Switzerland Journal Day Nine: October 16, 2009 (Geneva/Cologny/Zurich)
The benefit of a restless night in a hostel is when you are up you want to be up and out. As soon as we woke from the little bit of sleep we were able to capture we were downstairs for breakfast and out the door for our big travel day across Geneva. The morning had us catching a bus that would take us as close as possible to Cologny, Switzerland. The goal: Villa Diodati, birthplace of Frankenstein and arguably the horror/science-fiction genre. Prior to the trip I had been obsessing over the new comic book series The Unwritten and one of the major scenes in the comic takes place in the Villa. It is where Lord Byron and Mary Shelley make a bet to write the first horror novel. Shelley, obviously, won the bet. We took the bus to its terminus and had a long walk up from lake Geneva to Cologny which sits on a hill overlooking the lake and the city of Geneva. What we discovered at the top was a charming little village where we couldn’t resist but to pause and drink espresso and eat pastries.
The Villa is still occupied, so the closest you can get is the entry gateway. The best view you can get is from a nearby park. I believe it was worth the trip to the Villa simply for the hike and the view. Maddie and I paid our homage and made our way back down. Next destination: CERN.
Much like our trek to Cologny this trip required taking a bus route to its terminus and walking for a couple of miles. We went so far West we could see the mountains of France in the distance. If we had walked one more mile we could have actually walked across the border.
CERN, you may or may not know is birthplace of the World Wide Web and home to the Large Hadron Collider. We were there only a couple of months before the had the LHC up and running. Unfortunately, in order to tour the LHC you need to book many, many months in advance. Still, there is plenty to see in and around the compound. There is a reasonably sized museum dedicated to physics and the experiments that have happened at CERN. If I were to do it again I would book the LHC tour. We ate lunch at a lonely Indian restaurant that was the only place to eat in the area. It was like any Indian restaurant buffet I’ve eaten at.
On the bus ride back to Geneva proper we decided we had our fill of the city and wanted to make it back to Zurich so we could be bright eyed and bushy tailed for our flight back to the States. The train ride was three or four hours. Being a Friday night it was fun to see the train fill up with young people travelling from one city to the next by train to spend the night out in a different town. For much of the trip the train was packed wall-to-wall on both floors. It was inspiring to see such an exuberant use of public transportation. I envied it greatly and lamented, as I often do, the lack of rail from Chicago to Milwaukee to Madison to Minneapolis.
I was glad we made the trip back to Zurich. We spent a romantic evening exploring the city for a second time. the added bonus was that we knew it a little bit better than the first time we visited at the start of our trip. We had delicious dinners at Ristorante Liguria. I had the Saffron Risotto with Wood Musrooms and Seafood and Maddie had the Octopus Carpaccio with Tomatoes. My dish came piled upon with shellfish still in the shell. It was perplexing, but delicious. After dinner we meandered through the Zurich streets one last time, peaking through the windows of all the shops. Lamenting that our plane was leaving so early we would be losing one last day in the city. Before checking into the hotel we paused to breath in the Swiss air atop Lindenhoff. After that we checked back into the Zic Zac Rock Hotel. This time they gave us the Led Zeppelin room and unlike the Talking Heads room it actually had Led Zeppelin memorabilia on the walls.
In the morning we hurried to our flight and found ourselves homeward bound.
