Today would be a travel day, taking a series of trains from Hiedelberg to Geneva. After a good breakfast, my niece and nephew escorted me to Hiedelberg’s main train station, and from there commenced another sequence of trains, remarkable in reliability and punctuality. About 45 minutes after departing Hiedelberg, the train arrived in Karlsruhe, where I’d switch to another train. At 28 minutes, this would be the longest “layover” of the entire Europe trip, and I used the time to take care of some logistics — get a German SIM card for the cell phone (long story), send a few texts to confirm that it worked, buy a power supply for the tablet (which would become a long story). Kept an eye on the clock and scurried to the platform in time to watch my next train arrive.
Next stop, two hours later, was the Swiss city of Basel, just over the border from Germany.
From then on, I’d be on Swiss trains, and started to hear the Swiss German accent, almost comically and gratuitously gutteral to my ears.
This next run would provide some of the best views of the train rides in this trip, with the train winding somewhat slowly through the low mountains of the Jura chain, north of the Alps proper. After an hour we cleared the mountains and arrived in Biel, at the northeastern end of the long valley that is home to Lake Biel and Lake Neuchatel.
One more train change and I was finally on the last leg to Geneva. For the last half hour or so, we rode along the north shore of Lake Geneva, and the good weather provided for impossibly beautiful views out the window.
Finally, after 4 trains and 6 hours of travel, I arrived in Geneva. After getting a local map and my bearings, I hopped onto a tram and made my way to the hotel a few minutes away. Well, it would turn out to be only a few minutes away … I still needed to figure out where exactly it was and how to navigate the tram system to get to it.
Met the slightly crazy checkin lady at the hotel, checked in and found my room, plugged in all the devices that needed plugging in … Whoops, my plug wouldn’t work. Hey, guess what? Switzerland’s power plug looks like it’s the same as that used everywhere else in Europe, but it’s not! The prongs are a leeeeetle bit smaller, which means all those plug adapters I brought are useless! Yay! Fortunately, right next to the hotel there was a mobile phone store that happily took my money in order to supply me with a USB power supply that was compatible with the Swiss outlets.
Which leads to another thing: the Swiss have not signed onto the Euro currency used nearly everywhere in Europe (insert monetary policy explanations here), instead sticking with their own Swiss Franc (CHF) currency. Stores will take Euros, but you’ll get your change back in CHF, which has a different exchange rate. Take that pile of strange coins in your hand, and couple that with the language barrier, and I suspect they routinely fudge the conversion numbers in their favor when giving you change. Geneva is already a very expensive city, and this only exacerbates it. Oh well.
Grabbed the map, hustled across the old city center to get to the lake before nightfall. Got a sandwich at a stand (meat and pretzel, together at last) and enjoyed my first view view of the Jet d’Eau while chowing down. Back to hotel, internet, sleep. Tomorrow would be a long day.