Genève: Un pour tous, tous pour un!

Who decides to take a weekend trip to one of the most expensive countries in the world???

We do!

We being Mary Catherine, Erin, and me. 

And we went to Geneva, Switzerland for three days and had just a splendid time and there were lots of girlie moments and giggles and gluten-free candy for everyone. 

Posin' pretty.
Gluten-free candy not pictured. 

We arrived early Friday morning and got settled into our hotel, which was actually just over the border into France in a town called Ferney-Voltaire where Voltaire lived for a while and bossed everyone in the town around. We were all starving by this time so we went set off to Geneva to find food and see the city.

The water is so blue because Swiss women throw their sapphires
 into the water when they become last season. 

Let me just emphasis again: Geneva is SO EXPENSIVE. We wandered around for a good while trying to find a restaurant that offered gluten-free dishes and/or that didn't cost 25 euros/francs/rubies for a lunch plate. We finally found a pub that had croque monsieur sandwiches and omelettes that wasn't extremely expensive. 

I was seeing double at that point, and it was very yummy. 

Fancy ham & cheese plus salad. I love ham. 

After lunch, we explored the town more and stumbled upon--I mean, purposefully discovered--Cathedrale de Saint-Pierre, which is a very large Reformist church that John Calvin adopted when he lived in Geneva. Geneva was where all of the Protestant leaders, including Calvin, sought refuge during the Reformation. 

The church was cool on the inside, although it was markedly devoid of much decoration because the Protestants weren't big proponents of those kinds of things. 

They didn't mind imposing columns. 

There was one room inside that was decorated very lavishly. I forgot what the actually story was, but I think they recently restored it to how it looked before the Protestants took over? I may be making that up, but it was a nice room. 

 

We walked up a few thousand narrow spiral staircases to get to the towers that gave an awesome 360 degree view of Geneva.

My "the stone walls are all starting to look the same" face (à la The Yellow Wallpaper). 

Annnnd, then we did more wandering and talking and sitting in parks and wandering. Yay Geneva!

Mary and Erin playing checkers in one of Geneva's many parks.
They soon abandoned their game, because we remembered how boring checkers is if it isn't raining. 

For dinner, we had kebabs and fries. 

Because every good European loves a good ol' kebab from an immigrant-owned restaurant. 

In our hunt for cheap food the next morning we happened upon the Saturday markets in Ferney-Voltaire. The market was very impressive; I think it took up the whole town. We had delicious strawberries, and I had an excellent slab of gingerbread that lasted me the whole day. 

For our lunch we purchased a roasted chicken and potato combo for only 3 euros! We were very proud of ourselves and split two between the three of us. 

(Sharing is caring; one of many lessons I've learned in Socialist France, Daddy.) 

We took the bus into Geneva to find a picnic spot, but we got a little desperate and classily had our lunch in front of the United Nations. We hoped that people would not assume we were hobos and think that a) we were protesting something, b) just having lunch, or c) protesting Israeli apartheid by having our lunch. 

.

Palais des Nations in the far background;
Middle-ground: Giant chair with broken leg was an homage to the effort to ban land mines;
well-coiffed wanderers making plates out of paper bags in the front. 

Chicken n' potatoes, sold by a jolly man who told us they were beautiful chickens for beautiful girls. 

No photo-shoot would be complete without a picture featuring a chicken carcass!

After devouring our meal like rapid dogs, we embarked on a quest to find the Patek Philippe Watch Museum that was advertised everywhere. We mistakenly entered into the extremely fancy Patek Philippe Watch Store, but the lady gave us free tickets to the museum so it worked out well. We found the right museum and took a very long but interesting tour of the company's building and watch collection. 

The tour guide informed us that Geneva is so well-known for its watchmaking because...way-back-when, Geneva was a very popular transit stop for businessmen traveling through Europe, who would often buy artisanal presents there to bring home. Thus, there was a large population of specialty craftsmen and the like. But then the Protestants came in and forbid people to wear jewelry so now the artisan class didn't know what to do with themselves. But then Calvin decided that people could wear watches since they were functional, so all these different types of tradesmen (painters, jewelers, engravers, etc.) devoted themselves to making beautiful and intricate watches instead! 

