Geneva

Friday 30th July

Carole met me at the airport and whisked me off to her house in Genthod, a suburb north of Geneva. I hadn't seen her for something approaching a decade, but she hardly seemed to have changed at all! I'd met her husband Nathaniel before, but not her children or mother-in-law (who would be looking after the kids while we all went hiking).

Staying in their basement room, I got to see an example of the bomb shelters that were mandatory in Swiss houses until recently. It's used for long-term storage.

Saturday 31st July

Nathaniel and Doreen were off to the market (in France). I took the train into Geneva, walked down to the Rhone and across one of the bridges, and wandered around the old town. This turned into something of a religious tour, since I saw the synagogue, the Reformation Monument, the Russian Orthodox church, the Museum of the Reformation, and the Cathedral.

More secular sites included the art/history museum and the Maison Tavel (both of these were free, which I was to find wasn't normal for Swiss museums). As well as examples of furniture and artifacts from everyday life, the latter has on the top floor a model of Geneva in 1850 — when it was a full-on artillery fortress a la Vauban — and downstairs a (temporary) exhibition of photographs showing how Geneva changed since then.

After that I wandered through the shopping areas and along the waterfront, where some kind of festival was on, before heading back to the train station to meet Mark, who had come down from Basel to join us.

Next: the Tour du Mont Blanc
Up: Switzerland