Geneva; Friday, 20 December, 2019

The fog of the previous day had been replaced by heavy rain, that showed no real sign of stopping for any time during the day. After breakfast I headed out of the hotel, and by use of the hotels canopy and the underground shopping centre linked to the main station, managed to make it to the tram stop dry.

I caught the number 18 tram out to the end of the line at the European Organization for Nuclear Research at Meyrin on the Franco/Swiss border, better known as CERN. The site has two museums – the Universe of Particles and the Microcosm. I headed over to the large wooden globe that houses the Universe of Particles first to have a look around the museum, and also take in the hourly audiovisual presentation in English (I arrive about 10 minutes after the previous showing, so also got to see the French version that also runs every hour, 30 minutes after the English version).

From the globe I headed back across the street and into the main CERN complex to look round the Microcosm exhibition. By the time I’d finished looking round both exhibitions the weather had, if anything, gotten worse with almost sheets of water falling from the sky. In the 30 or so yards from the entrance to the museum to the tramstop I managed to get very wet.

I caught the tram back into town, and rather than walk up to the old town in the rain and get soaked, I decided to wait the 10 minutes under the bus shelter for the half hourly mini-bus service that heads up into the old town. Whilst it meant it took nearly 40 minutes after getting off of the tram before I was at the cathedral, instead of less than 10 minutes if I’d walked, it did at least mean I made it relatively dry.

After taking a couple of photos sheltering in the cover of buildings I headed into the Cathedral to have a look around. The Cathedral is the latest incarnation that has existed on this site, with buildings going back well over 1500 years on the site, the ruins of which are still visible beneath the cathedral. Along with the archaeological museum that I was intending to visiting next you can also climb the 160 or so steps to the top of the southern tower for views over the city, but given how heavily it was raining, and how low the cloud was, I decided that would probably both the pointless for the views and dangerous for the slippery steps towards the top.

Instead, after looking round the cathedral I made my way down below the building and into the archaeological museum to have a look around that. The museum has not only the remains of at least three former cathedral that have existed on the site, but also traces of Roman remains, and the burial site for a local tribal leader that was buried around 140BCE.

I spent a long time looking round the cathedral, so long in fact that by the end I had one of the staff coming up behind me to clear the museum as they were at closing time. I headed back up to street level where it was still chucking it down, so I sheltered in the portico of the cathedral before heading over to the bus stop as the bus came into view to catch it back down to the centre of town and a quick change onto the tram back to the hotel.

The weather showed no sign of wanting to clear up at all, so I popped into the supermarket in the train station to pick up some stuff for a picknick dinner and then, using the underground shopping centre and awnings of the hotels, made my way in the dry back to my hotel for an in-room dinner.

Quite a lot later the rain finally eased off and the skies cleared so at that point I was able to head back out into town and do some exploring – in this case I wandered along the east bank of the lake up to where the Jet d’Eau normally spouts from, but for some reason it had been switched off for the night. I then headed back along the lake side, through the English garden and the floral clock before heading back to the hotel.