I spent the weekend in Geneva, Switzerland with a couple friends, Alison and Jaclyn. We took a TGV train (Train de grande vitesse/"high speed train"), and it took about 3 hours to get there. Once we arrived in the city, we headed to the appartment we were renting for the weekend from a young couple. Their appartment was really nice and was easily the nicest place I've stayed at for a trip. Geneva itself is also really pretty, and it's really clean! It's also French-speaking so that made it better for us because we got to practice our French on a trip haha.
The first day we didn't do very much because we were waiting for two of Alison's friends to arrive and we didn't want to do a bunch of sight-seeing without them. But we did go to the Patek Phillippe Museum of clocks and watches. Sadly they don't allow pictures inside so I don't have any photos to show you, but the museum itself was otherwise nice. They had clocks and watches from all historical periods and a lot of them were really beautiful. We stayed for about two hours before the museum started to close (it closed at 6pm!), but that was long enough for me - I can only look at so many watches and clocks haha. We also found a park that had giant chess and checker boards on the ground with giant plasic pieces for people to play with, so of course we had to play! It was me vs Jaclyn with Alison as knight because Jaclyn's set was missing a piece. We were pretty evenly matched - that's to say that we both know how to move the pieces correctly but we don't have any real strategy at all haha. Eventually we just agreed to a tie because it would have taken too long. After, we went to a grocery store to buy food to make dinner because restaurants in Geneva are incredibly expensive. We made couscous and curry chicken with vegetables. I have very few cooking skills so I made the couscous cause it's basically impossible to fuck up haha.
After dinner we were really tired from getting up early to catch our train so we just relaxed at the appartment and watched some French TV.
Alison's friends arrived over night so they joined us for sight-seeing on the 2nd day. We honestly saw a lot, I can't believe we crammed it in all in one day. We saw the Jet d'eau which was pretty cool. We walked through a bunch of gorgeous gardens and parks, including the English gardens with l'Horlage de fleurs (Flower Clock). We were on our way to go to the Ariana glass and ceramics museum when we stumbled across the United Nations and Unicef buildings! So that was really cool. We stopped at the botanical gardens for a couple hours to just relax in the nice weather, which may have been a mistake because I actually got a sunburn haha. For dinner we really wanted to get fondue because it's so big in Switzerland so we found a nice place by the water. We got a giant pot of fondue and a basket of bread to eat it with. We somehow managed to finish all of it, but we were completely stuffed at the end. We decided to call it a day and head back to the appartment because we were exhausted but we stopped at a small children's playground on the way back (it was practically mandatory). It was fun but there were a couple pieces of playground equipment we weren't sure how you're supposed to use haha. Once we had enough we just went back to the appartment and called it a night.
Alison's friends had to take an early morning train on Monday so it was just me, Alison and Jaclyn again. We didn't have much time because we were taking a 4:30pm train back to Paris so we just fit in a couple more things that we wanted to see. We saw the Notre-Dame of Geneva and we also saw the Russian Cathedrale. Unfortunately the Russian Cathedrale was closed so we couldn't see inside but the outside was really pretty at least. After seeing the churches, we went searching for souvenirs and good Swiss chocolate to take back to Paris and then it was time to take the train back.
Geneva was really nice but there was one really annoying thing: a lack of ATMs! ATMs were actually fairly hard to find, which is weird for a big city. And even when we found them, almost all of them required a minimum withdrawal of 50 francs (~$56). You'd think that a country known for banking would have at least decent ATMs but I guess we're too poor for the Swiss banks to give a shit haha.
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