Geneva, Switzerland

kirstin and i decided to take a day trip to geneva to see the city and visit her sister. day trip to another country? no big deal! this is europe! the countries are as small as states, and it's cheaper to get between them!
though she had been to the train station many times, she hadn't actually seen much of the city... and i had no prior experience whatsoever. in fact. it was my first time in switzerland... at least that i remember.

seeing as it was a two hour train ride each way, in order to make sure we had as much time as possible in geneva, we left at the comfortable hour of 6:50... AM... did i say comfortable hour? i meant ridiculously early.. my bad. kirstin was going to sleep at my house the night before, but plans changed and we decided we would just meet at the gare at about 6:30 instead. i showed up at about 6:20.. plenty of time to spare. kirstin showed up at about 6:40, making me very nervous that she might not make it in time. one, i WOULDN'T have gone without her if she was late. two, i COULDN'T go if she was late.. seeing as she was the one with the tickets. luckily, she made it in time and we started on our journey, napping a bit on the way seeing as it was freakishly early in the morning.

we arrived in geneva shortly before 9am, meaning we had the whole day ahead of us. first: figure out where we might get a little bit of breakfast. but as we were working on that, surprise! tania (kirstin's sister) showed up at the train station to great us before she had to go to work! she showed us where the bus we would need was and then said goodbye.. we would be meeting up with her later in the day. with this info in hand, we set off to eat a little bit and then headed toward the united nations building where we were going to take a tour.

we saw four different rooms along with a number of paintings/photos/tapestries/whatever else donated by different countries. the tour was interesting, and this was definitely my favorite room because of the ceiling:

and i really like the united nations symbol (the earth as shown from the north pole, and two olive branches):

after our tour, we went to find the broken chair and the flags. we thought getting a picture of the chair by itself might be a challenge considering the number of other tourists taking pictures of it, when miraculously, they all left, and the chair was all ours!

next, we headed to the WHO building (world health organization) where tania works to meet her for lunch.

we hung out there for awhile. talking to her friends. and were then given a little tour of the building, including going up to the roof and seeing the amazing view. how they get work done with their views, i have no idea.

 next up, walking around town.  it's a pretty cute town actually. we walked into a church where i truly discovered that catholic churches are more interesting than protestant churches. sure it had pretty windows and arches and an organ.. but it wasn't anything spectacular in my opinion. although we did get to hear some organ.. i believe kirstin said it was being tuned. but i especially liked the christmas tree we found, and the stepping stones with little messages in different languages :)

oh and we found california in geneva!

next up, he hit the grocery store to get food to make dinner with back at tania's residence. tortilla soup. it was pretty bomb. but the BEST part of going to the grocery store? the chocolate of course! kirstin and i bought some for ourselves, and a little bit to give away too. mannn swiss chocolate is good :)

we enjoyed dinner with tania and a couple of her friends who we had met before when they were visiting lyon, met a few others, and soon we were headed back to the train station to catch the last train back to lyon. it was a lovely day, though sad to say goodbye to friendly faces so quickly. but we will be seeing a couple of them in two weeks in rome and basal! so that will be exciting :)

on the way home kirstin and i thought about our trip, our adventures ahead, and of course, about the finals that we have coming up. what to do? make lists to help make our stress managable!

i am now excited to head back to switzerland in a couple weeks, as well as many other new places, but i still love that every time i come back to lyon, it feels like home.