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Geneva
I’ve fallen behind on blogging my trips! The following have so far gone without mention:
-Luxembourg
-Bruxelles, Belgium
-Los Angeles for NAE Grand Challenges National Conference
-(and a wonderful return to Duke, where I saw the people and beauty of the campus I’d been longing for ever since Nicaragua)
Before catching up on those, I’ll put up a post about my most recent trip to Geneva. The two day trip (which turned into a 3 day trip thanks to the SNCF train strike which left us stranded in Dijon for a night) included visits to the United Nations and CERN - both which were very interesting tours. The UN tour was pretty standard - we saw several of the main conference rooms with thousands of seats for the delegates and toured the hallways which were decorate with art donated from countries around the world. Something unexpected was this ceiling:
A bit of research reveals that this ceiling cost $23 million to install and used over 100 tons of paint. Our guide explained that the shapes somehow represent the waves of the ocean and that the different colors should represent the diversity of all the countries and people of the world. Interestingly, depending on one’s location on the floor, different sides of the ceiling are revealed, leading to varying color schemes and appearances.
Random fact: Despite the fact that the “Palais des Nations” is located in Geneva, Switzerland didn’t join the United Nations until 2002.
The tour also included more “classical” looking rooms, where conferences for the League of Nations were said to take place:
But overall, there’s not much to mention about the UN that can’t be found online so I’ll continue. After dinner, we had hoped to use our public transit card to take the “Yellow Boat” (mouette) across Lake Geneva to the other side of the city, but turns out the boats stop running at 8. So we wandered around instead and stumbled upon the 100 year anniversary celebration of the “Musée d’art et d’histoire.” The museum was open to the public until 1am and filled with music, food, and decorations. It was very enjoyable, but we were all so exhausted from starting our travels at 5:30 that morning that we only stayed for an hour before making our way back to the hostel for bed.
Going to bed early turned out to be a good thing because we had a 4 hour private tour of CERN the next day! The tour was incredible and deserves its own post, so that will come next. After CERN, we had just enough time to grab lunch before our train back to Metz. One of the foods I enjoyed most in Switzerland when I went several years ago were the ham and butter sandwiches on a pretzel roll (which have been difficult to find in France! pretzels aren’t as popular as baguettes…), so I was happy to find one of those. Munching on the sandwich brought back fond memories of my first trip to Switzerland in 2006 with my Grandma, sister Rebecca, and Aunt Sarah.
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