And that's that. 

Speaking of the Reformers....This is the Reformation Wall, in front of which we hung out for a while with some sketchy Swiss teenagers. (We saw one of them put a cigarette through her gauge hole.) 

One of the well-known dishes of Swiss cuisine is fondue so, naturally, we jumped on board that bandwagon. We walked for a while looking for a place and just as we were about to give up, we found a restaurant with not-too-pricey fondue. 

So. much. cheese. 

I got the fondue aux bolets, which has mushrooms. It was pretty good, with a strong wine taste. It came with dried meat, bread, and tiny cocktail pickles and onions. 

I could make it at home with my fondue pot though, not to be a cheese snob...

Yum. Yum. Yum. 

On Sunday, we took a train ride to nearby Lausanne, which is situated further north on Lake Geneva. It was a lovely little town, one that gave us a great view of the mountains and the lake and cute Swiss buildings. We hiked across (nearly) the entire town in an attempt to eat lunch by the lake (i.e. have our sandwiches frozen in our hands). We also visited a photography museum with a really moving exhibit of a 1960's war photographer's work. 

Just the Alps behind me, no big deal.
Not like I was excited to see where the von Trapp family finally escaped the clutches of the Nazis. 

On the train ride home, we made a quick stop in Morgues, a quaint lil' town, to see how the view there was (and to say we've visited three Swiss cities).

This is my best Maria von Trapp impression. It included a half-spin. 

We sang a lot of Sound of Music that weekend. 

For our final meal in Geneva (my wallet was so sad), we ate a Swiss cuisine restaurant that looked just like what one would imagine a Swiss restaurant to look like. Everything was wood, there were lots of dead animals on the walls, and, overall, a very cozy atmosphere. 

We got 'la raclette', which is a plate, served in individual portions, of cheese that has been melted while still on the wheel and then scraped off. So it was basically like fondue put on a plate for you, without the wine base. Also there were the crunchy edge parts that were soooo yummy. 

With it, they gave us a lot of meat, tiny potatoes, pickles, onions, and bread.

For the food-lovers that find themselves too clumsy and/or impatient to fondue. 

So in summary, melted cheese.

Plus lots of fun with fun friends! 

Our photo-booth picture from the photography exhibit: 

(there was no screen on the inside so we had no idea what was going on). 

This is way cuter than any poster for the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. We know. 

Prague

For the second half of our break, we went to Prague! 

I visited Prague for a few days when I visited Europe the first time, but we only had one free day (really like four hours) to walk around. I also didn't remember that much about it so I figured that a return visit would be a worthwhile venture. It was just a five hour bus ride from Berlin, and our bus was SWEET. The seats were super comfy, everyone had their own TV, and we got free coffee. Which is basically everything I want in life. 

It was just a teeny-tiny-miniscule bit warmer in Prague, but we still had to take lots of breaks from walking outside.

Poising awkwardly on the Charles Bridge. Prague Castle in the background. 

Our hostel was super nice also. It was called the Czech Inn, oh you pun-y people. We had breakfast in the hostel every morning and it was a very nice buffet. If only I could have that every morning...

It was in the bar, where we also enjoyed some tasty Czech beer. 

Even the ceiling impressed me. 

For our first dinner we went to a restaurant down the street at the recommendation of the hostel attendant. It was 'bohemian' food, because apparently the Czech Republic is part of a region that was the original Bohemia. Our food was amazing and super cheap and we were most pleased with ourselves. 

I had roasted boar with a rosehip sauce and dumplings. ROASTED BOAR. Boar. I felt like I was a princess in a period piece film or something. It was tasty, with texture like normal pork. 

This is what Belle was first served at the Beast's castle but then got weirded out because it was never clear what kind of animal that Beast actually was. 

Blair and Erin both had wild hare, which I tasted a lot of. It was also amazing and delicious and made me feel like a fairy tale princess. (I don't think usually that's people's reactions to eating weird meats but whatever). 

Hare's the hare. 

