Things in Geneva, illustrated
The town
There is a lake, and mountains, and lots of buildings. Oh, and people too.
[a 180 degree panorama from the lake]
It's a nice place to be 35 with kids. I'm told it's more expensive than Tokyo, now. You live there for the school system, but do your grocery shopping in France where it's cheap. The town itself is really small, at least compared to its reputation. You see things that would probably get destroyed anywhere else, like the giant chess sets in public parks.
The accomodation
We stayed with some friends of Ian, in a lovely little house not too far from the city part. They had four cats, movies of Ian when he was just a little boy, and used funny words like nonante and septante and linge instead of serviette.
The tourist landmarks
Tourists seemed nice and polite and blended well into the background, completely unlike here or Paris. I guess the ones who come here are forcibly interested in things like a gigantic water jet and walls dedicated to the Reformation.
I had real Mövenpick ice cream from their head cafe thing. Yum.
Things to sell tourists
Namely chocolate and knives. The knife thing has gone a little bit far, I think, when you start seeing things like this:
And of course, one of the laws of the space-time continuum of Geneve is that it is physically impossible to return without chocolate. Ian took me to what he considers the canonical chocolaterie: du Rhône. I looked at the prices and walked out again. 100 CHF ($/euro 70) is not a number you're supposed to see posted on the wall of a chocolate shop.
I decided instead to buy a small amount of chocolate from three different chocolate shops we ran into in the downtown area, and du Rhône wins the taste test. The lady in the shop was also the nicest. She suggested I take the same chocolates without a box to save money, and was also the only of the three to actually speak to me in French.
fêtes de genève
It was going on the week we were there. They have a web site. They took over the whole waterfront with lots of amusement park rides and booths selling overpriced exotic souvenirs and food. The food included stuff you'd never see in the American equivalent: tartiflette, raclette, crepes, gaufres (er, waffles), döner kebaps (which really need to be imported to the US soon) along with the random junky Indian, Chinese, Mexican, and hot dog stands.
The waterfront at night:
Amusement park rides
I liked the fact that most of the rides were in German. I don't think Ian understood why I thought it was funny. They were horrendously overpriced: 4-5 CHF each, which is something like $/euro 2.50-3.50. Normally part of the thrill of these rides is that you know they're probably not all that safe, and yet you're still stupid enough to get on, strap in, and be thrown around in all directions at ridiculously high speeds. They get scarier every year to keep up with the crowds demanding more adrenaline, I guess. I convinced Ian to go on one of the less alarming ones: a slightly modified octopus ride that turned in two additional directions, including upside down and around. It was... interesting... the ride operator kept adding dimensions of rotation, colored spotlights, loud music, strobe lights. It was like an experiement in sensory overload, and after a few minutes I actually felt myself go beyond some threshold of passiveness. Kind of like zen, only that it was hard to walk afterwards because of the post-adrenaline thing.
The fireworks
The highlight of the fêtes is the fireworks show at the end. We got to climb onto the roof of an uncle's apartment building on the lakefront for the best view in town. It's rather difficult to take pictures of fireworks, but the choreography was really impressive. The coolest thing I saw, I think, was the green lights that exploded in the air and then stayed alight on the surface of the lake for a long time.
This one is neat because of the way the water is lit up.
They were really big and close.
At the end they light up the water jet.
