We also had to pay close attention because for our final project we are to design a museum on the Canal Saint Martin for all of the materials to be placed.  A big centerpiece of the museum is Foucault’s Pendulum, which was one of the first ways that the visually illustrated the rotation of the early.  The original was put in the Pantheon Church, but the one at the museum is a model of it, while the original plumb is on display.

It was all quite interesting to me, such as all of the different telescopes, a CRAY computer, iron and steel making processes, and building structures.  Also was a display on the Metro line 14, the new automated line in Paris.  There was a video with animations and stuff showing how the system worked.

We were in the museum for quite a while, but since most of the group was disinterested they left early.  Quite hungry, we went to the Oberkampf neighborhood for lunch.  The place that Celia recommended was closed, so we went to ‘Charbon’ next door.  Since the menu was all in French, and I was feeling like meat, I had the Charbon Burger, which turned out to be very delicious, even better than most at home.  We ordered a milk shake for dessert, but it was really a smoothie; no ice cream was used, but it was still ok.

We weren’t tired yet, so Celia took us to a small exhibit of student work on rue Rivoli in a former warehouse.  It was rather like the Arsenale exhibit in Venice, but unfortunately the student portion of the exhibit was removed.  There was a cool, large, model on the floor with projectors focused on it that displayed graphical data about Paris on a topo map of the area.

There was also a small bookshop, but I found two really great books.  One was large, panoramic picture of some of the Paris metro stations, and the other one was called ‘Hidden Paris’ ony the book was in French only.  Celia said she had a copy, but since she can’t read French either she just bought it for the pictures.

We departed there and returned to the apartment and had dinner and did other inconsequential things for the rest of the night.

After class we decided to go out for a few drinks.  The first bar we went to was so smoky and crowded that I couldn’t stand it and walked right back out the door, and everyone else followed shortly beheld.  We walked a little further down Oberkampf and found another place, but they only had outdoor seating and it was rather chilly.  We got drinks anyway, and hung around drinking with gloves and scarves on.

When we exited, we were about a kilometer from where we started, so we walked to the nearest metro station to go get some lunch.  Yes, even after looking and photographing bones for about 2 hours we were all starving.  We made our way over to the Jewish district, where some of the guys recommended a great place for Falafel.  The place was packed, and there was a line outside and a few guys taking orders.  Amusingly enough, there was a guy across the street trying to get us to go to his place, but no one was going there because apparently the one that we were going to was the best in town, and other guy across the street was trying desperately to get a foothold into the market.  The food was quite delicious and cheap, and we all inhaled it.

We walked across town for a while, noticing some medieval buildings, through the Louvre courtyard, to meet the rest of the group.

We entered the Ecole de Beaux Arts to see what I thought was a school of architecture, but all the public part had was a photograph exhibit that was uninteresting to me.  We got to see the rest of the school, but the whole place was just rather boring.  There were some things to see in the chapel that was turned into a gallery, but certainly not the 2 hours we spent there standing around.

I left to get some dinner and then venture back out to take some night pictures of the Montmartre hill, the Eiffel tower, and the Arc de Triumph.  Montmartre some policemen asked what I was doing (as if it was not obvious), but I guess they were questioning lots of people because they later had a group of kids against a wall and were searching for something.

I got some great shots of the backside of the building and of the city itself since it was a very clear evening.

I took the metro over to the Arc de Triumph.  But when I went to set up my tripod I found that one of the pins jammed in a leg, so it would not lock in place.  I had to make do with my little tripod, but it has been steadily deteriorating with use (how can I complain, it was $3).  I still managed to get a couple of good pictures of that and later the Eiffel Tower from the Trocadero, which is evidently the vantage point that everyone uses to photograph it because there are no obstructions between you, the river, and the tower except for other people.

We continued into the maze of gilded rooms, each one just like the next and packed with people.  People rave about the palace, but I was not particularly impressed.  More disappointing was Versailles signature room, the Hall of Mirrors, was under restoration and partially covered.  Of course, it had to be under restoration to be completed in the spring.  Not that it would have mattered anyway, since the room was packed full of kids and groups of Japanese tourists trying to hear their guide over the racket.

After escaping the palace we moved into the gardens which provided some more breathing space…especially considering they extend for several miles in all directions.  We made our way to the lake and rented bicycles; the best way to see the gardens.  We quickly made use of our new transportation and raced down the almost deserted paths and through the off-road trials.  John rolled his bike off the edge of a berm, but he was unharmed.  Unfortunately most of the fountains were turned off, several of the smaller park areas were closed, and the statues were all covered up for winter.