However, the most exciting part of the night was that Miki came to meet me. Of course his train was late because it broke down because of Hungary. But it was still great!

Look at how cute we are. 

Some of us smile for pictures, while others pretend that Europeans are better than everyone else. 

We took a walking tour one day and learned a lot about the city's history. Basically the history of Prague is just a long string of dudes being jerks to one another and then getting revenge. There were also two really devastating fires and several defenestrations. Our tour guide was this hilarious Greek student who would say things like "and then he did suicide;" his English wasn't the best but he made up for it with flair. 

After the two hour tour was over, we needed to warm up naturally. We had lunch with our tour guide (because we were the friendliest) and two German girls on the tour. We ate in a restaurant that was pirate themed but had typical Czech food. I had roast beef and dumplings. 

Dumplings were unintentionally a thematic element of the trip. 

Prague has a lot of cool buildings, which they work really hard to keep in good shape because some lady had a dream once about a fancy city named Praha. More history for you. 

Cool building that made me want to draw shapes. 

After not eating for thirty minutes, we of course had to get a snack. We had the same kind of sweet dough columns that they sell in Hungry although these weren't as delicious. But still a good snack. 

This is one of our many attempts to smile more like Europeans for pictures. 

Miki also found a monastery where they brew beer, because we hadn't had any beer for a whole 45 minutes. There were a lot of buildings on the monastic complex but we only went to the bar/restaurant. We met a very nice old man who has apparently lived everywhere and knows everything. He told us that the monastery's IPA is the best in all the land (of the Czech Republic). Miki was very excited about the huge beer brewing containers and kept trying to get us to take a picture in front of them.

But what he really wanted was a picture of himself in front of them. 

The next day we went to Prague Castle, which is actually a huge castle complex with ten different museums and/or exhibits within it.  It took us nearly all day to visit everything, and we even stopped reading the very wordy accounts of Czech history half-way through. 

Lots of historical artifacts though! 

Like real suits of armor! One such suit pictured here with a wax model of a 15th century dodo bird. 

The rooms inside of the buildings were colder than it was outside that day. I can't imagine how people lived there. They must have been fans of layering their chain-mail and lace corsets and whatnot.

We all forgot our chain-mail so we had to take a medieval coffee break to warm up. 

The architecture in the castle complex was very awesome. One building was a former house for single ladies, which sounds like it would be a brothel but was just for classy rich women. Inside was an exhibit on all of the gargoyles of the castle, and they were all freakishly awesome. 

My impression of a Czech gargoyle. 

Afterwards we went to Lennon's Wall. No one really knew what the purpose of the wall was, but according to Wikipedia, it was a symbol of artistic expression and free speech during the country's communist years. There was originally just one portrait of John Lennon, but it's been repeatedly covered by graffiti and other paintings of John Lennon. A lot of the graffiti that we saw featured snippets of John Lennon songs (like every other graffitied wall).

All of the fellow tourists were so excited to take pictures in front of it. 

We had lunch/dinner at a random local restaurant, where I had 'duck in a pan' with red cabbage and assorted dumplings. It was delicious of course. 

They weren't kidding about the pan. 

Since we knew it would be our last meal in a real Czech breakfast, we had dessert. I had apple strudel, which was on practically every menu in both Germany and the Czech Republic. It was super yummy. Strudel is pie's cool cousin. 

Our final day we did a little shopping and meandering. Miki and I bought a padlock to put on a bridge somewhere (we've been meaning to do that for as long as we've been dating). We finally put it on the Charles Bridge. The grid that we put it on is apparently some kind religious icon, because as we were trying to lock it on a MILLION other tourists came up to take their pictures next to it. They would put one hand on the cross thing on the stone ledge and then their other hand on the iron dude in the center, arranging their fingers a certain way. Then they would wait for their friends to take a picture of them. I don't know if it is some kind of pilgrimage thing, but it kinda looked like it was some nonsense that a tour guide made up one day. Anyway, three cheers for our love lock! 

Five dollars to whoever can find which one is ours. (excluding Miki)

Overall, our trip was very lovely. Prague was very charming. 

