Liechtenstein and Switzerland, Day 15: Vaduz and Zurich

For having the longest post title of the trip, this will nonetheless be one of the shorter posts.  Leigh covered our morning in the hills of Liechtenstein, so once we finished our llama walk, it was time to take the bus back down the mountain to the bustling urban capital of Vaduz.

We made our way to the nearest bus stop, where we were presently joined by a local woman to wait for the bus.  When it arrived, we all boarded, the doors closed, and then the woman suddenly started saying something to us that seemed extremely urgent, despite our minimal command of German.

Then we looked out the window and saw our bag of bars from the chocolate making class sitting on the bench of the bus stop.

Much frantic gesticulating and shouting at the driver ensued, and I did manage to get released before the bus left to jump out, grab the chocolate, and hop back on.

When we arrived in the capital, we stuck our luggage in a locker and went for a walk about the downtown area to see what we could see.  There’s a few interesting sights, but we didn’t remember to take pictures of many of them.

You can look up the hill at the Prince’s castle, but since he lives there, you can’t go inside.  We decided to just look at a model instead. (You can see both in this shot.)

Model and castle

We went to the postage stamp museum, that was cool.  Pity we didn’t take any photos.  There’s also a statue dedicated to Liechtenstein’s most famous composer, Josef Rheinberger.  (Who I initially confused for the ever so slightly marginally more famous Jaromir Weinberger, author of Schwanda the Bagpiper. I am not making this up.)

I did manage to remember to take one picture of this exhibit in the modern art gallery above the postage stamp museum.

Art exhibit

The shoes were part of a different work, but I was really taken by the collection in the back.  While they may seem to be a number of different objects, the entire set is actually a single work of art, designed to look like a cultural exhibition on the history of a fictitious country.  It includes artifacts and artworks from the Neolithic period up to the present day, but all from a place that doesn’t really exist.   Neat.

However, at that point it was starting to rain pretty hard, so we decided it was time to depart the principality and head back to Switzerland for our last stop on the tour – Zurich!  But here’s one last shot from the train station in Sargens that encompasses a pretty substantial chunk of the entire country.

Liechtenstein, seen from Sargens

In Zurich, we were staying in our first AirBnB for the entire trip, above a jazz club in a busy downtown neighborhood.  It was pretty nice – it had vinyl records, a French press, a whiteboard to write messages to future guests.  Needless to say – we weren’t anything LIKE hip enough for this room.

We walked around the neighborhood a bit, had some tapas, then walked around some more.  Saw this dude in a crypt:

Statue in basement

And this lady at the train station:

Train station art
And then we went and crashed.  One day left!

Liechtenstein, July 15: Triesenberg

What do you think of when you think of Liechtenstein?[1] If you’re like most people, the answer to that question might be “Where?” Or maybe “Um, stamps?” Or maybe even, “Tax haven banking?” These are all valid answers. But another valid answer is, “Somewhere that Dan and Leigh have been talking about going for 20 years.”

See, dear reader, when we got married (20 years ago next week, as of this writing!), we had a grand plan for a honeymoon. We wanted to go to the tiny countries of Europe – Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City, and Liechtenstein.[2] Why, you ask, even though you should know better than that by now if you know anything about either of us? Um, because they’re tiny and you can walk across them before lunch?[3] Because probably nobody else in the history of ever has come up with that as their honeymoon plan?

Anyway, the opportunity to have that particular honeymoon (or really, any honeymoon) never materialized.[4] However, in 2010 I was invited to a town really, really close to Liechtenstein –right on the border, called Feldkirch, Austria – to give a talk at a conference there. While I was there, I took a free morning to take a train from Feldkirch to Buchs, Switzerland (just on the other side of Liechtenstein) and walk back. Why? Because I could.

