More Geneva sites

As mentioned in our previous post we had our final set of visitors just a couple of weeks before our departure – Dave’s aunt Michelle and cousin Hannah.  They got into town on Saturday, June 9 and spent Sunday with us in Geneva before heading out on their own Swiss adventure for a few days.  Later they went to Paris and London and had a great time.

On Sunday we got Michelle and Hannah a little more acquainted with Geneva by taking a quick city walk…

We followed that up with a tour of the United Nations, something we’d been meaning to do for quite a while.  Upon arrival it’s impossible to miss the large chair with a missing 4^th leg – a memorial to those that have lost limbs in mine fields.  

The UN is located in the Palais des Nations, which was originally built in 1936 to house the League of Nations (before the organization was disbanded when WWII started).  In 1946 it was chosen to be the European headquarters of the UN and will continue to be so as long as the UN continues to be an organization.   While the UN headquarters in New York contains the seats of the principal organs of the UN, Geneva is headquarters of other specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization (among others). 

The tour was great – they explained all about how the UN isn’t a governing body (meaning it can’t force one country to do anything) but that it tries to influence countries through diplomatic meetings.  In fact, there are over 1,000 meetings held just in Geneva every year.  Another fun fact – can you guess the 6 official languages of the UN?  If you guessed English, French, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic then you are correct!  These were chosen based on being the most spoken languages around the world (population-wise).  This means that any written documents at the UN must be translated into all these languages.

The building itself had some interesting features.  This conference room had a crazily-decorated ceiling.  Funny thing is that diplomats have actually complained that they don’t like sitting underneath the larger stalactites for fear of them falling on their heads. :) 

There was plenty of symbolism throughout the building and gifts made of unique materials found in different countries.   The biggest form of symbolism was in this conference room.  The walls were covered with images of war-torn soldiers intending to show the consequences of war.  This room is actually where several war treaties have been signed for almost a century.  There is a unique feature about the room – there are main doors on both sides so that both parties can enter at the same time instead of one before another, which would suggest dominance in certain cultures. 

We ended the tour in the largest of the conference rooms.  This is a room that you’ve most likely seen on TV when a world leader is giving a speech in Geneva.  There are seats to represent every nation and supposedly they are in alphabetical order (fortunately for the U.S., in Geneva we are know as États-Unis in French – so our people sit fairly close to the front).  Overall it was a very interesting visit and we’re glad we could fit it in before leaving Geneva.  We would definitely recommend this tour for anyone visiting Geneva in the future—we wish we had done it earlier so that we could have recommended it to all of our previous visitors.

We also stopped in at the Calvin Auditory which is located right next to St. Pierre’s Cathedral.  We had tried to stop in there multiple times over our two years in Geneva, and every time it was closed (regardless of the fact the posted hours said it should have been open!).  This small chapel was constructed in the 1400s and a century later played a significant role in the Protestant Reformation—John Calvin frequently gave his lectures there and soon after it became known as Calvin’s Auditory.  It still serves a small congregation today.

Since our last ‘Geneva tourism’ blog we actually saw a couple other major Geneva sites that were on our list.  The first was located literally 50 feet away from our front door – the Patek Philippe Museum.  Patek Philippe is a world famous watchmaking partnership that has been, in their own words, raising the bar for 500 years.  The museum gave a history of why watchmaking in Switzerland was so much better than the rest of the world and some of the evolutions in the practice over the years.  Probably the most interesting parts of the museum were the videos that explained how moving pieces on a watch work from an internal perspective (such as dancing characters on a coo-coo clock, or moving body parts on a watch face, etc.).

The culmination of the museum however was the Calibre 89 watch, known as the most complicated watch in the world (it has 24 hands and 1,728 components in total).  To give you an idea of how complete this watch is, besides the typical features, it also tracks moon phases, century, decade, leap year, a star chart, even the date of Easter which changes from year to year!  This is all done through the complex internal design that is perfectly constructed.  All this for only $5 million! :)

Another major site in Geneva that we’ve been itching to visit was CERN, known for inventing the Internet as well as for their particle accelerator experiments.  It started in 1954 to try and keep Europe’s top minds from moving to the U.S., which was better funded and organized for scientific study at the time.

We took a morning off of work to get a spot on one of the last available tours before our departure back to the U.S.  Perhaps we were a little too caught up in the romanticized CERN from Dan Brown’s book Angels and Demons, because we found the actual tour quite dry.  Not to say we weren’t interested in the topic, but we had a guide that was extremely hard to understand so we couldn’t hear half of the things he was telling us – not great when you are trying to understand such a complex subject like nuclear research and colliding particles. 

We were also bummed that we were unable to go underground and see the accelerator (called the LHC – Large Hadron Collider) – that was actually the primary reason we wanted to visit CERN in the first place. :)  The LHC is located 600 feet underground and has a circumference of 27 kilometers (17 miles) – this thing is huge.  We did get to see the command center, which is where all the scientists work to interpret the massive amounts of data that result from the experiments.  

The accelerator travels through Switzerland into
France and back on it's 17 mile course

 









The tour ended in a large globe-looking center that had an audiovisual presentation of what CERN is hoping to uncover and understand (basically trying to find out, through physics, what the universe is made of and how it works).  One (of many) really neat things about CERN is that the facility is made up of scientists from all over the world, working together to discover extraordinary things.

People (ourselves included) often say that Geneva is a great place to live but not necessarily to visit, but hopefully we’ve shown that there are a few interesting things to see if you’re ever in the area! :)