Funmurphys: the Blog

The Triumph of Hope over Experience

Posts Tagged Geneva

The Coop (or We’re Not in Kansas Anymore)

Aug 14

Posted by Kevin Murphy in European Vacation | No Comments

As we drove around Lac Leman from Geneva to Lausanne, we marveled at the scenery: The deep blue lake dotted with sailboats surrounded by mountains. We didn’t take any pictures, but we did get hungry. The further we went, the hungrier we got. So I picked an exit pretty much at random, and discovered something called Coop Mall, which was furnished with more empty parking spaces than Geneva and Lausanne combined. For free. (OK, that’s the second free thing in Switzerland). With spaces big enough for American cars, which I appreciated even if I didn’t need it in my rental Peugeot.

Luckily, not only was there a grocery store, but there was also a mini-mall upstairs complete with a Coop restaurant. The rejoicing was muted, however, by the unfamiliar fare, so while the adults got some sort of quiche or quiche like substance, the Fruit of the Murphy Loins went for pastry. They weren’t going to ruin their first meal on foreign soil with something unfamiliar. We all had sugar drinks (the european description of soda) without ice, filled exactly to the 2 or 3 dl line, as the case may be. Then after a brief bout of shopping, we piled back into the car and headed on to Lausanne.

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Geneva (or Being There)

Aug 12

Posted by Kevin Murphy in European Vacation | 1 Comment

The plan was to pick up the rental car, drive to the Museum of the History of Science, and then walk along the Geneva waterfront before heading on to our hotel in Lausanne. We figured on several hours of enjoyment and cultural enrichment. The best laid schemes of mice and men aft gang agley.

While the cars aren’t too dissimilar, driving in Europe is a bit different than driving in the US. Road signage is different — street names have pretty low priority in Europe so the signs are tiny blue things affixed to a side of a building in the vicinity of an intersection. Points of interest (like hotels), as well as autobahns, other towns, and the city center are prominently marked with large arrow signs indicating their direction. They also have a lot of roundabouts, which I found took a little getting used to. Where they do have stoplight controlled intersections, the lights are small and off to the near side of the intersection. I often had trouble telling them apart from the pedestrian lights, which were also small but on the far side of the intersection. The lane markings were confusing – white separates lanes going in opposite directions, yellow separates lanes going in the same direction. Thus my first drive was pretty exciting, not even mentioning the generally cramped feel — narrow lanes, bus lanes, bike lanes — and the pedestrians crossing virtually at will. It almost like they made driving so hard you’d want to take public transportation.

Through pluck, determination, and exquisite dead reckoning skills, we found roughly where we wanted to start our exploration of Geneva. Finding a parking space, however, was much harder, and about exhausted my pluck. I did finally find a spot a bit of a distance from the museum, but at least it was a straight shot there and I was perfectly positioned to get on the autobahn later. We got out of the car in shifts because I had to park right up against a hedge, and then we started the fun part of the vacation.

First we found the botanical garden. It seems to me that in Europe the first park in town they planted a flower no local had yet heard of they named a botanical garden. So after eyeing the crowded restaurant on the property with longing, it was off to less green pastures.

We quickly found the lake front, so we walked along it, admiring the view and perspiring heavily.

LAC LEMAN (LAKE GENEVA)

We did make it to the museum, which was several rooms in a big old mansion along the lakefront without air conditioning. Let me digress a bit and mention that it was unseasonably warm in Geneva — in the mid 90’s F — so it was hot, even for this midwesterner. All over Switzerland are fountains that provide free drinking water, the only thing free we found there. Sadly, we had no cup or bottle to catch and hold the water, so we had to make do with cupped hands. Let me just say they are a poor substitute for a plastic bottle for drinking large quantities of water. So we purchased a bottle of water at the museum after a lengthy discussion in French and English as to whether or not the water in the bottle was cold. It was.