Here’s how that went: at about 9 am, I stopped at the front desk of my hotel and asked if they had an area map I could use for the morning, because I was planning to take a train ONE STOP to Buchs and walk back from there.[5] The front desk clerk was horrified by this idea, and kept saying, “But this is very far! You will get tired.” Reader, it’s three miles from Feldkirch to Buchs. I’m hoping that her concern was predicated on assumptions about Americans and their fitness levels in general, and not about this American’s fitness level in particular,[6] but she seemed to have some serious concern about whether or not I would be able to drag myself 3 miles across a completely flat portion of Liechtenstein without requiring medical assistance midway. Eventually she relented and handed me a map, but she also handed me the business card of a taxi company, saying, “When you get tired, you can call this company and they will come pick you up and bring you back here.” Yes, with emphasis on the word when, as if to highlight the inevitability of this occurrence.

A picture from my walk in 2010

So I took a five minute train ride to Buchs, Switzerland, got off the train, and walked a completely flat route of approximately 3 miles across Liechtenstein back to Feldkirch and my hotel. I recall that I got back about 12:30, which was probably because I stopped to have lunch and stare at goats.[7]

Historic Liechtenstein goats

I walked into the lobby of my hotel in Feldkirch to the apparent amazement of the front desk clerk who probably was worried that I was dead somewhere on the side of a completely flat road.

Anyway, that’s been my primary experience with Liechtenstein, which to be completely fair is still a lot more than most people’s primary experiences with Liechtenstein, and has resulted in a story that I have told more times than I can count.

But that means that Dan still hasn’t experienced Liechtenstein, so since we were in Switzerland, we thought it would be great to nip into Liechtenstein so that we could finally say that we had been there together, even if we weren’t actually able to both walk across it together.

While we were in the process of researching “things to do in Liechtenstein,” the option for a llama walk came up. You can probably imagine the glee with which we immediately signed up for this.

[insert Fry “take my money” image here]

Turns out, it’s not just a llama walk experience. Or, at least, it doesn’t have to be just a llama walk experience. If you want, it’s a stay-in-a-literal-yurt-on-the-llama-farm-and-go-on-a-llama-walk. And we wanted. Oh, did we wanted.

And we did.

Was this the most convenient part of our trip? The most on-the-way part? No. No, it was not. The llama farm was in Triesenberg, Liechtenstein. To get there we had to take a train from Lucerne to Sargans, Switzerland, and then a bus to Triesen, Liechtenstein, and then another bus to Triesenberg (which was basically up a mountain, so I’m not complaining that there was a bus there), and then walk a non-trivial way out of Triesenberg to the llama farm. (While being threatened with an oncoming rainstorm, as it turned out.)

Rainstorm in the mountains

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We arrived into Triesenberg, and Dan had found one of the few restaurants that was open that evening – in a hotel that was right near where we got let off. We walked in and tried to go into the restaurant, and the front desk clerk was VERY confused that we were walking into the hotel with luggage but we weren’t checking into the hotel and only wanted to go to the restaurant.

After dinner, and narrowly avoiding what looked like an imminent Alpensoaken, we arrived at the llama farm, where we got the first glimpse of the majestic creatures we would get to hike with the next morning. In eager anticipation, we spent the evening in the yurt, where our primary form of entertainment was trying to kill flies that wanted nothing more than to experience a non-llama lifeform. With that accomplished, we yurted ourselves to sleep.

The next morning, we emerged to find Marc, our human host, preparing the llama herd for the day’s excitement. We also met our walking compatriots, who were all adults accompanying children – because what rational adults would want to do this without children involved? (Oh, wait.) There was an older Swiss couple who were there with their granddaughter and her friend, and a French couple who were there with their daughter. And … us.

Llamas being prepared

Marc gave us the safety briefing for how to walk with llamas, and then assigned us llamas based on their – and our – personalities.

Llama safety briefing

This is how Dan ended up with Willie, who was described as a “teenager” who was somewhat volatile and unpredictable, and I ended up with Pius, who was the “leader” of the flock of llamas.[8]

Willie the llama

Willie the Llama

Pius, we were told, needed to be at the front, because his presence as a leader calmed the other llamas. So Pius and I forged the path for the other ridiculous creatures, and I will say that the view as the head llama is probably better than the view from behind the head llama.

