Pictures from Geneva, Switzerland

The Outside of Saint Pierre's Cathedral

Inside of Saint Pierre's Cathedral

The view from the top of Saint Pierre's Cathedral

The fondue tent & our fondue dinner

One of the Plazas lit up at night... each square says something different in different languages

The United Nations

My favorite sculpture in the ceramics museum

The Botanical Gardens

The view from the park of the river, the city, and the mountains

Random picture I took of groups of people playing large chess! I even got to play later that night!

Geneva, Switzerland

1/21-1/27

Geneva, Switzerland

I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble keeping up with my blog… oh wait, yes I do. Spain keeps me so busy! Another week of school flew by. No Friday classes. Monday was a holiday for University of Deusto. So I was looking at a 4-day weekend to take advantage of! The plan was Geneva, Switzerland. Six of us left Bilbao a little after 4 p.m. on Friday and arrived to Switzerland more confused than ever because none of us spoke French (the predominant language spoken in Geneva). But we did find our way to our hotels and settled in (hotel > hostel since the prices were similar). I was actually the one to find the hotel that my roommate and I stayed in and it was a success! Clean, good location, nice staff, breakfasts included, and cheap considering all of the above! We met up for dinner later into the night and explored a little, but basically had an early night. On Saturday, we went to the old city of Geneva… the old parts of cities are my absolute favorite! There, we found a museum of the reformation that had a combined ticket to also get you into Saint Pierre’s Cathedral. The museum was a bore; I’m not going to lie… but the Cathedral was amazing! It was so beautiful, but the really amazing part was that we were able to walk to the top of it in order to see the view. So many spiral staircases, but it was worth it! You could see the whole city, and even better, the mountains in the background. Switzerland is beautiful. After the Cathedral, we made our way back to the area our hotels were in to find somewhere to eat lunch. We figured we would be savvy travelers and save money by eating at Burger King… BOY, were we wrong! I spent $12+ on a combo meal of a burger, fries, and a drink. Switzerland is expensive. We didn’t end up doing much in between lunch and dinner because one of the girls in the group got her purse stolen… so we spent the afternoon at the police station, on the computer canceling credit cards, and just letting her take some time to cool down… And I really thought I would be the first one to have something of mine stolen. Anyways, dinner was an adventure. We found a restaurant that wasn’t just a regular building, but a group of three big, white, circular tents with Christmas lights around the edge. And we didn’t even know what they sold there until we got inside. It was a fondue restaurant. Perfect right? Switzerland is known for its cheese. We looked at the menu and ordered two $37 pots of cheese for the six of us. For an appetizer, onions and pickles were served… yum? And with the cheese, we got about 10 pieces of meat each and a ton of bread to dip. Fondue is so good! I was in love, until we got the bill. I mentioned none of us spoke French right? Well the $37 ended up being per person! So we each paid $40 each, since you have to pay for water everywhere else besides the U.S. We were all in such shock, but had to just laugh it off. We didn’t do much after dinner… we simply explored the city at night. On Sunday, we had our big day of visiting tourist attractions. We went to the United Nations – cool. We went to a ceramics museum – right up my ally, I love ceramics. We went to the botanical gardens – my new favorite thing to do, so pretty. And we went to a park with a great view of the river, the city behind that, and the Alps behind that – gorgeous, but the pictures DO NOT capture what I saw. Anyways, not much to say about the rest of Sunday night… or about the trip home Monday morning. I was able to pull some change together to afford Swiss chocolate… in the airport, but Swiss chocolate none-the-less! This weekend was one hell of an experience. Switzerland is the land of chocolate, cheese, and expensive shit.