Monday, April 16, 2007

Last week, my Eurail pass finally arrived, so I was able to start my traveling this past weekend. (Quick side note: on German keyboards, the Y and the Z keys are swapped, so now that I’ve gotten used to that, I’m having a hard time hitting the right keys on an American keyboard.) Rafal, Steven (aka Loud Harold) and I went to Geneva this Saturday, and on Sunday, Steven went back to Konstanz, while Rafal and I made our side trip to Montreux (of Smoke on the Water and jazz festival fame). While Geneva was pretty nice, Montreux is what made the trip worth it – but I’ll cover things in sequence here.

After arriving in Geneva, our first difficulty involved finding the hostel at which we were to be staying. I had looked it up via satellite image, courtesy of Google maps, and decided that we would need to walk south from the train station to reach our goal, but apparently I haven’t received quite enough training in satellite image analysis, since that turned out to not be true in the slightest. Because of my mistake, we ended up getting rather lost, and had to ask several different people where rue Rothschild was. Unfortunately, the street name is not pronounced anywhere near what it looks like, at least to an English speaker. I believe the proper pronunciation was something like “rue Rot-chill,” so the first few people we asked were very puzzled as to what this “rue Roths-child” were kept mentioning was. Finally, one of them, a bellhop at an expensive looking hotel (which I imagine probably describes most hotels in Geneva), told us that if we kept walking in the direction we were already headed, it would be two streets up and to the right. Perfect directions – that is if by two streets, he meant fifteen. Nonetheless, we eventually made it, booked the beds, and then set out for the European UN headquarters.

Unfortunately, the UN headquarters was a lot less exciting than I had hoped, probably stemming from the fact that the closest you could get to the building was about 200m away, behind multiple beefy looking gates. But then again, I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything else. As a consolation though, there was a monstrous chair with one broken leg located in the plaza in front of the compound. I didn’t really get it, but I guess it was probably some sort of modern artwork. The giant lawn chair at Swarthmore is cool; this chair was just kind of confusing. There were also fountains built into the ground of the plaza that squirted water into the air, so I suppose if you overworked yourself thinking why anyone would put a giant broken chair in front of the UN, you could go cool off in the water sprays, and then later regret it by having to go around the rest of the day in wet clothes that chafe when you walk.

From there, we walked around the block and found a museum of Swiss ceramics and porcelain. I don’t know… maybe I’m just not a porcelain kind of guy, but there’s only so many pretty vases I can look at until they all start looking the same. The one notable item in that collection though was a bust of the Virgin Mary (I think) wearing a veil. It was incredible how realistic the rendering of the cloth draped over the face was. I can’t even draw a round circle, so I’m really able to appreciate the skill that must have been required to create such an accurate three-dimensional rendering.

Right across the street from the ceramics museum was the Red Cross museum, which had some very powerful depictions of the destruction and suffering of war, and why organizations like the Red Cross need to exist. One section of the museum consisted of all the index-sized cards listing information concerning World War I POWs, which filled many, many rows of seven-foot high shelves.

Insert one-week pause. I’ll see what I can remember now, since I’ve put off finishing this post for so long.

The next thing that comes to mind was in the evening, we walked along the lakeside and saw two street performers, one girl playing accordion and another doing some sort of dance/baton twirling, but with a baton that was lit on both ends. Unfortunately, they weren’t particularly good, and the girl spinning the fire stick burned herself a couple times, once setting her knee-high socks on fire. Fortunately for her, she must have been taught “stop, drop and roll” in school. I think that was the only time I’ve ever seen any actually use that famous technique.

The next morning, we went searching for the world’s highest water jet, but upon finding out it was not running this particular day, Rafal and I decided to catch the next train to Montreux, while Steven went straight back to Konstanz, apparently because all this traveling was just too much for him.

I’m so glad we decided to go to Montreux, even if only for a few hours, simply because it was such an amazingly beautiful city. Situated at the foot of Mont-Blanc, also on the edge of Lake Geneva, pretty much any view in the city is postcard material. I also witnessed my first mime performance since Ethan Milner’s birthday party about 15 years ago. From a distance, I honestly thought he was a statue because his makeup was so good, but as I got closer, someone tossed a coin into his collection box and he came to life in an exceedingly amusing fashion, pulling off a perfect imitation of some wonderful mechanical toy.

Rafal had suggested stopping by Montreux because of the Castle of Chillon, which sits on a cliff next to the lake, about a 30-minute walk south of the train station, so after watching the mime for a while, we headed that way. Though the place was filled with tourists, it didn’t feel particularly touristy (compare to the following post concerning Salzburg). I think this was accomplished by providing information pamphlets that had lots of in depth information concerning the former uses and renovations of the rooms, which made me feel like the people running the place felt that effectively communicating the history of the place was a priority, rather than (or in addition to) just operating a tourist trap.

That’s all the readily comes to mind, but I think that should be sufficient, as the photos should fill in any descriptive gaps.

Photos are far too difficult to manipulate within blogger, especially when using a laptop with no mouse and a finicky wireless connection, so I'll get to those later.