A friend of mine is in Geneva this week on vacation and seems to really like it. Admittedly, Switzerland hasn’t really been on my travel bucket list, but my friend and I were discussing the possibility of visiting somewhere on the continent next year after we meet up in London. Switzerland doesn’t seem to have wonderful art museums, classical music, and I know it is expensive. I’m sure I’d enjoy a day or so in some of the mountain areas, but I’m more of a big city traveler, I think I’d be bored to tears in some Alpine village for more than a day.
Still, Geneva does look like it could be fun for a few days and I’ll be close to France and Italy for some potential travel areas after visiting Switzerland.
Switzerland is beautiful. The area around Zurich is one of my favorite places; I’ve been there three times. (Each time was a business trip, but I got to spend a day or so just looking around.)
I’m not much of a museum guy, but if you take the tram to the edge of town in any direction, there are hiking trails all up and down the mountains. And there are excellent train routes across the countryside. (I ended up going back and forth between Zurich and Berne.)
Geneva does have a bunch of fairly well known museums, including the Geneva Museum of Art and History, which has a fairly extensive collection of early modern Northern European art, as well as pieces by Rodin, Mogdliani and Cezanne. The city also has MAMCO, which is a museum of contemporary art, the Barbier-Mueller Museum, focusing on tribal and classical art,and the Swiss Museum of Ceramics and Glass. Additionally, just outside the city, in Cologny, is the Bodmer Library, which has most of the Bodmer Papyrii, a collection of classical writings including the oldest surviving copy of the Gospel of John. The library also has a Gutenberg Bible, a first edition of the Ninety Five Theses, and original manuscripts of the play Nathan the Wise and de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom.
Basically, Geneva has about 36 different museums and 50 different art galleries. They also have a music festival every June, a food festival every September, and a bunch of historical and cultural sights. It’s not a cultural wasteland. I mean, you can stop by the Palace of Nations, just to see the art and architecture.
I spent 10 days traveling around Switzerland a few years back and enjoyed it. I only spent about a day in Geneva, a couple of days across the lake in Lausanne, and another couple of days in Lucerne and Bern. (I didn’t make it to Zurich.) In all of these places I spent a fair amount of time just walking around taking in the local sights.
It’s closer to Laussanne than Geneva, but Chateau de Chillon is on the shore of Lake Geneva and is an interesting (and much-visited by tourists) castle. There’s been some sort of fortress on the site for more than a thousand years.
Switzerland is nice, but I’m also a great advocate of Austria. I think it is far better for an extended stay. You still have the stunning scenery but it is much cheaper for food drink, accommodation and entertainment. Plus classical music, art and festivals of all types are pretty much compulsory wherever you go.
You obviously have Vienna, Salzburg and Innsbruck but many of the smaller towns have music and art ongoing throughout the year. Thisis a town just over the river Inn that holds classical concerts and operas in an 800 year-old castle. That sort of thing goes on all over with the smaller villages taking any opportunity to break out the oompah bands, beer tents, lederhosen and dirndls (all *non-*ironic).
You say you would get bored in a mountain village for a day but what you’ll find is that any decent size place (i.e. 2000 people is decent) will probably have excellent sports facilities, swimming, saunas, tennis, volleyball etc, cycle tracks, hiking paths, nature trails. Certainly for Austria, tourism is the basis of their GDP and they do it very, very well.
The other big benefit of Austria and Switzerland is the public transport. Trains and buses are well priced and extensive so you are never more than half hour ride from something to do.
You know those Swiss artists you’ve never heard of? Go to the GMAH and see why you’ve never heard of them…
But in the modern world, fine work is done by machine, and “craft” is done by hand, so it was mind-blowing to look at the mechanisms of the early fire-arms.
(I was envious of the building the collection is housed in. In Melbourne the Art museum is from the school of architecture descriptivly named “brutalist”, and the history museum is a modern building which could have been the reference site for Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”).
As a presbyterian, Calvins chair isn’t a relgious icon (we’re iconoclasts), but for someone with an interest in Church history and architecture, standing in the prototypical Assembly Hall beside the church was a memorable experience.
And you know the reputation of Swiss chocolate? I can buy Swiss chocolate anywhere in the world, but the (chocolate) cherry liqueur I bought in the Geneva airport was actually the best cherry liqueur (chocolate) I’ve ever had. It was the cherry that made it exceptional, not the chocolate, but the end result was superb.
This is a very clean safe and healthy city. Don’t go there to experience street crime, crippled beggers or broken toilets. In it’s degree, it’s an almost unique travel experience. Naturally, we took the bus from the airport to our hotel.
I have spent close to two years, spread out over three occasions, living in Zurich and loved it. I don’t know if the Tinguely construction at the Zurichorn still operates (it did in 1991, the last time I was there) but you gotta see it if it does. Then imagine coming on it purely by chance during one of its operating periods (it only runs twice a day for 15 minutes each time, so I was lucky), never having seen nor heard of it. It blowed my mind.
Another thing I did a number of times was to take the Uetlibergbahn to the top and then walk few miles to the Felsenegg cable car which you take down to the Sihltalbahn and then back to the city. The Landesmuseum is worth a trip. So is the Rietberg museum. And several others.
Vienna and Berlin have been at the top of my must see cities, as the basic research I’ve done shows that they’re not as expensive as London and have all the culture I could want . My friend lives in London and this is his second trip to Switzerland this year, he really likes it there. I’ll chat with him when he gets back to find out exactly what he likes about Switzerland, we’re both pretty similar in that we are definitely city people, Perhaps my views of Switzerland have been tainted by too many Rick Steves shows which only shows tiny Alpine villages and cows I love looking at mountain scenery, but even a city like Boulder, Colorado wears on me after a couple of days.
One last random question, is it easy to pay by contactless or card in the big cities of Switzerland? I don’t mind having leftover Euros or British Pounds from a trip as I know I’ll use them for a future trip, but I don’t really want to have leftover Swiss Francs as changing small amounts of foreign currency is usually at an awful exchange rate, I’d much rather end up with a tiny amount of Swiss Francs that I can easily just donate to a charity box as I prepare to leave.
If you are flying out of Zurich, you will likely take the train to the airport. In that case, the Changeburo in the train station always gives a decent rate. I once walked in there with a fist full of Japanese Yen and it was changed instantly, at a good rate, no questions asked.
I never cared for Geneva, but did take the train from there to Zermatt (where the Matterhorn lives). Beautiful place, very quaint, no cars allowed. Sit out on a sunny restaurant deck, have a fondue and enjoy the view. I also liked Bern, which straddles the Aare River; very old-Europe look to it.
Resisting making a joke about having only neutral feelings about it, I’ll say I was there for a few days on my whirlwind city-a-day through Germany, Austria and Switzerland and I thought it was lovely.