Leigh and Pius the Llama (left)

As foretold, at various points of the walk Dan’s llama Willie determined that he should be the one in front, and Dan was somewhat forcibly coerced into something resembling a leadership position until Pius had enough of the teenager and resumed his rightful place at the head of the llama parade. But then Pius would get distracted by dandelions, which were apparently his very favorite snack.

Dan and llama

The walk itself involved rather a lot of going uphill, and also involved a copious amount of sweating and a fair number of mosquitoes, the latter of which was increased by the former. But I got to spend time with one of the most regal llamas I’ve ever met, so my joy was boundless.

[1] I mean, if men can think about the Roman Empire on a regular basis, why can’t we think about Liechtenstein?

[2] Luxembourg doesn’t qualify – it’s huge compared to these countries!

[3] Well, some of them. Some of them have really big mountains and it might take you until 3 pm.

[4] Don’t feel too bad for us. As this blog demonstrates, we’ve gotten to go some amazing places together; they were just a lot larger.

[5] There are only four train stops in Liechtenstein, one of which is abandoned. Tim Traveler talks about this here None of the three working ones were in any way convenient to the llama farm, for some reason.

[6] Canadian, now!

[7] Not at the same time. Well, okay, maybe.

[8] Google suggests either “flock” or “herd” as the collective noun; I feel like we’re missing out on the grandeur of “cavalcade” or the implied hilarity of a “business,” but fine.

Switzerland, July 14: Lucerne

Before this summer, I had only been to Switzerland once, while I was an undergraduate.  I was helping chaperone / play as a ringer for the Cleveland Youth Wind Symphony.  That trip included a single day excursion to Switzerland from Germany and for some reason, the destination that day was Lucerne.

I even dug through my box of old pictures and discovered that I had some pictures of Lucerne’s most famous sight, the Lion of Lucerne.

The Lion of Lucerne

This is not one of THOSE pictures, however, because THOSE pictures were taken on a 35mm point and shoot potato by someone with no idea how to operate it.  The lion is recognizable, but only just. 31 years later, the Lion looks about the same, but my phone is a lot more forgiving of my photography skills, which probably haven’t advanced much.

At any rate, the Lion is an anti-revolutionary monument, dedicated to Swiss mercenaries who died trying to protect (checks notes) Louis the XVI.  Definitely not as inspiring a story in 2025, that’s for sure.  But the sculpture’s pretty cool, and it’s in a quiet little grotto in the middle of the city.

Lion grotto

OK, Lion, tick.  What are the other must-see sights in Lucerne?  The two wooden bridges over the Reuss.

The first is the Chapel bridge, originally built in 1333, but substantially restored after a fire in 1993. It has wooden panels along the entire length depicting scenes from Lucerne’s history.

Wooden bridge

But those panels aren’t NEARLY as cool as the ones on the Spruer bridge, just downstream. Built in the late 1500s, the panels in THIS bridge all feature Death.  Not just the abstract concept of death, but the anthropomorphic personification, doing all sorts of spooky things.

Sometimes it’s even wearing a hat.


Tag yourself!  I’m the kid in red leaning on the table.

There’s DOZENS of these panels. They’re amazing.

DEATH

Having looked at the major sights downtown, we decided to go check out a very different type of history, in the form of the Swiss Museum of Transport, which is, as it turns out, the most popular museum in Switzerland.

It’s set up as a number of different buildings around a central courtyard.  One for trains, one for boats, one for planes, etc.  This one was, unsurprisingly, for cars.

Auto building at transport museum
There were also a number of entire airplanes, submarines, and boats scattered about.
Airplane in museum
There was a lot of extremely photogenic stuff, but for some reason we didn’t take a lot of pictures.  I’ll blame it on being late in the trip, and we were getting tired.

But pictures aside – this museum is well worth a visit.  It does an excellent job of striking the balance between “entertaining for children” and “not boring for adults.”  Plus, trains and planes and boats are just inherently pretty cool

One more picture – this time of a “vending machine” that would pluck a car off of the wall periodically and bring it to a turntable for people to gawp at.

Car wall

After a solid few hours in the museum, it was time to set off for our next destination, and we wanted to allow plenty of time, because we had to get to an entirely different country.

