It was an early morning wake up, mainly as I had slept for the last 8 hours after falling asleep at about 6:15pm the night before.
I decided to get up around 7am and head out for a short 20 minute run to see how far that would take me and then walk back, it was a nice and warm 25 degrees when I walked out the door of the hotel. I didn't have a plan on where I was going, just wanted see where my legs took me. As it happens they took me to a park called Parc de La Perle du Lac, onto another Parc called Parc William Rappard, where I saw a statue, unfortunately I couldn't find any info about this statue, but I'm sure there is some meaning behind it. I continued and then ran past this massive building, I wondered what it was, turns out it was the Centre William Rappard, and home of the World Trade Organisation, a organisation that deals with global trade agreements and regulations between different nations. The park and the building are named after William Rappard who was a Swiss economist, a crucial part in the establishment of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which eventually evolved into the WTO.
I continued on the run and ended up hitting 20 minutes as I I arrived at Conservatoire et Jardin bontaniques de la Ville de Geneva, the Geneva Conservatory and Botanical garden, essentially their equivalent to Botanic Gardens... But in my opinion, no way near as pretty or colourful as our one in Christchurch.
After a walk around the Park, I slowly made my way back, it appears everybody out there was out for a run, I couldn't count how many people I saw running when I was out there, but I'm not surprised with them wanting to get it out of the way before the heat really started to hit higher numbers.
I got back to the hotel about 10am, did some planning of the day with the help of my mate Cam via a phone call, hadn't planned on getting suggestions from him, but it was helpful, most of the activities he had suggested I had already done the previous day, but none the less it was helpful with giving some of the spots I had missed the first day another go. After a quick shower I headed back out towards the old city, detouring past the English Garden that I had seen the day before to find a floral clock which I had missed the previous day.
It was then back to the Old City which I had walked through parts of the previous day to find the St Pierre Cathedral, not sure how I missed it the previous day, probably because I was half asleep. Inside was tall ceilings and stained glass windows, like those that you would see in the movies set in the middle ages. There was an option to head up some stairs to the bell tower for a small fee of around 15 NZD, based on their pricing here, that's cheap, about half the price of a Big Mac Combo. I decided to take a look and as I started up the stairs the bells started to dong. Hoping to get up there and get some video of it, I moved up as quickly as I could in the one person wide sprial staircase, reaching the first landing. No bells there, so began to carry up, only for my climb to be foiled by a family coming down when they shouldn't have been, there is a lighting system to say when you can go up or down. As I was just by the entry to the stairwell I stepped back to let them out... Waiting and wait, the first two people came out, I continued to hear the bells ringing, thinking I may still get to see them, but as I waited for another 2 minutes for the last 3 people to exit (2 kids and the husband of the lady who had already come out) the bells stopped. Gutted, I quickly climbed up the stairs which took less than 30 seconds... I was a little annoyed considering. There were a number of bells, all dating back with different years of installation, some as far back as the 1500's, some the 1600's and others in the 1800's. Anyhow, big building, lots of cool views from the top over looking the city, lots of stained glass windows as well, they look pretty. Ice when the sun shines through them and casts the colours over the rooms.
I moved on towards the flea markets, taking me through the park where I saw the Reformation Wall the previous day, the flea markets are open on Wednesday and Saturday so I decided I'd head down to take a nosey, I wasn't planning on buying anything, I just wanted to see what they looked like and what sort of things they had. If I had been looking to buy something however, it would have been limited options, I can understand why they call them flea markets, as it's just junk that probably has fleas all through it... Well not really, but honestly the majority of it was just second hand clothing, trinkets or old books, and I doubt any of those would have been a first edition of anything.
By the time I had seen this, I had to make a choice of going to CERN (the birth place of the World Wide Web) or find something else to do. After looking up the train schedule, I worked out I really wouldn't have enough time to go to CERN, have a good look around before I had to come back. So decided to just slowly roam back to the hotel for a little rest before I went out again in the evening.
I made some plans for the following day and then headed up to the train station to figure out how to get from Geneva to my destination for tomorrow, thankfully there was a guy there at the terminals who showed me the cheap way of doing it, the machines at the terminals didn't have a cheap option on it, so he got me to download the app and showed me how to use that for another part of my trip for tomorrow, should save me about NZD$20.
I went and got some dinner and walked down to the waterfront to eat it there, while I waited hoping it would get dark enough for the fountain to be illuminated, as I arrived at the waterfront, there was some music playing with people up and dancing to it, I figured it would be a good place to eat my meal while I waited.
Eventually it darkened up enough and the fountain got lit up, however as there wasn't a particular theme for this date it's just plane old white lights, sometimes they have different colours depending on a holiday, event or something like that, but it was pretty enough. I decided I'd jump on the Ferris wheel, something I hadn't planned on doing, but why not... I was there, and it would give me a better view. The ride was a good length of time, about 4 loops, after that, you have already had a chance to see everything in each direction. After that, back to the hotel to get some rest for tomorrow's activies.