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...

Zurich to Geneva on the Golden Pass

Near Zweisimmen, Swiss Alps

25 November 2013

Today we took five connecting train trips.  Every single one of them was on time.  Our longest wait time for a connection was 20 minutes.  Our shortest was 6 minutes, twice.   I dare anyone back in NJ to attempt this anywhere in the US.

The first leg was from Zurich to Bern.  We got to the station early, so I had time to take a couple more pictures of the Christmas market, not yet open for the day.

An inflatable scary angel oversees the operation:

We've got a sucky wifi connection here in our Geneva hotel, and it's past midnight here, so I'll shut up and start the slideshow.

Throughout this post you'll see reflections from the inside of the train in the pictures of what's outside of the train.

The trip from Zurich to Bern was flat, but mountains loomed in the distance between Bern and Interlaken.  This, the second leg of the trip, was where I started taking pictures:

Lake Thun comes into view.  Interlaken West train station is on the western end of the lake.

Roof tiles are red clay.  Later in the day I saw workers laying tile on a new building.

We had booked tickets on the Golden Pass train that runs from central Switzerland, through the Alps, to Montreux on the eastern bank of Lake Geneva.  Interlaken is about halfway through the Golden Pass route.  When our train pulled in, we were puzzled, because we were expecting a car with more windows than wall.  Instead, an ordinary-looking train arrived.  But it had the destination we wanted, it was on the track it was supposed to be on, and it was exactly on time.  So we boarded.  If it was the wrong train, we'd have an adventure.  No biggie.

As soon as the door closed, a ticket taker came through the empty car.  She assured us that we were on the right train.  "We had to change trains," she explained, and sent us forward to our seats.

We doubled back along Lake Thun, so I got more pictures:

At one of the stops along the lake, a couple boarded and took the seats across from us.  The man was wearing a purple velvet frock coat, a black silk cravat, black trousers with gold piping, and black-and-white shoes.  Upon sitting down, he began to wind a gold watch.

Jack was convinced we were sitting next to an as yet unknown regeneration of Dr. Who and his traveling companion.  I thought we might be sitting across from a pimp.  Either way, I had to try to get a picture without being too obvious.

The sky cleared and we began to climb.

The pretense here is the scenery out of the opposite window.  Forget that. Check out the Purple Fellow.

We changed trains again in Zweissimmen, where the track gauge changed.

In another small town stop, an old-fashioned Golden Pass train pulled in next to us.  I didn't have much time to get a good picture, but our modern car is reflected against the old one. Or something.

More climbing.  I made a guess that the grade never got above ten percent.  At the highest point, we were about 4000 feet above sea level.

The Purple Fellow left us at Gstaad, just past the peak of the pass.  Jack now had to take up the mantle, which he did by ordering a glass of prosecco.

It was after this, too, that the town names switched from German to French.  I could now understand the few signs on the few shops in the tiny towns we passed.

On the descent it finally occurred to me that I could use my phone's inclinometer (part of the built-in compass app) to figure out the grade.  We never got above 7 degrees, or 7.7%.

Lake Geneva comes into view:

We descended on a switchback, stopping at Chamby to let a train pass in the other direction.  We had enough time to translate the sign and parse its meaning.  Not a museum about trains, but a train that is a museum.

Montreux from above:

Above from Montreux:

From there it was an hour-long ride on a crowded, scenery-free train to Geneva as the sun set.

Our hotel room has a scale somewhat hidden under the sink in the bathroom.  "It's in kilograms," Jack says, "so it doesn't matter."  I'll pretend it's for weighing luggage.