After returning the bikes and getting some lunch we went to the small garden within the garden to see the ‘Temple d’ Amour’ (Temple of Love) which was a small round classical building in the middle of some beautifully landscaped gardens.  Fortunately this area and most of the rest of the gardens was completely deserted, as most people just took a look from up at the palace and left.

Versailles was a great place, but the next time I go I think I will just skip the palace and go straight to the gardens, perhaps early in the day before it get crowded, but I definitely want to come back when the place is more alive rather than hibernating.

I found the Egyptian area to be very cool, as well as the Mesopotamian sculptures and wall tiles were my favorite.  I also enjoyed the indoor sculpture garden which had a few Bernini’s and Michelangelo’s.

Doug and I left around 4:30 because we were kind of falling into a daze from seeing so much.  We did little of consequence that evening, he worked mostly on his project and I did some tweaking.  I had forgotten to render a few views so I did that and added some of the images to my layout.

By the evening I had all of my shit rendered to file and the templates laid out.  We grabbed a bottle of wine and headed down the hall and hung out with people for the rest of the night.

After touring the house we went into the cafeteria and got a very mediocre and expensive lunch, but it was food.  We then grouped into fours and rented golf carts to drive around on the property.  We wanted to get our money’s worth, so we drove them very fast all over the place first, all the way to the end of the property where there is a statue of Hercules.  We then took turns driving like delinquents; though the mud, puddles, and whipped shitties (doughnuts) in the gravel around the ponds, raced for a while, did stunts and other fun stuff.  Surprisingly we didn’t hit each other, nor did we flip or damage the carts at all.  Celia was not pleased with us, and one person did a little rolling when he missed the jump, but other than that it was perfectly tame, but tons of fun.

We returned the carts after an hour and spent some more time wandering about and feeding the fish before going back to Paris.

We walked across the plaza to get into the Notre Dame.  Unlike the rest of the churches we have visited, it was free to enter.  Of course, this meant that it was very crowded and had beggars and pickpockets inside the church, so I had to be especially wary.

It is sparsely decorated inside, with simple compound capitals that rise to plain stone vaults.  The most beautifully decorated areas were the windows, which were all stained glass depicting scenes that I presume are from the bible, and the large rose windows at the front, and on the sides of the transept.  The apse was closed, but we were able to walk around the front in the aisle space, which was cool to be able to see the complex ribs of the vaults connecting the apse to the chapels.

I took my time to take some pictures, but it was hard to get it all in because of the size, and I didn’t feel like it was really worth taking pictures of the floor since it was filled with stupid looking tourists.  I also noticed a few oddities with the building, such as that the columns are not all the same, nor are they perfectly aligned; the whole building is racked about 1 meter in one direction.

The outside was just as great as the inside, with all of the flying buttresses and intricate masonry such as the gargoyles and other motifs and carved figures.  The park behind the church was very photogenic and filled with local Parisians and not tourists, which was a nice contrast to the front of the church.  Rounding the last side of the building I noticed the scaffolding and other restoration work, so really only 3 quarters of the outside were photograph-worthy.  I stopped for a nice big (and cheap, considering I was in the shadow of Notre Dame) crepe.

After meeting back with the group we went down the street though some government building to get to Saint Chapelle.  We had to go through security, which was irritating because there were a bunch of assholes that pushed their way into our group, so we were assholes back and blocked them in, but the guards let them past.  Evidently they weren’t tourists, because we didn’t see them in the chapel.  The Chapelle church was built in the 13th century but it is a masterpiece of engineering for its time, because it has the highest glass-to-masonry ratio of any church of its kind.  The entire building is covered in large stained glass murals, and is yet built of stone.  It has some buttressing, but not much.  What I believe the trick was is that it has a very light vault, probably of brick rather than stone and a wood roof which lightens the downward load.  Anyway, it was very bright inside even though it was partly cloudy outside.  It was not filled with too many tourists which made it nice for taking pictures and lingering for a while.