Leigh and I have had a running joke ever since we were married that at some point we wanted to take a honeymoon trip to the tiny countries of Europe – Liechtenstein, San Marino, the Vatican, Andorra, and Monaco.

And just a few weeks shy of our twentieth anniversary, we were finally going to tick off ONE.  At this rate, I don’t know that we’ll ever finish.  But it’ll be fun trying. Especially if everywhere is as pretty as Liechtenstein.

Liechtenstein

To be pedantic, only the parts of this picture on the LEFT side of the river are actually Liechtenstein.  But on the other hand, we LIKE being pedantic.

An absolute must do on this visit was to try the national dish of Liechtenstein, which we have previously attempted to make right here on this blog. And at a restaurant in Triesenberg, with this amazing view of the Rhine valley, we had the chance to do just that.

Cheese Spätzle

My heavens.  This was fantastic.  Big pile of cheesy dumplings with crispy fried onions.  What is not to like, I ask you?

We each ordered a serving, and neither of us was able to finish, although we made a valiant effort.

At this point it was time to walk to our evening accommodations.  It was about a mile, and we were growing increasingly concerned by the weather.

Rainstorm in the mountains
You could SEE the rainstorm walking down the valley towards us.  It was really spectacular.  It was going to feel a lot LESS spectacular when it started dumping water on us…

…except it never did.  It passed slightly higher up the mountain and spared us, allowing us to arrive perfectly dry at our yurt.

Yurt in Liechtenstein.
But why were we at a yurt in Liechtenstein?  Well, that’s a story for the NEXT post.

Switzerland, July 13: Interlaken

We had allowed ourselves two days in Interlaken to slow down a bit and enjoy the Alps, so the second day we took another cogwheel train.  This one left from immediately next to our hotel, and took us up to the lower region called Schynige Platte.

This train is very slow, but that’s because of the incredibly steep grades it hauls itself up.

Schynige Platte train
Because of the old-fashioned wooden seatsness of it all, I was put slightly in mind of the romantic train ride we did in Kyoto, but this was was actually a bit better than that – you didn’t have an announcer shouting at you the whole time, and no one attempted to sell us photos of ourselves.  I still wouldn’t necessarily call this “romantic”, per se, but the views were pretty great.
View from train
The point of coming up here was to go for a hike.  There’s an alpine garden and a trail along a fairly narrow ridgeline.  There’s also a picture frame, so you can take a properly framed photo of the Alps.
Alps in frame
We tried to do a Magritte, but I don’t think we quite got it right.
Picture in picture
At any rate, the hike was very pretty, and especially once you got up to the ridgeline, very narrow.
Ridgeline

Panorama from ridgeline
Normally I don’t just throw in a bunch of pictures without saying something between each one, but – come on.

The one difficulty, as can be seen in these pictures compared to the one from the day before, is that it was threatening to rain.  And shortly after we took this one, it went from “threatening” to “raining pretty damn hard.”  Of course at the maximum distance from the train station on the out-and-back loop we were on.

So was slogged our way back in the rain, skipped the alpine garden, and squished on to the train for the ride back down.  At which point, of course, the weather turned gorgeous.

Schynige platte railway
I mentioned that we had mostly skipped the town of Interlaken, the center of which feels very much like the Virginia Beach of Switzerland.  However, we HAD signed up for a chocolate making class that afternoon.

The shop where we did the class was promising.  Lots of interesting decor, funky hipster vibe.  The class itself was… fine.  Really.  We got to make chocolate, and we got to eat chocolate.  But you could tell it was geared towards the 12 and under crowd who made up most of the rest of the attendees.

Chocolate class
We ended up with six chocolate bars, which we then carried around with us for the remainder of the trip in a little white paper bag, which had to be maneuvered on top of our other luggage the whole time.  Keep Chekhov’s bag of chocolate in mind.

While we waited for the chocolate to set, we had some time to walk around and see some of the less touristy bits of town along the river, which were really quite nice.

Interlaken river
And then it was zoom zoom again off to our next city – Lucerne!  We arrived in time to have a nice evening walk along the lake there, and then off to bed.

