Geneva

Geneva is a city of neutrality and I have nothing good nor bad to say about it. Just kidding, as my door way into Switzerland it's a cool place. It's small enough that you can walk everywhere and borders a lake, so the temperature is mild. Geneva is not the capital of Switzerland, but it is the center of French Switzerland. This is actually pretty neat because Swiss people are friendly and polite, so you get all the good things about French people without the bad.

The old town portion of Geneva holds the Cathedrale de St. Pierre (which makes it about the 20th St. Peter's Cathedral I've been in), which is where Calvin of Protestant fame preached. It also holds a manor house kept furnished to show how Genevans lived two centuries ago. The city hall is the place where the Geneva Convention was held way back in 1864, setting the stage for Geneva's role in international peacekeeping.

I was walking along a narrow pier on the lake early in the morning and some guy tells me to get back towards the shore. I had no idea why, but I did as he said and after I passed him he presses a button and this huge column of water shoots into the air right next to where I was standing. I later learn that this is the Jet d'Eau, a 134-meter-high fountain that is also Europe's tallest. The engineer in me immediately spends time mentally estimating the volume of water that must be in the fountain, about 9000 L in the air at any given time, and therefore 9000 kg of water, or about 10 tons. I have yet to try figuring out the velocity of the water coming out of the jet and the pressure that has to be used. I'll save that one for the next train trip.

In the northern part of the city is International Hill, the prominent home of the former League of Nations headquarters and now part of the U.N. The tour was decent, but in the end, the building is just filled with lots of conference rooms. Still, a lot of time was spent describing the complex organization of the U.N. and the buildings had many gifts from different countries everywhere. Nearby is the International Red Cross museum that describes its history and workings in detail.

I'll describe more of Switzerland later on, tomorrow I head to Lausanne and Montreux.