We weren’t catching the train until 12.25pm today, so we luxuriated in our hotel room until about 11.30am, then went across to the train station for a snack before we boarded the train.
The first class carriage was rather nice on this Swiss train (the Italian first class carriage was a bit average). We journeyed in style and comfort from Milan to Geneva. The border crossing was very uneventful – not even a passport check!
It was quite nice having some time just to stare out the window at the countryside, and interesting to see it change from flat farmland to hilly then mountainous.
We arrived in Geneva about 4pm, and didn’t get to the hotel from the train station until about 6pm – it should have been a 15 minute journey. It was an adventure! First of all, it started POURING with rain just as we pulled into the Geneva station. Rather than taking the sensible option of going straight to the hotel, we opted to stick to Plan A: Do Laundry, and got very wet in the process. After getting to the laundromat and realising that we didn’t have any local currency, we aborted Plan A, and went with Plan B: WTF Are We Doing.
Somehow it escaped our attention that the Swiss have not adopted the Euro, so we had to get some Swiss Francs. We could not find an ATM anywhere in the train station (there are dozens of them, we just couldn’t find one!) so we abandoned Plan B and went with Plan C: Eat Pasta Until We Feel Better. That worked a treat, and so slightly less wet and a lot poorer ($80 for two plates of pasta, OMG!) we found an ATM, got some money, purchased a train ticket for the Airport (where our hotel is) and found our way to our home for the next three nights.
The hotel is lovely – super comfy room, fast internet, a great restaurant, and it’s a quick walk to the airport where the train takes us to town.
We still needed to do laundry, so after a brief regroup, we headed back into town to the laundromat. While sitting waiting for our washing to dry, it dawned on me that the girls sitting outside the laundromat were not in fact waiting for their washing to finish. There were about 10 working girls lined up on the street outside the laundromat, and we watched them come and go from the building beside us. Awesome, we found a laundromat in the red light district.
We eventually made it back to the hotel about 10pm, only to discover that the Swiss have different power plugs from the rest of Western Europe! First stop tomorrow will be the Relay store at the airport to buy a new adapter…
The Secret Life of Bebe 