Lucerne night view

Switzerland, July 12: Interlaken

This post title is a touch misleading, as the one place we didn’t go was the city of Interlaken.  Instead, we explored (spoiler) both of the two valleys above Wilderswil – Grindlewald and Lauterbrunen.

Honestly, it would have been a spoiler for us too, at the start of the day – there’s no way we would have SET OUT to travel quite as far as we actually did.

We started the day by catching the train up to Grindlewald, an impossibly picturesque town located, well… here.

View from Grindlewald.
But this view CLEARLY wasn’t scenic enough, so we boarded a gondola to the summit of First, (pronounced “feerst”) a peak just north of town.

Dan and Leigh on First
Getting there.  But how scenic would it be if we got those two knuckleheads out of the picture?
View from First

Pretty goddamn scenic, that’s what.  The whole day was basically like this – the weather was perfect, the views were stunning.  Easily my favorite day in a trip full of amazing ones.

One of the reasons you go up First in particular is that there are a lot of super fun ways to get back DOWN, the only one of which I managed to take a picture of is the one we didn’t use.
First glider
Instead, we first took a zipline from the summit down to the FIRST gondola stop below the summit, Schreckfeld.  Then at Schreckfeld we boarded a mountain tricycle.  This is an amazing experience where you barrel down a narrow mountain track while trying to keep your eyes on the road and off of, you know, the Alps.
You know - the Alps
It would have been slightly MORE amazing, however, had we not ended up behind an exceptionally timid rider who moved at an incredibly slow pace, and frequently came to a complete stop.  And since the track is way too narrow for passing, that meant that she managed to collect over a dozen riders all poking along behind her trying to to lose all of their momentum on a flat stretch.

The cycle ride takes you to Bort, where we sadly did NOT stop to buy a souvenir license plate,  but happily boarded our THIRD means of transport down the mountain, a trottibike!  I almost got a picture of this one.

Leigh and trottibike

I mean, you can see the handlebars.  A trottibike is basically a scooter with souped up brakes.  And the brakes were needed.  I kind of can’t believe they let us do this.

Trottibike route

From Bort back down to Grindlewald is quite a ways, and they just handed us scooters and helmets and said “Have fun, see you at the bottom!” (And by “just handed” I mean “in exchange for quite a lot of money.”)  But still – it’s a fun ride! Nearly two and a half miles, and easily the best of the three.

Arriving in Grindlewald, it was time for a nice hearty lunch.  (And “hearty” is definitely the watchword with the Swiss cuisine we tried.)Hearty lunch
And with that, it was time for more gratuitous theme park rights on the side of the Alps.  We headed up a gondola on the opposite side of the valley to Pfingstegg, which boasted both a mountain toboggan ride and a “fly-line”, which is kind of a slower zip line that curves around through the forest.

The fly line was fun!  The mountain coaster would probably have been MORE fun if I hadn’t gotten stuck behind a Spanish grandmother who kept bringing her sled to a full stop.  It was kind of our day for that, sadly.  We also photographed an extremely patient cow.

Patient cow
All the cows really do wear the stereotypical Heidi-ass cowbells, by the way.

Having fly-lined, mountain-coastered, trotti-biked, zip-lined, and tricycled, we realized it was only about three o’clock, and what should we do next?  Well, why not take a gondola up to the high point that separates the Grindlewald valley from the next one over?

View from Mannlichen
Absolutely no reason, that’s why.

And once again, the Swiss rail app proved invaluable.  Drop the pin on top of a goddamn mountain, press go, and you have your bus ticket and your gondola pass all set in your phone.

This peak is called “Mannlichen,” and has a very nice 90 minute hike leading deeper into the mountains.  Why not?  Let’s do that!

Mannlichen view
Dear lord.  Also, don’t forget you can click on these pictures to make them bigger.

The end of the hike was a spot called Kleine Scheidegg which had a quaint little train station and a historic cogwheel railway down the far side of the mountain into the Lauterbrunen valley. And since the last train was fairly early, we opted to hop onto that rather than having dinner at the top of the mountain.

