Geneva: CERN, Museums, and $12 Big Macs

The busyness has commenced! David and I travelled to Geneva, Switzerland this weekend. We left very early Thursday morning and arrived, after many train connections and a lot of essay writing, in Geneva around 6pm. Immediately upon stepping off the train, we realized that everything in Geneva cost at least twice what we thought it should. As an example, we stepped into a McDonald’s to check their prices, and found that a Big Mac runs at 11.50 francs (about $12) and a 6-piece box of chicken nuggets cost you 9.50 francs (about $10). We ended up eating from grocery stores a lot. In fact, our buffet breakfast at our hotel allowed us to eat out only once. We chose the cheapest place we could find, a Chinese restaurant near our hotel, and our meal cost $60. Basically, we are glad to be back in Prague where we can buy food without going broke.

The cheapest place we could find to stay was a three-star hotel near the train station. We were shocked that we could afford a hotel with stars at all, let alone one in the most expensive city we’ve seen. The room was 60% off its original price, and we took the included breakfast for everything it was worth. Overall, it was an excellent deal (well, for Geneva). 

Panoramic from the bridge

Jet d'eau (which I still don't know how to pronounce)

On Friday, we bought and used 24-hour Geneva Passes, which granted us entrance to a lot of museums. We visited the city’s main cathedral, San-Pierre Cathedral, and we climbed the tower there to get a great view of the city. Once back on the ground, we went to the archeological museum located under the cathedral. The current cathedral is actually the fourth one to be built on that location. Underneath the cathedral, archeologists have found ruins from Roman and pre-Roman times. One of the oldest finds was of a skeleton of a chieftain who was buried there around 300 BCE. It appears that people began settling around the grave in order to worship there, and shrines were built over it. Over two thousands years later, people still worship on the same site. On the way to our next museum, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, I had a freakout time and David was great about it. He didn’t once tell me that we should really get going because our passes were only good for 24 hours. He just sat with me and talked and listened and helped me process. Basically, go David. Once I had finally calmed down, we went inside the Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, which turned out to be one of the best museums I’ve ever been to. It was exceptionally well done, very artistic, and appropriately depressing but also surprisingly hopeful. We walked around for a while after the museum closed and then ate dinner from a grocery store.

View of the city from the tower at San-Pierre Cathedral

The next morning, we had a 10:30 appointment for a guided tour at CERN. For anyone who isn’t quite as big of a nerd as David and I (or who doesn’t watch ‘Big Bang Theory’), CERN is an internationally funded center for the study of physics. Last year, they announced their observation of the Higgs boson, which is theorized to give particles mass. We took a tram there and arrived 45 minutes early. We looked around a museum covering some fairly basic physics until our tour started. We received fancy blue badges that authorized us to go inside and were led by a scientist who works on the ATLAS experiment, one of four main experiments located on the LHC (large hadron collider: it allows physicists to collide beams of particles at very high speeds and recreate the conditions present just after the Big Bang) and one of two that verified the observation of the Higgs boson. Because there are experiments running, we couldn’t go down to see the LHC itself, but we were led into a room with a LEGO model of ATLAS (to scale) and a window looking in on the control room, which was empty because CERN physicists apparently eat lunch just like the rest of us. Our guide was great at answering questions that varied from mine, at the low end of physics understanding, to those of the physics PhDs in our group. After the tour, we visited an exhibition on the various elements of the LHC, the basics of astrophysics, and some of the questions CERN scientists are working to answer. It was such a cool place to see.

After we got back to the center of the city, we wandered around town looking for pretty places. We ate at a grocery store for lunch and then walked around Old Town and some parks, and walked out on some jetties the extend into Lake Geneva (which apparently you aren’t supposed to bike on, as David learned). Then we went to our $60 Chinese meal, which was an overpriced, but tasty, relief from grocery store food. 

David got a thorough shaming whenever we saw these signs...

BABY SWANS!!!

Sunday morning after breakfast, we checked out of our hotel, where we stored our luggage. Then we went to the train station and tried to get a reservation so that could have a nice overnight train ride back with beds and such. Of course, we should have known that we wouldn’t be able to afford a reservation. The man at the counter made it very clear that we were imposing by asking how much the reservation would cost. Once he told us a bed cost 66 Francs each (in addition to the tickets we already had), we knew we would be in for a gross overnight train trip. We ended up boarding a train around 3pm and arriving in Prague around 9:30. Our sleep was interrupted by multiple train switches, including a 3 hour layover from 1:30 to 4:30 am in Berlin (we sat in a coffee shop and watched “On Golden Pond”). Once we finally made it back to Prague, I went from the train station to the gym, then from the gym to Starbucks, from Starbucks to class, from class to David’s apartment where I had therapy and made dinner, then to class again. And tomorrow I have three classes and two finals. Basically, I’ll be running on coffee until Wednesday when I can sleep in. Until then, happy caffeine-ing!

Park we explored just before we left. It reminded me of the Greenbelt. :)