Spring Break Part 4: Geneva

This story will begin with my telling all of you that being prepared is a good thing. Book a hotel in advance, everywhere. I will now tell you that we did not do that for Geneva.

While getting ready for spring break, Laura and I booked all of our hotels/hostels/planes/trains/etc. because we wanted to be prepared. However, the ONE city we did not do that for was Geneva. We couldn't find a lot online when it came to Geneva hostels so we thought we'd just find one when we got in about 11 p.m. Geneva is a relatively small town, and everyone there is really friendly and most people speak at least some English.

Now I'm going to tell you about our first night in Geneva.

We got off the train and couldn't find any information on hostels/hotels in the train station. It pretty much didn't exist. Ok, odd. But we'll walk around and find something, right? This seemed easy, since there were signs pointing to multiple hotels. We wanted a hostel however. We found ONE and it was completely booked for the week. We soon came to realize that there was some sort of HUGE convention in town and ALL THE HOTELS WERE FULL ALL WEEK. So here we are, 3 American girls, wandering around Geneva close to midnight, asking every single hotel along the way if the have ONE room open for the evening. We got the same response everywhere, "No, we're full all week." Awesome. We managed to find 1 or 2 that had rooms but they were WAY out of our price range.

Close to 1 a.m. we became desperate, and decided to go to a little one near the train station and just pay more than we could afford. (There was no where to sleep in the train station, otherwise I would have just done that.)

We walked in and the guy at the counter was really nice. He reduced our price and gave us free breakfast. I love that guy. I think he could tell we were pretty desperate, and poor. We got a room that was supposed to be 250+ (in Swiss Franc=215US) for 230 plus free breakfast (breakfast was 20 SF per person). So we got one night in a nice hotel with a really nice shower! We all took super long showers the next morning. They also had a really nice breakfast buffet, so we all ate as much as possible.

We then went next door to the Starbucks to use the WIFI on with Megan's laptop to secure a place to stay that night. We ended up having to stay in France because there really was nothing left in Geneva (in our price range). I have some pretty good stories about the hotel in France, but that will come later.

That day we got to tour CERN. It's a HUGE physics lab. Laura's dad is a physicst and knew people there. I'm sure I saw some pretty cool stuff, however, it all went way over my head. I did see the place where they thought the blackhole would appear and suck up the earth in it, killing us all. (If any of you heard that story in the news a few months ago.) Lucky for us, the chances of that happening are really quite tiny.

We went back into town for some dinner and we realized that we had to check into our hotel before 9 p.m. because that's when the front desk closed. We didn't really know where it was, and we waited for the tram in Geneva at about 8:30 and we missed it. Shit. We're screwed. There's no way we're going to make it out there in time! And we thought that if reception was CLOSED, we would get charged on our credit card anyways and we also would not have a place to stay, again. So we ended up taking a taxi. Which we knew would be expensive, but we were desperate.

Trying to get out there was ridiculous. We passed it on the freeway, but there was no actual way for the cab to get there because there was no exit ramp. It was so stupid but we got there at 8:58! And... the damn front desk was closed. Nobody there. Damnit, I'm starting to hate the French a little bit at this point. However, there was a "check in" machine outside that we could use to check in 24 hours. So we basically just paid 50 Francs on a cab we apparently had no need for. GRRRRRRR!! I hate spending money unnecessarily!! Annoying.

Well then we couldn't get the machine to work. It recognized that we had a reservation under Megan's name, but wouldn't accept her credit card. WTF?! We got out of the way after we tried it twice, because there was another group of people trying to check in. They were also having a little trouble with it, and at some point a hotel employee had come outside and we all jumped him, "Help us!!"

I heard the employee talking to the group in front of us, in French. The group tried to speak to him in English. The hotel employee only spoke French and the group spoke Spanish, with some little bits of English. This is where I stepped in to try and help. I was pretty proud of myself. I tried to translate the Spanish guys' English into French to the employee, then translate his French to English for the Spanish guys. Yay language!! It wasn't anything too impressive, the guys just didn't understand what floor their room was on and I had to ask the employee for them. I still felt pretty cool.

The employee helped us with our credit card problem (we apparently just didn't leave it in the machine long enough). And voila! We finally have a cheap hotel room! And cheap it certainly was! I have some photos of it but I can't post any on here now, I'm on a campus computer in the library. It was called "First Class Hotel" I kid you not. Can you imagine a first class hotel for $15 a night?? LOLOLOLOLOLOL... I'm still laughing just thinking about it. It wasn't really bad, just TINY rooms and apparently the reception desk is just an illusion because there was never anybody there, and when we found an employee they didn't know how to get into Geneva. But, like I said, you really can't complain for $15 a night (15 per person).

We eventually got some help on how to get to the bus that takes us to the France/Switzerland border. We pretty much knew how to get to Geneva once we got into Switzerland, it was just getting there that was fun. We walked a few minutes to our bus stop. The buses were not frequent, and we had about a 30 minute wait at that point. I spend a lot of time waiting at bus stops, it seems. We waited. Got on the bus, took it for about 5 minutes, and then it stopped.

Apparently we were right next to the border. We probably could have walked there in less time than it took to wait for the bus. Would have been good to know. So now we got to walk from France to Switzerland! Woot! That also became a pretty funny joke later, "Hey guys, save up your energy. Remember-we have to walk back to France tonight!!"

Once in Geneva, we walked around the lake. It was very nice outside, and the lake was full of swans and ducks. We ate some Swiss chocolate while sitting at the lake, terrified that the swans were going to attack us (we were also eating French bread). We walked around town, had some food, and walked back to France late that night.

We had to walk back to Switzerland at 6 a.m. because our train to Venice left at 7:45 a.m. and we didn't want to miss it!

Now I'm off to Venice....