So – now we were in Lauterbrunen.  There was still one cheese-related dish I wanted to try, and that was raclette, which is basically the cheese of the same name poured over potatoes, and often pickles.

Raclette
And it was everything I hoped for.  We also got a nice light Caprese salad just to have some (checks notes) cheese with our cheese.

AND we had a view of this amazing waterfall right from our table.

Waterfall
(The view was actually substantially BETTER than this from our table – I took this from the train station later.)

One train back to Wilderswill and we had a chance to think about what we had actually done that day.  Google isn’t great for plotting maps of routes where you use multiple modes of transport, but here’s approximately what we did:

Map of the day

We started at the upper left, took a train to Grindlewald, a gondola to First, zip-line to mountain cycle to trottibike back down to Grindlewald, gondola up to Phingstegg and back down, bus to Grindlewald terminus, then a gondola up to Mannlichen, hiked to Kleine Scheidegg, cogwheel railway down to Lauterbrunen, and then convenional train back to where we started.

Google wont let me plot a route all the way down from Kleine Scheidegg to Lauterbrunnen no matter WHAT I do, because apparently it thinks the last bit just isn’t possible to do at all on foot.

But more to the point – this is an objectively nuts itinerary.  We would have been crazy to plot it intentionally.  When would we have time to even look at the scenery?

Friends – we looked at a lot of scenery.  Maybe it was a bit accidental, but my goodness – it was great.

Switzerland, July 11: Bern, Baby, Bern

I have been avoiding punny titles for these posts, but… come on.

At any rate, we did indeed start our first full day away from Geneva in Bern, the “de facto” capital of Switzerland. (Switzerland has no officially designated capital, but since Bern is where the parliament is located, that’s what we’ll go with.)

And since there’s a big concentration of historic buildings, museums, and other cool stuff in the city center, we immediately boarded a bus out of town.  We’re nothing if not contrarian.  To be fair, we didn’t go very FAR out of town, but we really wanted to go here:

Zentrum Paul Klee
This is the Zentrum Paul Klee, a museum dedicated to the iconoclastic artist who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The building itself is pretty interesting, and was designed by the same architect who did two other buildings I encountered on this trip, the Centre Georges Pompideau in Paris and the modern art museum in Istanbul.

Klee was a fascinating character.  The primary gallery shows some of his early drawings from as young as 11 years old.  And in his youth, he was perfectly capable of doing both highly realistic work and impressionism.  But then he decided that wasn’t really his thing.

Klee work.
Klee’s work is fun, and it’s the sort of thing you can stare at for hours.  Leigh and I tend to divide works we see in galleries into two categories: “I’d have that on the wall” and “Nah.”  Klee has a lot more of the former.
The Last Adventure of the Knight Errant by Paul Klee
One interesting feature of the exhibit is that they have an entire room full of textbooks that have used Klee on the cover, including in some cases, over a dozen books with the same artwork.
Klee textbooks
And in many cases, the actual artwork is hung on the wall just a few feet away.  Very cool.

After our morning at the museum, we headed back into town to check out two smaller museums before continuing our travels.  The first was the apartment where Einstein lived during his annus mirabilis of 1905, when he wrote five papers that would each have been a career-defining masterpiece for any other scientist.

Einstein apartment
The papers were a lot more miraculous than the apartment, which was basically just an apartment.  Still, it was cool to be in the room where it happened. Also, there were some exhibits about how Einstein was a jerk to his first wife.

We almost noped out of the second museum, but it turns out that would have been a mistake.  The museum in question was the wind instrument museum, and it’s a basement room that you walk into and think – “Oh, there’s not that much here, and it’s quite expensive.”

BUT – your admission gets you the use of a tablet and a pair of headphones, and there’s a LOT of extremely well executed video to go with the exhibits on display.  This is pretty cool when you’re listening to it at the same time.

Wind Instrument museum

Also, there’s this bicycle.

Brass instruments and bicycle.
Why is there a bicycle in a wind instrument museum?

Why indeed.