ATTRACTIVE MODEL DEMONSTRATES WATER FOUNTAIN, SWISS STYLE

Thus refreshed, upon leaving we discovered a black storm cloud and thunder, though it wasn’t actually raining on us. Some say it was the jet lag, some say the heat, others claim it was the prospect of an immanent deluge, Jimmy Carter would have blamed a general malaise, but whatever the reason, we opted to break off our exploration of Geneva hours early and barely started and instead go to the hotel in Lausanne without further sightseeing. So we went back past the public beach and a couple of topless sunbathers to the car. Then it was on to the autobahn, clearly marked by a green picnic table sign, and out of Geneva and on towards Lausanne.

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Flying To Europe (or Getting There)

Aug 12

Posted by Kevin Murphy in European Vacation | No Comments

If a journey of a thousand steps begins with the first one, our journey of six plane flights, several train rides, many car rides, and lots and lots of steps began with a flight on American Airlines to Chicago. It was, of course, delayed, and we didn’t have much time to catch our next flight which was to London. While waiting to board in St. Louis, the gate agent kept stressing how we would just board quickly and everything would turn out fine. But when it came time to board, we did it in the same slow motion style that every plane is boarded with. The single point failure repeated until eveyone is at long last seated — an aviation reminder of the fatal flaw in Market-Garden. So we went from making the connecting flight, no problem according to the gate agent to there are 14 passengers on the same flight so they probably will hold the plane according to the stewardess.

The connecting flight information read by the stewardess as we were landing had our flight already departed for dear old England and we would have to go to the ticketing desk for another flight. I thought to myself, great, the wheels have already come off before the wagon has even begun to roll. But when we taxied into the gate, we could see a plane at the gate our flight to London had supposedly left from. Were we so late that another plane was already using our gate?

When we deplaned, the gate agent informed us that our eyes weren’t lying, the flight had been held. So we dashed (after I paid a brief visit to the men’s room) through O’Hare — all the way back into the main part and then back out another concourse. The lady with lots of kids and even more carryon made it with a beet red face. An older couple came strolling up long after we arrived — I guess they figured as long as they were holding the plane, why rush.

Then it was off the London on a 777. The in-flight entertainment system was really neat. Everybody had their own little screen in the back of the seat in front of them and headphones. My favorite part was the flight info section that showed our progress on maps of varying scales along with information like ground speed, altitude, and outside air temperature. I was amazed by how long we flew through cloud tops (and their chop) — hour after hour at a ground speed of 600 mph. As near as I could tell, there were clouds all the way from St. Louis to London.

Heathrow looks like a relic from the early industrial era. Long hallways that twist and turn and lead ever onward without exit or bathroom (WC in Europspeak — which I took to calling “The Claude” as WC was pronounced like “Debussy” there). We had to switch from Terminal 3 to Terminal 4 and after taking a bus to Terminal 4 we had to stand in what has to be the longest line I’ve ever been in to go back through security. It stretched halfway on to forever, and when you got there, it turned a corner and stretched the rest of the way to forever before turning again into a room that opened out into the security checkpoint. And this was before the new security requirements that are causing even longer lines (I imagine they now stretch to forever and back).

When we finally emerged in the brand spanking new gate area, my daughter exclaimed this was a mall, not an airport. Unfortunately, our flight to Geneva had no gate listed on the flight info screens, so we trudged back to the check-in we had bypassed because I had printed out our boarding passes for British Airways just before we left home. We were unofficially told that the flight was delayed (thus giving us the late trifecta) but that it would leave from gate 19 sometime in the future. So 45 minutes late we began to board for a 90 minute flight to Geneva. At least we were only connecting with a rental car at this point so a delay just didn’t matter.

Over 9 hours in the air and a day later on the calendar we had at last arrived. While Geneva’s airport was much more modern than Heathrow, it also featured the interminable corridor to civilization – although there was a Claude halfway there, unlike Heathrow where you had to make it all the way to the end before you could get relief. But none of that mattered as we had gotten the worst part of travel, namely the travel, over with. Hurrah!

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