Geneva, Day Two

27 November 2013

Today consisted of more walking and museuming.

We figured we'd head through the sculpture garden first.  We figured we'd see sculptures in the sculpture garden.  We did not.  We saw a couple of heads on pedestals, a bas-relief wall of Protestants, an underwhelming tribute to the Red Cross, and that's it.

My impression of Geneva is that it's overpriced and oversold.  That, and this city is buttoned down. No array of lights in the shopping district at night.  No holiday markets.  Very little in the way of anything would even suggest that we're a month away from Christmas.

So, if you wind up visiting Switzerland, spend more time in Zurich than in Geneva.

Anyway, here are some last pictures of the city.  Below is a bit of medieval city wall in the non-sculpture garden:

At the top of the non-sculpture garden, looking towards Old Town:

View of the city from the top of the wall that you can see in the picture at the top of this post:

This is how people get up the hills in Old Town:  battery-powered bikes:

Our first museum was Maison Tavel, the oldest residential property in the city, restored and devoted to Geneva's history, and free.  Here's a model of the city as it looked in the mid-1800s:

Our hotel is a bit above the center of this picture:

View from inside the museum:

Jack liked this door because it led nowhere and had no explanation:

Outside again, we were drawn into a home decor shop because they keep their moose under glass...

...and in piles:

We did not buy a moose.  (!)

This driver was backing up, very, very slowly, carrying a plane of metal that was swinging just enough not to crash through the plate glass windows on either side of this narrow medieval street.

We found a small museum devoted to the art of a small section of West Africa, so we did that for half an hour or so.

I tried to capture the steepness of the grade as we walked back down the hill.  It's steeper than it looks.

Last up was the Musee Patek Phillipe, run by the Swiss watchmakers Patek Philipe.  I might not have mentioned that a plurality of storefronts in Zurich and Geneva are plastered with watches whose prices are an order of magnitude more than one would reasonably consider spending for a watch.  Anyway, this museum had thousands of watches dating back to the 1600s, two hundred years before Patek Philipe was founded.  Three stories of these things held our attention, all the way up to the invention of the wristwatch around 1910.  Then it got boring, save for a handful from the 1960s. We breezed through the last hundred years.  Sorry, no pictures.

Here's a motorized bike in a storefront near our hotel.  There's a lot going on in the rear hub. The bike looked so heavy that it was hard to imagine not needing the engine for anything even slightly uphill.

This is either the battery or a trunk designed to keep one's belongings dry:

The bike has a license plate. Around the corner we saw another battery-powered bike with a license plate.

So that's it for Geneva.  Tomorrow we fly to London.

I don't figure I'll be blogging much from London because I've been there so many times (snob alert).  I'll keep the camera in my pocket just in case.