Chez les Hevèltes

After waking up at about five am, Stevie and I grabbed our bags and headed toward the train station, catching the 6:52 for Lyon. A short layover there and then a train to Geneva, the first real stop on our trip.

We left the train station headed toward Lac Léman, also known as Lake Geneva (think "smoke on the water"). Crossing the bridge we saw the flower clock outside of the Jardin Anglais - a working clock made out of flowers, how very Swiss. From the garden we could also see the large water jet on the lake shooting water straight up into the air, probably a few hundred feet. Quite impressive. After resting there a bit we crossed back to the other side of the way and walked all the way to the Place des Nations, home of the UN, admiring monuments and the scenery along the way.

There wasn't really a public entrance that we could see, so we just took a few pictures of the flags and buildings, as well as the broken chair sculpture in the square before the complex. There was group of Vietnamese Buddhist monks there chanting and burning incense. I couldn't really figure out why they were there since I don't read Vietnamese, but it was interesting nonetheless to see them.

After a few hours in Geneva we ran out of things we knew to look at that were free (this trip is costing us enough as it is, and Europe has lots of free tourist sites.) We went back to the station to catch a train for Lucerne, where we had a hostel booked for the night.

It was late afternoon when we got into Lucerne, so we decided to check into our hostel right away and drop off our bags before exploring a bit. The directions I had from the hostel involved a bus, and since we're cheap I looked up walking directions on google maps before we left. The route they gave us was fairly direct, but involved a lot of small turns and walking up steep hills and stairs! Needless to say we were exhausted when we finally got there. Looking at a map of the city we found a slightly longer but more direct route back into town, which actually took us less time.

On the way back into town we stopped by a monument known as the dying lion of Lucerne, a monument to Swiss troops that had been carved into the side of a cliff face. It was quite impressive but also kind of sad to look at. A few pictures and we kept moving, back toward the water where we crossed on the chapel bridge, built in the middle ages and beautifully decorated...

A few more pictures and dinner later (Switzerland is definitely the most expensive country I've ever been in - worse than Japan!) and we took a last look around, since we had an early train to Innsbruck the next morning. The hostel had free breakfast so we filled up and walked back to the station in the morning, headed first for Zürich then getting on the train for Innsbruck!