Still, it was nice to get back to Nice, mostly because we hadn't seen the sun shine in a week. 

Please once more look at how cute we are. 

(Ignore how my coat made me look a little chubs)

Brrrrlin

aka Berlin, Germany

This past week was our spring (actually mid-winter) break, and I traveled to Berlin and Prague with two of my lovely fellow Americans. We went to Berlin for the first part of week to get our beer and besichtigung (visiting) on. Overall we had a really great time and only had to make bitter comments about the World Wars one time (to be explained later). 

Anyway, Germany! I visited two western German towns for a single day when I was in Belgium, and I have since been looking forward to returning to Germany. I didn't know much about Berlin before going but figured there was no better place to be impressed by German efficiency than in its capital city. 

Also Angela Merkel lives here and she's like the most powerful woman in the world. So yeah. 

Here's me in front of the Brandenburg Gate, or the Brandenburger Tor in German.

As a warning I am wearing the same thing in all of my pictures. And the sky stayed the same color. 

 During the Cold War, the Berlin Wall ran in front of the Gate and now it's a big symbol of Germany n' democracy n' stuff. This is where the most news coverage of the Wall coming down took place in November 1989. I think the Gate itself was built by a Prussian king a long time ago (and assumably served as a real gate to something).

If you look really hard, you can see a statue in the far distance through the space in the very middle of the columns. That's the Victory Column, which was built to commemorate the Prussians kicking someone's butt a long time ago. 

**Detailed and accurate history brought to you by the history major**

Aside from my general excitement about traveling, I was extremely excited about having German sausage and beer. By the time we arrived and had gotten settled in our hostel we were all starving. At the recommendation of the hostel desk assistant, we went to Brauhaus Lemke Hackescher Market. It was a huge restaurant that brewed its own beer, which seemed to be the case with a lot of Berlin restaurants. 

The waitress tried to talk us out of the dark beer. Psssh she don't know where I come from. 

My goal for the first day was to try two different kinds of sausage and two different kinds of beer. And I accomplished all of it in ONE MEAL. A thousand meal points to Gryffindor! 

 I had the three sausage platter. The Nürnberger style sausage tasted like very good breakfast sausage. The Thüringer style Bratwurst, the large one with the Xs on it, tasted exactly how you would imagine delicious German sausage tasting. The outside was extra crunchy. The Gourmet style Bratwurst, the one that looks like it is launching itself at the camera, had cheese inside and was also extremely tasty. It came with fried potatoes and a few vegetables for show. 

My satisfaction with this meal my have been partly fueled by my intense hunger and my love of sausage, but it was also a reflection of my fatigue with my own cooking.
But, really, i<3sausage

Afterwards we worked off our huge meals by getting a little lost and playing in the snow. Because it was snowing that day! It was very cool getting to see snow. It was never very heavy but snowed pretty consistently and it was the largest amount of snow I've ever seen. 

We poor sheltered Louisianians in front of the largest park in Berlin.
This was, of course, before we discovered the snow just makes you really cold. 

The park was beautiful and I finally got to submerge my snow boots, that I have lugged across Europe for two months, in the snow!

                                 We even made snow angels! People do that when it snows.

I'm not one to brag but this was the best snow angel that I have ever done AS WELL as the best Berlin had ever seen. 

And sometimes you just have to have a nice cold Berliner beer to warm yourself up. 

#snowproblem

It also snowed all day the next day when we visited the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. It was about a 45-minute train ride outside of Berlin. It was one of the most important concentration camps, because it is where the SS planned their general evil-doing and controlled hundreds of other camps. It was super depressing and freezing but our tour guide, Mike, was awesome and knew everything ever. 

 Mike was a New Zealander who has lived in Berlin for 13 years because he fell in love with a German girl once. He kept telling us how great his wife was; it was pretty adorable. On the train ride he gave us an overview of Cold War East Berlin as we were passing notable train stops. We were actually on a train line that ran through both East and West Berlin and was restricted to just West Berliners during the Cold War. According to Mike, the train would stop at the East Berlin stops because of technical reasons but the platforms would be guarded by armed men so no one got on or off in East Berlin.