We departed company then, various people went shopping and such but I went up to the Montmartre area.  The Montmartre is a hill with two churches on top, one being a beautiful, new, multi-domed Sacre Coeur (Sacred Heart).  The hill is accessed by way of a funiculare, a tram that is built into the hill at an angle, or a very steep stair.  I had looked it up the pervious day (in class actually) and deduced that the stairway was the same one that was in a photograph at The City Market that I looked at every time I was there.  It showed a very steep stair with trees in the sides and lamp posts lit up at night (in the winter too as I recalled).  There was no question that it was the right stairway, it was just a matter of finding the right place that carefully frames out the funiculare with the very modern stations.  After thoroughly photographing the stair I went into the church, which was in the middle of a service but I still walked around.  There were large no photography signs on the door, so I only took a few discreet pictures.  I walked around the building which has a very complex and beautiful exterior and then into the town part.  This was a section of Paris that has not been changed by the modifications by Haussmann and others in the 1700s and 1800s to ‘beautify’ Paris because it was built on the steep hill.  The new avenues simply were routed around it and it was left as it is.  The area is well saturated with tourists, so all of the businesses cater to them.  There was another church, however, which was completely deserted.  It was very plain and small, but it did have some great stained glass windows, and the sun was at a great angle so it cast the light into the church for some pictures.  The building, however, had some serious problems.  The vaults must have been pressing down and outward, because all of the columns curve outward and the whole building is twisted strangely out of plumb.  Also, it is clear that part of the vaults failed because it was repaired slightly differently than it was constructed.

After dinner Doug and Christine and I met Kyle and Alyssa at the Pompidou center.  We started in the book store, which had an extensive selection of architecture books, but no good prints unfortunately.  It also had a €1500 book, for some reason a 500 page large format color book cost that much, not sure why.  It was just a bunch of pictures of famous people in seductive poses, a lot of disgusting Courtney Love, so suffice to say I was not enticed to buy it at all.  What I did like was the complete construction documents of the Eiffel tower and its construction history, but it was €100 so I didn’t get it.

Downstairs was the temporary exhibition space which was a multimedia conglomerate of various things like photography and animations, as well as a video game of one of Alvar Alto’s buildings based on the Doom shell, but no weapons were used.

The Pompidou center was cool, but in rather bad shape because it was very dirty and had some off-color inhabitants, including several bums sleeping around the air handling units which really took away from its charm.

After class I hung about at home.  I installed BitLord again and began downloading the other Family Guy seasons since we have watched the first 3 to death.  I also got the pictures from Barcelona and Switzerland and picked out a few of the good ones to be tweaked and added to my money shots collection.

I had tired to make grilled cheese earlier with much difficulty.  As I later discovered, the knobs for our small two burner electric stove are opposite what is the world-wide standard; clockwise is hotter.  In fact, this was the opposite so when I tried to turn the heat down, I was actually turning it up.  It was quite frustrating and lead to a number of burnt pieces of bread and our room was filled with smoke so I had to leave the window open for a while.

After dinner and some more work on pictures and my journal we hopped in the 1 line down to the Louvre to see the pyramid at night.  It was nice because while the museum was closed, the lobby that occupies the area under the pyramid was open, so we could walk in and take pictures.  Also, at the end of the hallway we could walk down to see the inverted pyramid, which of course jogged images to mind from The Da Vinci Code movie.

The area around the inverted pyramid is not really part of the Louvre, it is a mall of sorts, so when I walked down to that end they ended up closing the Louvre lobby, so I had to exit at a different part of the plaza, but fortunately when I made my way back to the pyramid in the middle I ran into the rest of the group leaving.

The tour was in French and English, and since the French always came first it was pretty easy to figure out what we were looking at since the names never change; the Louvre is the Louvre no matter what you speak.  The whole thing was rather pointless because it was hard to see what was on land from the water, though it was nice to see the bridges from the river and the Notre Dame area.

We broke apart to go back to Accent for class, but along the way I stopped at the grocery store near our place to get a few essentials.  I was about ready to leave, but I got in line behind a woman who had a lot of groceries.  That would have been fine but something pissed her off because she started arguing with the cashier about something.  Normally in Europe you bag your own groceries, but someone was called from the back to do hers.  Then she proceeded to fill out what I figured was a complaint form.  By this point they opened the other line, but since I was right behind her everyone else moved over before me.  Needless to say I was pretty late for class, but it was no big deal.

After class and dinner we went over to the Oberkampf neighborhood where the other people live; it is the bar district.  We walked into one place where we were going to meet some others, but it was so chocked with smoke that I couldn’t stand to be there and left.  We walked a little further down the street and found a place where we could sit outside.  The drinks were expensive and shitty, so we left after one.  Some Halloween this was, a few people were dressed up but it is not quite the holiday that it is in the US, and certainly not the rocking party in Madison which I missed this year.

