48hrs in Geneva

After a day in Lausanne for Lou’s job we arrived in Geneva by train into glorious sunshine, jumped into a taxi and headed to the Hotel Rotary despite him insisting it was only a short walk away.  He was right in the end, but we didn’t have a map due to printer malfunction and he made himself a bit of cash.  The hotel appeared nice enough from the reception, but Geneva is expensive at the best of times, and at short notice you get even less for your money so when we got to the room we were not surprised to find it was a little old fashioned, but who cares we were only sleeping there.

We went for a walk to enjoy the early evening sun, the hotel was located conveniently close to the southern point of lake Geneva where the River Rhone flows out of the lake where there were lots of Swans swimming around.  We then walked along the promenade and around Le Jardin Anglais and after a walk down past the shops on Rue de Marché we returned tot he hotel to change for dinner.

I had previously received a number of recommendations for dinner and we ended up walk over to the Old Town of Geneva to Soupçon where we enjoyed a fantastic dinner, if pretty expensive for what is essentially a cafe.

On Saturday we went for breakfast in a small cafe and went shopping for our forthcoming trip to Kamchatka, we followed this up with a wonder around the old town for the afternoon, past the Hotel de Ville and even the 12th Century St Peter’s Cathedral where there was a wedding party leaving.  Bizarrely the wedding party seemed to be made up a mixture of British and French accents, and the groom rode away on a bicycle – those crazy Swiss!!

The next day we went for a ride on Lake Geneva on the boat taxis that were included in our free transport card we were given at the hotel and ended up getting off the boat on the north bank of the lake and walked back along the bank.  There was some kind of wake-boarding festival going on, and right next to it an eerie outdoor photo exhibition about the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.  These photos were disturbing and you have to wonder who would volunteer to take these photos of the remains of Chernobyl, showing things like abandoned hospital rooms, or the fact that the seal plug over the reactor is close the leaking again, scary stuff.

Click images for full sized images.

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 6:00 pm. It is filed under Blog, Life, Travel and tagged with Geneva, Lake Geneva, Lausanne, Photos, St Peter's Cathedral, Switzerland, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.