Mike also told us the political history of Nazi Germany, which I've probably learned a million times in school but it felt ten times more real hearing about it in the place that it happened! 

The history of Berlin in the 20th century alone is incredibly amazing. We were constantly shocked at how recent these terrible and huge events happened, which is even more shocking when juxtaposed how Germany is today. 

We casually ran into some of the Berlin Wall when exiting a shopping center. 

Our hostel was in East Berlin, so we spent most of our time in the attractions there. My friend Blair read that if you see yellow tram lines and cobble-stone streets that means you're in East Berlin, but other than that you really couldn't tell which part of Berlin you were in. 

Exhibit A: Did I warm myself up with this delicious treat in East or West Berlin? Who can tell?!

I had this carrot cake and cappuccino after we walked around Sachsenhausen in the snow for four hours. Sometimes you just need a drink with a heart and a star on top to cheer you up about the world. 

It was in East Berlin, on a street that was lined with foreign food restaurants on one side
and an enormous abandoned building on the other. 

To further investigate East Berlin's communist past we went to the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) Museum, which was an interactive museum on life in Germany from 1949 to 1989. It was extremely interesting. 

A few tidbits that I found particularly intriguing: 

            ~~toddlers in pre-school were made to take communal bathroom breaks where they sat on the toilets in a row until everyone had done their business

            ~~when people took vacations to the beach or a lake, everyone was nude because swim suits were considered wasteful. Nudecations! What would Slavoj Zizek say about all of that family nudity?!?

            ~~fashionable clothing was controlled by state entities and was about 10 years beyond Western Europe. Levi's were a BIG DEAL

            ~~a lot of city-dwellers had vacation/weekend homes because they only had limited opportunities to travel outside of the country plus they could use their gardens to cultivate extra food. It was also seen as something good for the communist morale or something like that? 

            ~~There were huge price disparities between goods that could easily be produced in the country and those that had to be imported (as expected). 

            ~~If people were able to buy cars, the cars were just terrible but people learned to function as their own mechanics because they were such prized items. 

One could say that we took a drive through history. Hee hee.

And to answer my dear daddy's question...

nothing in the DDR museum resembled France or Obama's American Dream.  

We also went to two ancient history museums, which we all enjoyed a lot. They were housed in these enormous old buildings in a group called Museum Island. The buildings were partially bombed or otherwise destroyed in World War II but have since been spiffed up. 

Don't dare lean on a column because someone will come and tell you off for desecrating history.
They are trying to make up for all of the previous abuse. 

As a side note, the Germans are super mad about this collection of artifacts discovered on what is thought to be the ancient Greek city of Thebes but was taken by the Russian government during the Soviet occupation of East Germany. The Germans say that it is rightfully German property because the original archeologist paid the Greek government for its value plus like $10,000 extra. Apparently the Russians still won't give it back (oh look, Russia doesn't give a hoot about what you think; it's shocking). The displays in the museum I visited kept adding snide remarks about the Russians, like "There was also a glass pot found in this area but we are unable to display it with this ancient vegetable knife because of Russia's breach of international law in withholding it." 

Talk it out guys. Nerd wars don't help anyone. 

Anywhoozle, all that knowledge made us hungry. 

We looked up best restaurants in Berlin and one was pretty near to the hostel. 

Erin and I split pork roast, schweinebraten in German (I think?), which came with cabbage and fried potato dumplings. The potato dumplings are either called kartoffelpuffer or kartoffeknödel or kartoffelkloesse. (My German is not the best, I'll admit it.)    

 Meat and potatoes!
It looked a little tastier before we split it up between us.

For dessert, I had a chocolate pudding-esque thing that came with white cream. It was a good ending to the meal. 

It's the German take on chocolate mousse, methinks. 

The most mysterious part of the meal was the little leafed berry that came with the dessert. 

It reminded me of the Pokemon Oddish. 

I tried researching it, and I think it MAY be a sea buckthorn. Honestly I have no idea. 

And now on to more landmarks! 