I took a shower and got some stuff unpacked before returning to Accent for the typical, stupid, pointless, orientation; ‘don’t drink,’ ‘don’t be loud’, ‘no parties’ and etcetera.  After dinner we wasted no time with seeing the town.  We walked to the Gare de Lyon and got lost before finding the subway to get to the Eiffel Tower stop.

It was dark, and we walked out of the station and saw the tower all lit up, I was spectacular.  It is much bigger in person, but it feels wider than it is tall because it takes quite a while to walk underneath it.  It was fairly chilly, but the Accent folks were raving about how warm it is, so I decided to go up the tower.  It costs 11 euros to go all the way to the top, but it is no time like the present.  Getting up the first elevator to the second level took no time at all, but we had to wait in line for quite a while for the elevator to the very top, even at 10 at night.  The view was amazing, and it was foggy near the ground so it was hard to see down.  The wind was very cold though, and Jen, who I went up with, didn’t stay long because of the cold.  I took as many pictures as I could and then we went home, of course getting off at the wrong stop and had to walk for quite a distance to get back home.  Oh well, the only way to see a city is to get lost.

We then headed down to the subway and over to the Park Guell.  However, the transfer at the station involved us walking through a hallway so long that it completely receded into the distance, it had to be at least 500 meters long.  When we got to the park, we had to go up to the top of a very large hill.  However, there were outdoor escalators that went most of the way, which were great.  The part we walked was extremely steep though, with about a 30 degree grade!  I took pictures of the cars parked on the hill that looked as if they would just slide down the hill, and strangely no one had their wheels turned in.  The park was completely designed by Gaudi and was his home for many years.  The upper plaza sits above a colonnade similar to the ones in Sagrada Familia; fluted and tilted inward.  He also used fountains and other water features throughout the park.

The place was packed though, since it was a good place to take children.  I stood in front of his signature lizard to get pictures for about 15 minutes snapping pictures so that I could later use Photoshop to digitally erase everyone in the background.  Tours were also available for his house, but with the crowds we decided to skip that and walk instead.

We went back to Las Ramblas and had a ‘tapas’ dinner which consisted of a series of appetizers that we order and share.  I got meatballs, a salad, and potatoes and people got various other dishes.  It was unique, but ended up being more expensive than it should have been.

We went back to the train station and ran into several other people from our group also bound for Paris.  They divided people by gender, so Kyle, Doug and I were in a room.  There was one other guy from Argentina or something, but he left and came back a while later to get his things; he must have found somewhere else to stay which was just fine with us.  We plugged in a computer and watched a half-dozen Family Guys before going to sleep.  The train was quite a bit smoother than the others that we have taken, and the beds were nicer too.  The 4 person cabin was not physically smaller, so each of us had more space, and considering that we had only 3 people it was not cramped at all.  There was even a small sink in the cabin.  I actually slept as well as could normally be expected on the train.

The first point of interest we came to was Frank Gehry’s ‘Fish’.  It is a woven bronze plane that takes the shape of a fish with no head and no tail.  I am not sure if that was the actual concept behind it or not, but that is what it was referred to on the maps.  The design of the space was cool, with the fish sitting above 2 floors of outdoor seating for the open air mall filled with clothing stores and restaurants.  The floor of the space was a reflecting pool with a wooden platform with trees in the middle.  The fish sculpture looked better from far away though, because when experiencing it from immediately below it my vision was obstructed fairly significantly by the steel support structures.  They were painted white, but they still felt overbearing and unnecessary because the fish skin consisted of thin strips of metal that could have been supported by less.

We continued down the beach a while further before we hit the nice sandy areas.  The rest of the group wanted to sit for a while, but I walked to the end of the breakwater instead.  There were thousands of boats docked in the marina, many of which were very elegant.  The marina area was absolutely huge; several kilometers long and at least one wide because it took me over a half hour to walk to the end of the breakwater and back…probably 3km.

We walked farther down the beach, past some strange sculpture of pieces of a boat rammed into the hill in different parts, past a rugby game, a soccer game, and a nude beach before we reached the edge of the forum.  Unfortunately by this time we were all pretty tired and hungry so we went back to Las Ramblas for dinner.

Along the way down the Las Ramblas we stopped in at their market.  The market was contained under a large enclosed space, with about a hundred little stands selling everything from nuts, mushrooms, meat, cheese, seafood, and of course fruits and vegetables.  It was actually amazing how much they had there, as well as some very, very strange items.  There were sea urchins, some tube-worm looking things, and live crayfish crawling around in their bags.  Also was every part of a cow imaginable, which was pretty nasty.  We stuck to buying the fruits and peanuts, which we knew what to expect.

