Thursday, April 30, 2009

14Apr2009: Day 323: Cathederale St. Pierre & Geneva (Switzerland)

The past few mornings, Makenna has actually eaten a granola bar. In fact, now, when she wakes up, she asks for “na na bar.” At first we had a hard time understanding what it was she wanted. The problem is that every day, she’s eaten less and less of it. Luckily today we had a complimentary breakfast with our room, unfortunately, Makenna wouldn’t eat much. I figured this would set us up for a bad day or a day filled with junk food, but she was not too bad considering.

We set off into Geneva again and headed towards the Palace de’ Nations – or the United Nations building. By the time we got there, right at noon, it was closed for tours until 2pm. I had read on-line that there were English tours at noon, but that’s not the case now. So we just took some pictures and left. Across the street was the Red Crescent Museum which is all about the Red Cross and its founding’s, but that’s closed on Tuesday’s which is today.

So we went back to the car and decided to go to Cathederale St. Pierre (St. Peter’s Cathedral). It wasn’t anything too spectacular but it did have a chapel section which was really neat. Then I went up into the tower which was a heck of a lot of steps, that’s why I went alone and Chris took Makenna outside. When I got up the first flight of many steps, I was inside a wooden structured area inside the church. I couldn’t even tell you where I really was. It wasn’t really the bell tower but you were basically walking above the church I guess. Then I went up some more steps and found myself outside. I got a pretty good view of Geneva but it wasn’t until I went up even higher that I got a 360 view of the area. As I was up there filming, the bells started going off which scared the living daylights out of me but at least I got it on film.

I came down and felt like my legs were rubber.
We all then went down into the crypt area underneath the church which was excavated for 30 years starting back in 1976 I believe. It had a lot of Roman ruins and even some before that. In fact, they found a skeleton from 100 BC of some important chieftain that was under the choir area. It was still half-buried so all you saw was from about it’s hip area down. There was a circular hole where his head would be as someone tried digging to find it in order to worship it so they think.
It also showed how the church was built over and over again through the centuries to be expanded or modified until its present make-up now. So you were able to see ruins or remains of baptisteries and even a roman mosaic floor, or what was left of it.

We left there and we walked around and found the Reformation Wall which honours many of the main individuals, events, and documents of the Protestant Reformation by depicting them in statues. The individuals most prominently depicted on the Wall were Calvinists. These states are of William Farel, John Calvin, Theodore Beza & John Knox. (Not sure if it's left to right or vice versa).



It was in a nice park that we found had the University of Geneva in it, which explained all the kids milling and laying about in the park. We then headed back to the car as it was starting to rain. Even though we would look up and see no clouds but if we looked directly up, we saw the dark cloud above us. Of course when we got back to the car, it was nice and sunny again.

We decided to try and find the oldest house in Geneva. Come to find out, we probably walked past it a couple of times in the past two days and had no idea. We were unable to take a car down the road it was on so we just left to figure out what to do about dinner.

We had 60 Swiss Francs left so it was a toss up between finding a restaurant or just getting things from a grocery store. We opted for the grocery store. Makenna has been asking for her “oose” (noodles) and we were hoping to find some in the store. We were pretty lucky to find a grocery store as we were just saying how we hadn’t seen any that we knew of in the towns we had been driving through. Today we found two. We figured out that co-op was one and as we were driving we saw one and pulled over.

Chris went in and I waited in the car with a sleeping Makenna. At the time, I thought he was just going in for noodles, but as time kept going on and on I figured he was either buying food for all of us or he had gotten mugged and dragged out back somewhere. He came out with two bags full and spent 6 Francs more than what we had. He said there was quite a language barrier and luckily some girl behind him could help him with the cashier. He was trying to tell her that he didn’t want the cashews and to take them out but he gave up and just went over the amount we had using the credit card for the extra 6 Francs.

When we got back to the room and I started to unpack the food I asked him where the cashews were as I didn’t see them. He totally had this look of panic on his face and said, “what!? You’re kidding?” I answered, “Yes, I was kidding.” He said that was a good joke after all he went through regarding stupid cashews.

We had a picnic on the floor and Makenna was ecstatic to have her noodles. I was glad to give her some food, although not healthy, that wasn’t complete junk food. She only had one or two break-downs today and both times were because she was tired. We were able to get her to sleep in the pushcart by putting her coat over her and she fell asleep pretty quickly. That was after doing the crypt and she did a lot of steps and running around down there so it wasn’t too surprising that she was worn out.

Chris will be glad to get out of Switzerland and is in fact planning our route to Italy to avoid going through Switzerland. He’s mainly planning it around so we don’t have to pay 40 Swiss Francs to just go on their motorways and since it only added 20 minutes to the trip, it seems a waste to spend the cash for a 10 minute ride on the motorway. It’s required that you have a vignette (sticker) to allow you on those roads. He’s also glad because to get to Geneva, it’s been a huge hassle with the one direct road being closed and the GPS just taking us in circles to get us around it.


Thought I'd add some pictures of the ruins under St. Peter's Cathedral

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