We arranged a visit to the Reichstag, which is the home to the German Bundestag (Parliament). There is a giant dome on top of the building (you can barely see it in the picture below) where the tour takes place. We planned it so we could see the city at sunset (we're like real vacationing adults!), but the sky was a solid grey so we just saw the city at dark grey and then night. It was still awesome. 

I'm pretty positive that Angela Merkel stood here once.
Also note the German flag behind me not behaving properly for my photo opp. 

The Reichstag was a very cool building. It burned down in 1933, when Hitler and other top Nazi officials were conveniently visiting Berlin and staying nearby. That's when the Nazi party blamed the Communist Party for starting the fire and passed 'emergency' measures that suspended civil rights and  eventually gave Hitler unlimited power. (Thanks, Mike!)

The building was pretty much destroyed in World War II and had a long road to recovery. But since 1999, it has housed the Bundestag. The dome was added in 1999 as well. Once inside of the dome, you walk up a very large winding ramp that goes around the outer edge. We received headsets that were programmed to give specific information on buildings or history when you reached a certain point on the ramp. You can see a lot of the city; it's much higher up that I expected. 

It's very eco-friendly! In the middle of the dome, there is a large glass fixture which reflects sunlight down into the plenary chamber* (with the purple chairs). The very top of the dome lets waste air (but not  heat) escape the plenary chamber. It's also warmed by the sunlight in the day. 

 The roof and the dome are transparent as a symbol of German democracy nowadays. 

*Angela Merkel works here....

It was very beautiful even at night. 

The audio tour pointed out the American, French, and Hungarian embassies! How fitting. 

So all this other stuff was fine and dandy, but it does not hold a candle to one of the most exciting meals I have ever had the privilege of eating. 

After the Bundestag we were wandering around the city, looking for someplace to eat. We ended up in a primarily-shopping district so we cut across a street to get to the main road again. We happened upon a Bavarian restaurant that looked exactly how one would expect a German restaurant to look like. Everything was made of wood inside (not the food), there were paintings of German countryside on the walls, and the barmaids were dressed like milkmaids. Or barmaids, whatever. 

I had read about roasted pork knuckle when researching Prague, and I had seen it on every German menu so I decided to try it for my last night in Berlin. 

For those of you innocents unfamiliar with pig slaughtering, the dark pink parts are where the pig knuckle (or knee) comes from: 

That'll do, Babe. 

I think that in German it is called Schweinshaxe, although they should really just call it the 'best-piece-of-pork-ever-stein' or whatever the literal translation of that is. 

Here it is! 

The outside tasted like bacon (I could only stomach two bites of it) and the inside was really tender meat, served with cabbage. 

I regret nothing. 

It was a TON of meat. It was a little difficult to approach, mostly because of its bacon armor. But after I got through that it was heaven. Every time I turned my plate, I discovered a new meat pocket (sorry I couldn't think of any other way to describe that). It was so tasty.

Cheers to using all parts of the animals! 

I think pigs are a lot bigger than I imagine them to be. 

But apparently everything in German is bigger. 

This was to a stuffy church that wanted to charge people 7 euros to tour it.
Puh-lease, we've all heard of the Vatican.

As you may be able to see, I very much enjoyed my brief stay in Berlin. 

The ONLY negative thing was an incident on the train. 

"Oh but I've heard that German public transit is so great," you say. 

Well, yes. It is pretty cool, although all of the trains look ancient.

 But German public transit is also home to the Public Transit Nazis, who are probably actual descendants of Nazis who now terrorize tourists on U-Bahn trains by giving them 40 euro fines for unwittingly buying the wrong kind of ticket! 

FORTY EUROS. THAT IS LIKE TWENTY BEERS. OR FOUR PORK KNUCKLES.  

 This was the time when we made lots of snide remarks to each other about fascism and civilian compliance with war crimes. Then we moved on to listing all of the things that we have saved money on both in France and on the trip to compensate for that 40 euros that we EACH had to pay. And that helped our anger and frustration subside to a dull,yet scar-throbbing pain. 

ANYWAY, I'M SO OVER IT.

I still like you Germany. 

And Angela Merkel. 

Even more because of this picture. 

And then off to Prague!