United Nations and wandering around Geneva

After resting and doing nothing for the first day, we decided to be a little more productive on our second day, hehe…

First up, was to send in our visa forms to the French authorities. We have to drive to Ferney-Voltaire to get that sorted and then it was onto a bus to the UN building. The UN building is near quite a few other buildings such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM), International School of Geneva, Red Cross Museum etc. We had lunch at the IOM and then walked down to the UN Building.

I had expected to see a row of flags at the UN building but there was only the UN flag. The building itself was of course impressive and security was obviously tight. We had to wait til 2pm before the doors were opened for us to register for the tour so we walked around a bit and took some photos. I got my photo taken for the visitor pass (only one person needed to get that done, between the two of us, strangely enough) and then it was off to pay for the tickets and then start our tour. We started our tour by going into one of those rooms you always see in movies where it’s a semi circle and all the interpreters are up there looking through the glass windows. The room was one of the smaller ones but it was still interesting to sit there and listen to some UN facts. I felt like I was on the movie set of ‘The Interpreter’.

Doesn't this look like the movie set?

UN Fact #1 : Only 2 countries remain which are not member states of the UN. The Vatican City and Palestine Territories. I thought it was a bit weird that Myanmar and North Korea are member states, also the guide didn’t mention Taiwan, haha…

UN Fact #2 : The 6 official languages used in UN are English, French, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Spanish. Participants/ observers for the conferences etc just need to speak any one of the languages.

UN Fact #3 : Countries are arranged in alphabetical order, but if one country really doesn’t want to sit next to another, that can be arranged (haha…)

After that we moved on and the guide was telling us that the various art pieces around the building was donated by the various countries. China obviously donated a painting of the Forbidden Palace and I also saw figurines from Egypt, mosaic work from Jordan etc.

My little bird brain cant remember the name of the room we went to next but it was the biggest room of all and I think that’s where the major conferences are held. Actually the UN headquarters are in New York so most of the major stuff like security happens there but in Geneva, they have the human rights, WHO stuff etc.

The Spanish Room

Then it was off to another room where the Spanish government has paid for the renovations and thus its also known as the Spanish room. A Spanish artist had covered the walls and ceiling with paintings depicting progress and also the consequences of war, pretty interesting stuff. Apparently countries can volunteer to sponsor the renovations of rooms, which is what the Spanish government did.

The interesting thing to me was that the building had so many art pieces scattered all over. Some were obviously very old and probably extremely valuable but they were just all over the place. CS was saying that the Europeans really know how to appreciate art. I hardly think we will have that many art pieces all over government buildings in Singapore.

After the UN building, we went down to the city of Geneva to walk around. We originally wanted to find this restaurant in the guidebook to grab a quick bite but we forgot that we are in ang mo land and restaurants usually close after lunch time before opening again for dinner so we had to make do with kebabs instead. I honestly can’t remember if we saw any significant landmarks but just wandering around was pretty nice. It did get rather cold after a while and we then headed back to our hotel.

Next up, CERN!

Edit : Apparently we went to the non-official entrance for UN, thus no flags! We went to the correct one yesterday so this was the entrance I was expecting. In any case the entrance for the guided tours is not through here.

Main entrance to UN Building

There was also a chair with 3 legs outside the UN Building. The story behind the chair is to remind countries the horrors of landmines and to get countries to agree not to use landmines in times of war. Pretty effective way to get the message across, oui?

Chair with 3 legs outside UN