We also wandered over to the Bern Cathedral which is impressive, although we opted NOT to climb to the top of two cathedrals in three days.

Bern Cathedral
And it’s cool for another reason in that we had just watched a whole video at the instrument museum about the building and playing of an experimental modern organ, which we could then go gawp at in person.

Organ
And at this point, it was time to bring our time in Bern to a close and head to our next destination, the Interlaken region.

The Interlaken area is one of the places you go to get your Alp on – hikes, views, gondolas, all that fun stuff.  We had chosen to stay in the small town of Wilderswill, outside of the relatively touristy Interlaken city proper.  And we did not regret this choice, at all.

Wilderswill church
Our evening walk made clear that we had made an excellent choice for our home base for the next two nights.

View from Wilderswill
Yowza.

Switzerland, July 10: CERN and Bern

I cannot believe I got to use that post title.

Statue at CERN

At any rate yes – conference over, there was one more Large thing we wanted to visit in Geneva – CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider.  As an accelerator physicist, this place is pretty much sacred ground, even if I didn’t get to see any more than the normal public tour.

Still, the public tour is pretty good.  You get to see the original synchrocyclotron built at CERN in the 1957, and used continuously up until 1990.

Synchrocyclotron

If you want to learn more about what a synchro-cyclotron is, and more about cyclotrons generally, you can check out the Wikipedia page on cyclotrons, which I wrote a fairly large chunk of.  Incidentally, you probably DON’T want to be the luckless tour guide with me on your tour asking annoying technical questions.

The tour then progresses to the control center for ATLAS, which is one of the primary detectors on the LHC beamline.  The detector itself, as well as the rest of the accelerator, is located deep underground, but we got to at least gawp at the folks in the control room.

ATLAS control room

ATLAS, incidentally, stands for “A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS”.  Yeah.

In addition to the tour of the synchrocyclotron and detector buildings, there’s a small art museum located in a big wooden sphere, and a large science museum built directly over the road.  The science museum was very well done, and did a solid job of trying to conceptualize what the LHC is for and accelerator physics more generally.

LHC museum

But with this final bit of entertainment extracted from Geneva, it was time to move on and see the rest of Switzerland!  And I cannot say enough nice things about how easy it is to get around using the Swiss rail app.  Imagine all the mapping and directions functionality Google maps, but it also lets you buy the tickets for pretty much every means of travel, including gondola.

View from Swiss train
Our first stop was the city of Bern, which immediately charmed us by feeling much less sterile than Geneva. No less f*ing expensive, though.

Bern old town

There was also a giraffe, for some reason.

Bern Giraffe
We had dinner at the Kornhauskeller, a restaurant in a 200 year old corn cellar.  The ambiance was really something.
Kornhauskeller

As was the food, which was very… hearty.  We had definitely moved into the more… Germanic part of the country, culinarily.
Sausage plate

A bit more of a walk around town, including an amazing sunset view, and it was time to crash.

Bern at Sunset

Switzerland, July 9: Geneva

For our last full day in Geneva, Leigh was available in the earlier morning and afternoon, but in the middle of the day she had to do (ugh) her actual JOB. So we started by going for a short walk from our hotel to the confluence of the two rivers that meet at Geneva – the Rhone and the Arve.

On the way, we met a few foreshadowing friends.
Leigh and llamas
According to a number of sites, the junction of the two rivers is very striking because of the way their two colors are very different, and there’s a distinct line where they come together. For example, in this file photo here.

Unfortunately, WE weren’t standing where that photo was taken, so the effect visible from where we were was a bit less striking.

Junction of two rivers obscured by a tree
Still pretty cool, though.  The nearby graffiti covered building was also pretty awesome.
Building with graffiti
But after this I had return Leigh to her conference for a bit.

While she was there, I went to check out a small museum of historical scientific instruments. These kind of museums always make me appreciate just how much more dangerous being a physicist potentially was when we had no fricking clue what electricity actually was or how to handle it safely.

Historical scientific equipment.
Not like today, when only sober, competent people are in charge of science and science policy.  (sobs)

At any rate, speaking of policy, let’s go look at the U.N., the other thing Geneva is known for!

