Fun: Swiss Bliss
In a lot of ways, I think that one of the best incentives to explore is the possibly of finding beautiful things. Places, ideas, inventions, art…its actually pretty amazing how much you start to appreciate the mundane once it’s cast in a different light. Among all of the places that we went in Europe, I think that Switzerland probably had some of the most beautiful and inspiring places as well as a number of world-changing ideas and the tools to make them happen. It’s a truly inspiring environment to be in.
I didn’t realize it until our trip, but Geneva is nestled down in the far western corner of the country of Switzerland — only minutes away from the French border by train. It’s located on the edge of Lake Geneva (the origin of whose name is still a mystery), one of the most beautiful lakes I’ve ever had the privilege of seeing. There weren’t many people out on the lake while we were there, although we did occasionally see someone out paddling in the mornings or evenings.
Lake Geneva from our hostel in Vevey, Switzerland.
We spent most of our time in the town of Vevey, which is actually closer to Lausanne than Geneva. Nevertheless, it’s still only a little over an hour outside of Geneva that was easy to do by train. We spent a lengthy three nights in our hostel in Vevey — we originally planned to move around some, but we were so pleased with our first hostel that we decided to stay there for our entire Swiss experience.
In my opinion, one of the highlights of our entire trip was a hike that we took through the mountains near our hostel. We were able to take a very small train up to a mountain town where the full-day hike started. Due to the stunningly high price of food in Switzerland, we resorted to a loaf of bread, a little bit of meat and some yogurt for lunch and packed these to take on our hike. The hiking trail itself was fantastic — we walked through forests, down roads, and through fields, all of which was breathtakingly beautiful and largely uninterrupted by traffic and human noise (the silence was something we didn’t encounter much in our whirlwind tour if you hadn’t picked up on that).
Our lunch spot on the way up the mountain. That's Lake Geneva in the background.
A view from the top.
Alas, every good tale has its tragedy: we got back to the hostel after a full day of hiking only to realize that Mac had lost his wallet somewhere along the path. Yep, bad news. He realized this after dinner that night and decided (due to lack of alternatives) to take our only flashlight, catch a late-night train up to the mountain, and run the first leg of the trail to see if he could find his wallet. He thought he had a decent idea of where it might but, but unfortunately, after trials & tribulations, returned back to our hostel empty-handed. He tried again early the next morning, thinking that a little sunlight might help his odds, but his wallet was still nowhere to be found. That gave him a pretty good excuse to resume his more familiar lifestyle of spending other people’s money, though! 
It may be the nerd inside me, but out of all of the things that we did in Switzerland, I was most excited about going to see CERN, the European hub of physics research and one of the leading scientific hubs in the world. In fact, it’s the home of the LHC and if that doesn’t get your juices flowing then I’m at a loss for words.
I called the day before we were planning on getting a tour, only to be laughed at by the receptionist who answered the phone. For future reference, travelers, you should call at least 4 weeks in advance if you’d like a tour of the facility’s internals — apparently there is a waiting line that is a month long just to get inside. We still ended up going, but only got to tour the Microcosm museum, which, despite being a really cool hands-on science museum, still didn’t stack up against the dream machines that must’ve been behind the curtains.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (abbreviated CERN in French).
We kept ourselves pretty busy throughout our time with the Swiss. In addition to the things I’ve already named, we also went to see the headquarters of the World Health Organization (which is on a really nice campus … Mac was drooling), the Red Cross museum (the RC is headquartered in Geneva), and attempted to take a tour of the United Nations but couldn’t make it there in time. That’s a lot of action for the corner of a single country!
[Note: I think I took some of the best pictures of my life in Switzerland. All of the pictures in this post were taken by Mac, but mine will be going up on Flickr in a couple of days.]