Geneva the Lac Town

Geneva is a very pleasent place to visit. It is situated at the tip of the largest Alpine lake, nestling between the Jura Mountains and the Alpes. The major language used in Geneva is the French. However most establishments are well versed with English.

Geneva is the house to the WHO, the United Nations... among many prominent organizations of the world.

View of the Alps from the Airplane

We landed in Geneva on our flight from Mumbai via Zurich. Its a short flight of about 30 mins from Zurich to Geneva, flying besides the famous Swiss Alpes. Its one of the most breath taking flight journey one could ever have. Geneva hosts a relatively small and quite Airport, The Cointrin Airport. We had to wait for quite a while at the airport for our Hotel cab to pick us up as it turned out to be that we landed at the time when their drivers take a deserved rest for an hour. It was a short drive to the Hotel from the airport and we comfortabaly checked in to our hotel, The Express by Holiday Inn. It was a small and cozy hotel, but not one I would recomend if you are there to visit Geneva on a tour. It served us well as we had to attend some business too, which was near the Hotel.

We headed to the Lac(Lake) Leman to view the Jet d'Eau, the most spectacular view in Geneva. The Jet d'Eau is a fountain the pumps water high up into the air to about 140 meters. Thats amazing. The Lake is filled with hundreads of boats of all types on its shore. As we reached in the evening, most of the cruises were closed for the day. We checked our for the different cruises and decided we would be talking one of them the next day. And as luck would have it, it started raining out there. We headed back to the Geneva Railway Station to take a train back to Contairin to head back to our Hotel.

At the Lac Leman, with Jet d'Eau at the back

Next day after the business meeting we headed to the Lac again, in anticipation of not missing the cruise. We boarded a beautiful cruise which took us really upclose to the Jet d'Eau. We could even experince the mist from the Jet falling on us. It was one of those experince to really cherish and we knew it was just the begining and there were many more to come.

The next day we decided we had to make it to the United Nations for its sheer historic purpose. Somehow it feels good standing along side the UN. We took a bus opposite our hotel to the Nations. After 2 stops we realised we were going on the opposite side to the nations, towards La Hopital. Anyhow we decided we would go and visit the La Hopital too. It turned out to be quite a good ride, with the bus taking us throug interior Geneva, amongst the houses, which not many tourists would usually visit. We sat in the same bus which would evetually take us to the other end of its journey to our initially intended destination, The United Nations. The last guided tour inside the Nations is at 3PM and as we were able to reach there only by 5, we were not previledged to have a birds eye view of the nations.

At the United Nations

We bid good bye to the Nations and next set of in persuit of the WHO. We had to walk quite a distance to eventually find the WHO. We moved around its vast campus and took pictures with whatever we could. Extremely tired we then hoped on to bus which took us back to the Nations. We took one of those most colourfull trams from the Nations to the Lac Leman which was the center point of our Geneva experience. We had heard about the famous flower clock and now we had to see it. We were pretty unfortunate that day not to be able to locate it. However we did narrow it down the next day which also happened to be the Birthday of Your Truely. We had hunted down an Indian restaurant (rather Pakistani)where we had a filling dinner, the first Indian food we laid our hands on after leaving the shores of Mumbai. We headed back to the Hotel, to pack our stuff to headover to Interlaken the next day. Interlaken is where our tour really began away from the work.

At the Flower clock, Lac Leman

Next day we got up early enough and off we went to Interlalen by the 9 AM Geneva Aeroport to Zurich Flugafen Train.