Leigh’s conference started on Monday, so I went geocaching. As a reminder, geocaching is a silly hobby where people hide stuff and other people go and find it and then mark that they’ve done so on a website.
Sometimes it takes me to some interesting places, though. My goal for the day was a very difficult puzzle cache in a park area northwest of downtown. So I decided to go for a long walk from our hotel, pick up some caches on the way, and see what else I happened to see en route.
And in a suburban park, what I spotted was a tall security fence with a gate in it marked “Zoo.” Now, this was just a random gate in a fence. It had to be an employee entrance, or an emergency gate or something, right?
Nope. Unlocked, come-right-in, help yourself, self service zoo. No employees in sight, just come on in and wander around.
To be fair, it’s not the San Diego zoo – there’s not a panda in sight. Rather, it focuses on largely native animals.
Also peacocks, for some reason.
So I just wandered around and looked at the animals. It was fun. There were goats.
Leaving the zoo behind, I continued my hike through the woods. Found some caches, didn’t find some caches, bought an espresso at the random café near the zoo, and finally DID make the grab on the destination cache I had in mind.
Returning to the city, I was getting hungry, but had not yet acclimated myself to the staggering food prices in Switzerland. As such, although I sat down in what looked like a tasty Afghan restaurant, the prices startled me so much I ordered something called a “Kabul Wrap.”
I figured that might be a nice kebab kind of thing.
No. It was easily the worst thing I ate on the entire trip – hot dogs and egg salad wrapped in a flatbread. I have no idea what was in any way Afghan about it. Yeesh.
But at least it was calories. You don’t want to know what it cost.
After lunch I went and saw some more Geneva sights, like this statue of Rousseau.
Or this clock, measuring to the tenth of the second the time until the sun is going to explode:
If I ever need to explain to someone the difference between accuracy and precision, I’m showing them this.
As an afternoon snack, I stopped into a nice indoor courtyard for a chocolate apricot patisserie.
And finally ran across Frankenstein’s monster. As you do.
Finally, Leigh was done with her conference and we had dinner at a nice Turkish place near the monster. All in all, a perfectly nice day of wandering around.