After dinner we went over to an Irish bar.  We stick to the Irish bars because they all speak English and always have a soccer game on the big screen that amuses Kyle and I get into it too.  The bar was quite packed and the bartender was obviously new.  There was a very annoying group with a loud singing girl and a guy who was a little too interested in the new bartender and kept her from doing her job (aka serving us) so it was pretty annoying.  We suggested that the bartender serve the signing girl a tall glass of bleach or a rophie colada to ease us of her pain.  I stayed until the end of the game and not wanted to spend more money left.

The museum was arranged chronologically, so the first part of the exhibit was Picasso’s sketches and early paintings as a student.  Amusingly, they are nothing especially good, and they look nothing like the cubism that he was known for.  Instead, they were typical formal paintings that he was being trained to do.  As we moved through the museum I could see the progression of his life, and there were detailed time lines explaining what was happening to him during the period that he was painting.  The museum is the most complete collection in the world, but it contains none of his most famous works.  Picasso was born and raised in Barcelona and the surrounding area, so it is no wonder that all of his work, especially his early stuff, remained in the city.  Some of his latest work was a 60 painting study on Velazquez’s Las Meninas where he took each character and different segments of the painting and broke them down cubistically.

As we were leaving I took pictures of the interior courtyard, which was apparently against the rules since this prick of a guard came up to me, demanded my ticket and then showed me on the back where it said ‘no pictures in side the museum’…of course I wasn’t in the museum but apparently I could only take them when I was down the stairs.  I blew him off and went into the gift shop, but I should have been more of a dick and then just left before they kicked me out.

We hopped on the metro after lunch to the Sagrada Familia, one of the most important construction projects in the world.  Simply, it is a gothic church that is under construction designed by Gaudi.  However, it is much more than that.

The church was designed by Gaudi in his later years, but he died before construction.  It was begun in the 1800s but there were some collapses as well as some intentional destruction by revolutionaries and interruption of work.  In the 1960s it was reexamined by some modern architects and the plans were brought into the digital age in the 1980s so it could actually be completed.  The sprit of the building has been kept intact, but steel and concrete that weren’t conceived of by Gaudi have been integrated into the construction to make it happen.  The building is still very much a construction site; scaffolding fills the transept and apse which are entirely obscured.  The nave is half-completed with the roof missing over a large portion.  The floor has been turned into a factory for casting blocks of concrete with the glass patterns integrated into them to be later hoisted up and be placed into the vaults.  The modernization of the project has allowed for the columns in the nave to be made incredibly thin.  Also, the stained glass windows have been replaced with incredibly thin pieces of stone laminated in glass to create colored, transparent windows.

The museum contained many of the models and drawings that have been used over the years to plan out the construction.  Currently the project is slated to be completed in 2025, with the nave to be completed in a few years.  The remaining parts are the giant towers, which are not even started that will double the height of the current building which is already one of the tallest in the city.

The architecture of Gaudi is extremely bizarre with curves, segments, and very organic construction.  It is beautiful with how unique it is, but too much popularity of the style would look terrible.  I am excited to come back later in a few years to see how the construction has progressed.

We moved on with our whirl-wind tour of Gaudi to the Casa Milla, an apartment building designed using the same organic, curving structure that Gaudi is famous for.  People still live in the building, albeit very well-to-do rich folk.  We looked through the attic space first, which served as a mini museum.  It was filled with amazing, thin, brick arches that curved in all directions over the building; it was like being inside an animal.  The roof is a big hit of the tour; we were able to run around on the tiled wavy roof and look at the amazing chimneys and stairwells.  Following that there was an apartment kept as it was originally deigned, with the furniture and appliances as it would have been around the turn of the century when it was built.

Our hostel was rather shady.  It was in an old building and didn’t have the key-card or locked entry, there was just usually someone at the desk but it was not as secure as some others. The key to our room was just a regular skeleton that could be picked easily, or even more easily the door could simply be pulled open with enough force because it was very thin.

The bathroom was ok but the shower curtain was too high so water got out onto the floor.  Fortunately there was a drain in the floor, but the entire bathroom still got wet.  We had a balcony looking onto the plaza, which was cool…except when we noticed the homeless amputee in a wheelchair sitting by the fountain was later lying on the ground with no pants with 2 cops next to him.  The ambulance came, and later that day he was back.

We wandered a little by the docks on the way to meet Doug and Christine but we didn’t see too much.  It was very hot and stuffy compared to Switzerland, I was glad that I brought my shorts.  We dined on Las Ramblas with ‘authentic’ Spanish Paella, and it was pretty good but expensive especially considering that I really didn’t eat the shellfish that came with it.