UN main building
Yeah, that’s pretty cool.  There’s also a giant chair statue out front designed to first garner support for the international land mine treaty, and then to remind people it exists.  People such as the United States, who still haven’t signed it.  Sigh.

Giant chair
There’s a lot of very imposing brutalist architecture in this neighborhood, including the headquarters of things like UNICEF, the ITU, the WTO, UNATCO… wait, hang on – that last one is from Deus Ex.

The International Committee of the Red Cross took over an old hotel, so their headquarters is much less brutalist.

ICRC Headquarters
After a LOT of walking around in the sun (these buildings are BIG, and are commensurately spaced well apart from one another), I took the tram back to down and ended up buying some train station empanadas for lunch.  Sure, why not?

In the afternoon, once Leigh had been returned to me, we went to the museum of the watch maker Patek Philippe.  It made an interesting comparison to the Seiko Museum I had visited in Tokyo.

For one, it was MUCH larger, and included a huge array of historical timepieces.  For another, it just felt more like an old school art museum than one about the science of telling time accurately.  There were some really amazing pieces, and the museum was definitely worth the price of admission.

One of my personal favorites was this watch. The hands change length as they proceed around the face.
Watch with variable length hands.

Definitely NOT designed by Dr. Seuss, or so they claim.

Finally it was time to join the rest of the conference attendees for the official conference dinner of.. fondue!  Yes, we were in Switzerland, it was time to dip bread into cheese!

Which, of course, I forgot to take a picture of.  But it was bread dipped into cheese, what’s not to like?

The next day the conference was over, so we had morning plans in Geneva, and then off to see the rest of the country!

Switzerland, July 8: Geneva

Leigh had already finished most of her conference related duties at this point, so in the afternoon she played hooky and we went to look at a bit more of Geneva together.

We had been told that Geneva was not the most interesting city in Switzerland, and (spoilers) it’s not, really.  But there’s a few really good things worth seeing, and one of those is the archaeological museum under the cathedral.

The cathedral, viewed from the outside, is a proper European pile of stone – towers, arches, all that fun stuff.

Geneva Cathedral
But directly underneath is a huge excavation site – an area substantially larger than the church itself has been opened up to show construction going all the way back to the Roman era.  It’s remarkable how MUCH empty space there is, given the fact that there is still an entire CATHEDRAL sitting on top of it.

Archaeological site
And there’s some really impressive stuff – the monks apparently had heated floors in their cells at one point.  WE don’t have that, and we live in the future!

Mosaic floor
This mosaic was the floor of the bishop’s reception chamber.  You can see spots where it was incompetently repaired much later than its original construction.  Good to know Ecce Homo wasn’t purely a recent phenomenon.

Having explored the depths below, it was time for the sky above, in the form of climbing the church tower for a view of the city.  Unfortunately, this was the one day of our visit where the weather was grey and rainy.

View of Geneva
And just for completeness, here’s a view of the church from the inside.
Geneva cathedral interior
Swiss cathedrals are interesting, because they were generally built before the Reformation, meaning they were highly decorated and ornate, but then stripped down to the extent possible afterwards.  So it’s obvious that there used to be a lot more stuff here.

Except for this chapel – this one’s still bonkers.

Geneva Chapel

After this, we visited a small gallery we had seen an ad for on a bus.  It’s dedicated to artwork that revolves around clockwork and time.  Some really amazing pieces, NONE of which we remembered to photograph, although Leigh at least got a video of a marble clock.

They had a “build your own Swiss mechanical clock” kit that I really wanted, if it hadn’t been somewhere north of $10,000.

After that we just bonked around the city a bit more, had some more chocolate, and then went back to our hotel to hide from the rain.

Switzerland, July 7: Geneva

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.

Ibix

Also peacocks, for some reason.

Peacock
So I just wandered around and looked at the animals.  It was fun.  There were goats.

Goat
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:

Doomsday clock
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.

Indoor courtyard
Apricot tart

And finally ran across Frankenstein’s monster.  As you do.

Frankenstein monster

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.