la suisse!

umm yeah so nice is over?! but i still have a million blog entries to write from spring break through the loire valley trip. i really want to say i will get to it, but the next school semester has already started so who knows when that will happen. luckily, at some point over the summer i did manage to write an entry for our last trip to geneva and annecy and the last week i was in nice.. so here they are!


28/5-31/5
Geneva!
Last trip of the semester :(! We had a late flight out of nice that ended up being even later due to a delay. We ended up getting into Geneva pretty late, around midnight.

The next day, we woke up at like 9 or 10, which is late for traveling (for us anyways), since we didn’t have anything in mind to see really, this trip was pretty chill. So we just walked around a lot. I remembered the amazing coop grocery store I went to in Zurich, so looking for those was on the top of our priorities. There was actually one right near the hostel but it wasn’t really that great. So we went to the lac to try and see the landmark jet d’eau but it was so windy that it was turned off. Then we wandered around the old part of town, through a parck, to the cathedral and went up the tower, which had a great view of the city. After that it was back to our quest to find a coop. the lets go Europe book talked about one but we had trouble finding it. Finally after basically walking circles around it, it was right in front of us. It was even better than a coop, it was a coop city, which is kind of like monoprix or a department store because it had a little of everything: clothes, toys, cosmetics, all in addition to an amazing grocery and an awesome little food stand. It also had an amazing chocolate section, which was exactly what we wanted. The 45 cent chocolate bar I got there for breakfast, however, was also really great quality, which was good since some of the fancier lindt bars cost around 4 swiss francs. Chocolate (and dr pepper!) in hand we were prepared to resume our wandering. We also checked out another grocery called migros, which was across the street (why do they do that?) which wasn’t as cool, but did have trolli bright crawlers which took all my strength not to buy.

The next day, we took a bus from the gare routiere to annecy in france. The hour 1/2-ish bus ride went right over the border like it was no big deal (even though france is schengen and Switzerland is not) and through the mountains (alps). It was described as being a picturesque town (the “Venice of france”) and it certainly was. We even saw wedding photos being taken there. There is also a large lake in annecy with really blue water and baby animals, like ducks and swans. That day, some sort of volleyball tournament was going on, stretching across several fields by the lake. We walked back through different streets in the cute town where we, of course, had to get gelato. I got struomph (smurf-blue) flavor ice cream, just because I was curious as to how it would taste. It ended up to just be vanilla dyed blue (lame). So then I ended spending more money on sweets/candy/food (story of this weekend) and bought granita, which is like a fancy Italian word for slurpee/snow cone type drink, that costs way too much, but I really wanted it. In annecy we also walked up to the chateau, but didn’t feel like paying to go in. so we continued our walking (story of this trip) and started going down streets with shops, and stopped in an h&m (other story of this trip). I was looking for specific top that the nice h&m didn’t have, so I thought maybe Geneva would have it. Geneva had at least 5 h&ms and annecy had like 2, but they still didn’t have what I wanted. the mall in annecy was pretty nice, though small, but we found these random free internet kiosks by the bathroom and spent some time on the touch screen (slow!) computers checking the essentials (gmail & fb). When we got back to Geneva there was a new girl from Australia in our room. She seemed nice, especially since the girl the night before started out with “are you guys Canadian?” and after we said no, American, she seemed disappointed. After she heard we were from the dc area she asked if we went to Georgetown.. as if every student from the dc area goes there. We didn’t even get the chance to ask her a similar question because she left, but we didn’t think she really liked us.

The Australian girl had such crazy stories, she was on her second gap year (the first year she spent saving) and was traveling in Europe for a couple of months. She also came with no plan and just went where she felt like going and with people she met along the way. She was cool but I think we were a little too low key for her… since we were super tired and just went to bed. Oh and didn’t have crazy Turkish adventures like her.

The next day we started out wandering outside to find that EVERYTHING was closed. This was really sad since we left our major chocolate buying to this day, and now we couldn’t even do that. So we walked to the un and then through the botanical gardens. We also tried to find some special buildings designed by cool architects but we couldn’t. so we just sat around in the park a lot instead. We even ended up going to the airport early so we could try to find chocolate/food. There were like 2 stores in our terminal both of which had chocolate and took euros (we were out of swiss francs) which was good, but they were expensive, so I just ate some of erin’s which was probably enough. All in all, we ate a lot of chocolate, did a lot of walking and went in a lot of stores. But Switzerland is cool!!