We went to the fountain again and the church also, as well as along the lake.  There were some interesting mobile retail spaces that looked straight out of a project that we would have done, so we took some pictures and read the display boards.  Kyle also got some ideas about his project.  The units were set on uneven surfaces by sliding disks of hard rubber under the feet, so Kyle decided that was the way that he was going to do his project 2 for this semester.

We got some kebabs for dinner and went back to the hostel to hang around and watch some TV before we left for the train station to go to Barcelona.

The train to Barcelona had all of the beds full, so we were only able to get reclining chairs.  Fortunately there was no one next to me, but it sucked having to share a car with so many people.  The girls behind me were whispering in French for several hours periodically broken with smoke breaks.  The compartment was sealed, but whenever the door opened the smoke poured in.  Not only that, but they reeked of it whenever they would get back so I was uncomfortable with the smells.  I was also uncomfortable with the temperature, which fluctuate wildly the entire trip.  Add to that the fat-ass in the corner who snored the entire trip.  Suffice to say, I slept very little.

Chateau du Bois was in fact not a winery, it was just a strange space which was disappointing for me.  We tried several wines and sampled cheese and bread for about a half hour.  There were no fewer than 9 different varieties that this winery produced.  They were actually grown and bottled in a different town, but were for some reason stored here.  The owner didn’t speak very much English at all, so it was difficult to communicate but we got by anyway.  We got a few bottles and check out the cellar and around the farm a little before we returned.

After getting off the train we went to see if we were able to rent bikes and ride around Geneva.  The place only had 4, so I decided not to go and leave the couples to themselves since I had been feeling like a 5th wheel for several days.

I went down to the lake where the fountain was.  It is supposed to be the world’s tallest, and indeed it was very tall.  It was supposed to be 150m, which is 450 feet.  It was not that tall, but it was still taller than all of the buildings in the city.  It was located out on the breakwater, and people could walk right up to it.  The wind was blowing fairly strong, so the spray was arching over the walkway so that I could walk under it and just get a light mist.  The base was simply a nozzle set into a concrete platform next to the breakwater.  I went out to the very tip and the wind changed, so I was stuck out there for a while.  When it shifted back slightly I decided to just make a run for it.  I got fairly wet, but I had my camera in my bag and under my shirt so it didn’t get wet at all.

I wasn’t especially cold so I took the longer way back to the hostel by going by the Cathedral.  Aside from its lovely green-tarnished copper tower it is nothing special, but it is very strange architecturally.  The Nave and transept parts are typical, but the façade of the entrance was a Roman temple-front, which looked highly out of place.

On the way back to the hostel I ran into the others.  I didn’t bother changing as I was completely dry at this point, so we just went to dinner.  I had noticed a Mexican place before, so I recommended we go there.  Everyone was satisfied with the cheap beer, margaritas, and good food (albeit smaller portions).

On the way back to the hostel we passed by a building that had a McDonalds.  There was what appeared to be a torch on the front of the building, and we both remarked that it seemed rather fancy for a McDonalds and that it was pretty big because it was lapping at an adjacent tree.  However, as we got closer I noticed that it was not a torch, but a flaming pharmacy sign.  Pharmacies in Europe are marked with green neon plus signs, and for some reason this one had caught fire and was melting and burning.  I went to the restaurant next door, but the guy coming out explained that he had already called the fire department.

We stood around for a few minutes and watched the sign burn and collapse leaving a pile of fire on the ground and in the bushes and trees.  The firefighters came and put it out, which was fairly unnecessary at this point because it had completely burned away.

We got into Geneva and to our hostel, and sure enough, Doug and Christine were in the room next to us.  They had arrived the night before.  We got some Chinese, though we could have chosen a restaurant from any country in the world.

The reason for the international feeling of Geneva is that is where the UN is based as well as almost all of the world’s main embassies.  Also, many of the huge Swiss banks are based in Geneva.  For this reason there is really not a single language; we pretty much went around understanding no one.  Most of the signage was written in French (what the locals speak) and English, which has become somewhat of a universal language.

We went down by the lake and saw the flower clock in the dark, and went to a bar to have a drink before we met with Doug and Christine.  The drink was listed as 5 CHF, but for some reason it was twice that when we got the bill so we didn’t bother getting another.  It was pouring by this time, so we elected to go back to the hostel rather than try to find our way around the city in the dark and the rain.