, I managed to pull off a conversation in which I asked if they had small pens one could put on one's keychain.  I had to talk around "keychain," and I mispronounced the word for key ("clef," which I remembered as being one of those counterintuitive pronunciations, therefore countering my intuition, and getting it wrong, because it wasn't intuition, it was memory that I was remembering, and it's pronounced "clay").  Anyway, I left the register avec deux stylos q'on peut porter avec des clefs, et deux cadeux pour Noel aussi.

Back into the wind, through a park where people were playing giant chess,

and then to the hotel to kill some time before dinner, which is now, so until tomorrow...