Geneva; Sunday, 22 December, 2019

Whilst the weather didn’t look as bad as Friday, it was still grey, overcast and drizzly as I left the hotel after checking out.

I caught the bus a couple of stops north to my first stop of the day at the Musée d'histoire des sciences. This museum is located on the banks of the lake and houses a collection of historic scientific equipment, including telescopes, barometers, globes, sextants and even an electron microscope. There are quite a lot of informative displays on how the equipment was used and how it advanced science – with several hands on exhibits and experiments that you can recreate.

As I left the museum it was starting to drizzle quite hard, so I headed over to the bus stop and waited for the number 1 bus round to my next destination of the day. I could also have caught the number 25 bus which would only have taken about 15 minutes to make the journey, but I guessed – rightly as it turned out – that by taking the number 1 the 30 minutes or so it would take to make the journey would be a similar length to the incoming heavy shower that started to lash down just moments after I boarded the bus.

I caught the bus round to the aptly named Museum bus stop to visit the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle. This museum houses a large collection of natural history artefacts – including vast numbers of stuffed animals, a small exhibition on geology and minerals, as well as exhibits on animals and their environments. I spent a long time looking round the museum, and even stopped for lunch in the museum café.

With the natural history museum exhausted I walked the short distance back into the old town, past the stunning Russian Orthodox Church with it’s gold domes glistening in the light reflecting back off of puddles on the roof, and over to the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire. This is a weird mash-up of museum and art gallery with the top floor being the city’s main Art gallery and the two basement floors being dedicated to Archaeology with the upper one being generic (Roman, Greek, Egyptian) and the lower being specifically related to the Geneva area.

By the time I’d finished looking round the museum I had a serious case of museum feet and so decided that I needed to rest my feet for a little while. I walked the short distance from the museum into the centre of the old town where I was able to find a nice bar and have a leisurely late afternoon drink.

I finished my drink just as the next hefty shower decided to start, so by the time I’d made it down to the bus stop I was quite wet. I decided that, given I only had about 3 hours until my flight anyway, that was probably a good time to just call it a day and head back to the hotel to collect my luggage and head on out to the airport for my flight home.