The second part of our New Years Travels were to Geneva Switzerland. Geneva is located right across the French border and was a two hour train ride from Grenoble. The train ride gave us a great chance to see the snow covered mountains, endless vineyards and canyons and lakes between Grenoble and Geneva. We got into Geneva around 3 p.m. on New Years Day.
Most of these pictures are from our second day in Geneva as we spent the entire first afternoon trying to find an ATM and a place to eat dinner! Note to anyone going to Geneva in the future, change money and bring it with you. ATM's are next to impossible to find in Geneva. The one in the train station would only give us 100 Franc notes (not very useful) and every ATM we passed on the street belonged to a private bank that required their bank card to enter. Another note... in our entire time in Switzerland we found it impossible to find a regular grocery store... all that we could find was little corner convenience stores. Weird.
On the whole I enjoyed Geneva, but wasn't super impressed with it. Our time their was very cold, overcast and many of the things I wanted to do were either way too expensive (museums with $12 entrance fees per person) or closed for the holidays (The UN center on Jan 3rd). We were actually very surprised that many businesses and attractions were closed long after Jan 1st.
However, there were some memorable attractions. Our first stop was to the flower clock which lies near the waterfront of Lake Geneva. It was impressive and I was happy to see planted with winter plants. Both in France and Switzerland there is this odd obsession with continuing to plant flowers (usually pansies) even though the cold weather cannot support them. You constantly see government workers replanting pansies over and over as the old ones die from the frost.
As you can see from the close-ups it was really really cold out. Through our entire day we did lots of walking and its always nice to see what random sights you can find in a city. I really enjoyed seeing all the Swiss flags, the pointy rooftops and this pretty archway.
We walked through old town Geneva in search of St. Pierre Cathedral. This is a Protestant Cathedral (and thus much less ornate than the many Catholic cathedrals we have seen in France). It was interesting because Geneva was the center of the reformation and there were monuments and exhibits relating to the reformation.
The waterfront of Lake Geneva was quite pretty and we walked along the lake every morning trying to get pictures of the sunrise over the mountains. Sadly it was too overcast every day to really see the Alps. But I did get a few nice boat pictures.
So those are most of my Geneva pictures. Next up our day trip to Montreaux Switzerland... a very pretty little lakeside town.
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