Kit Cat Diaries -> 12 FEB

First few days out of my room.

You can see a lot of action from here, I like it.

Though sometimes I get a bit spooked by loud cars or dogs barking.

I also hang around here a lot.

Oh...hello.

The Cross, the Watch and the Weird

Our last day in Geneva was rather educational, we went down to 3 museums!

First up was the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in the morning and whaddaya know, there was a whole bunch of teenagers on excursion too! Just our luck... We wanted to rent the audio guide but it was all reserved for them. The guy at the counter was quite funny, he was telling us the exhibits were rather self-explanatory and the teenagers need the audio guides cos 'they don't read anything', haha.. After we bought our tickets and went down for the first exhibit, there was another tour group there as well! Apparently it was a popular day to go down to the museum.

One of the founding fathers of the Red Cross, Henry Dunant

Apparently the Red Cross is known as the Red Crescent in Muslim countries out of respect for their religion. Some of the functions of the Red Cross I feel is pretty similar to the UN, but I guess there can never be too many people championing the same cause.

Exhibit on the horrors of land mines

The exhibits about the current work of the Red Cross were the more interesting ones to me. They had a few small exhibits on their current work, like social programmes such as AIDS, homelessness, aid for land mine victims, protection for prisoners etc. All in all, a pretty good museum to visit.

Then it was off to hunt down our lunch, which will be posted by CS.

After that, it was off to the Patek Philippe Museum. We mistakenly thought that there was a guided tour but apparently it's only available on Saturday. The museum was positively oozing with money and grandeur, as can be expected of Patek Philippe. Well, I guess they have to live up to their tagline of 'You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation'.

No camera was allowed in the museum so no pictures. Suffice to say, if you are a watch lover, you probably think you died and went to heaven. Apparently Patek Philippe was set up by 2 Polish businessmen but its now owned by the Swiss. It was an interesting museum to go but after a while, all the watches got to me. They had like a mini workshop on the first floor where there was an actual guy doing something to a watch. Whether it was for show or the guy actually does work, it was interesting to observe nonetheless. Obviously someone who is more into watches can tell you all the technical aspects of watch-making and if we actually had a guided tour, it would probably be more informative. They apparently have one lady who does enameling work exclusively for Patek Philippe and she produces 1-3 watches a year! After her polisher retired, she had to go learn it herself cos no one else could do it, it's totally crazy.

Finally, it was off to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. There was only one floor opened for visitors so we got in for free! Hehe... honestly I don't think I got all the pieces that were on display but I did rather like the series by On Kawara. I didn't know who he was but I thought the 'I Got Up' and 'I Met' artist books were quite interesting. No pictures of those though.

Can't remember the artist who did the below but the colors appealed to me. I actually felt like going in to play with the blocks but I didn't, haha... Although I do wonder if anyone would have stopped me or just let me be, since it is Modern and Contemporary Art afterall, hehe...

Colorful blocks which reminds me of Lego

And that concludes our last day in Geneva! We had a lovely dinner at Segny, which I'll leave to CS to post.

CERN and more Geneva

The Globe at CERN

Woke up bright and early yesterday to head down to CERN. Admittedly I never heard about CERN til I watched Angels and Demons but it was enough to pique my interest.

Anyhoo, we made our way there in time for our 1030am tour. Our tour guide was a young guy with a Phd (of course...) in Particle Physics (like duh...) and we started it with a video about the history of CERN etc. After that the guy opened up the floor for questions and all these people started asking questions which totally flew over my head! Some girl asked something about string theory and its connection to something and some young boy asked something chim too. I probably never felt as stupid as I did yesterday. Our guide was pretty good and I did understand some of his answers but most of it flew over my head. CS asked something too, but I can't remember what, will leave it to him to add it in here.

After that we went one of the detectors for the LHC, ATLAS to watch another video (!). Actually in all honesty the videos were a little boring to me at least but the scientists do have a sense of humor, on the first floor the 2 videos of the ATLAS project were named 'A New Hope' and something along the lines of 'The Empire Strikes Back', lol... After that it was more questions of which again I couldn't understand half of them. We spent most of our time there watching the video explaining about the LHC and after that we had time to explore around the first floor where there were more explanations. We also got to press the emergency button, haha... All in all pretty cool stuff and the explanations were more layman so it was better for my little bird brain.

The tour was supposed to take 2.5 hrs in total but we took more than that mainly due to the numerous questions asked. In total, we only went to ATLAS and no where else. After the tour ended, we went to the Globe of Science and Innovation to catch the exhibition 'Universe of Particles'. Again pretty cool stuff but CS was way more interested in it than me. After that, we went to the Microcosm to finish looking at the exhibitions.

Universe of Particles at the Globe

All in all, pretty educational though they should probably have separate tours for people like myself who is a complete physics idiot and people who are way more technically inclined. It did bring back some memories of secondary school physics though, which was honestly a bit of a nightmare for me. All in all, if you are totally in this kind of stuff or even if you're not, I do think a visit there is a must if you are in Geneva.

After the heady morning, we headed down to Old Town Geneva to basically walk around. The Old Town was well, old, haha.... We saw Cathedrale St-Pierre, Jet d'Eau, Old Arsenal, Hotel de Ville. Pretty productive eh, hehe... anyway after a while we stopped near a playground where tons of kids were playing, all I can think of watching them play was that it must be very tiring to have to wear so many layers to go out to play, lol... There were also a bunch of old men playing giant chess in a park, pretty idyllic life.

All the Swatch watches ever produced since 1983

While walking to take the bus back to Ferney-Voltaire, we chanced upon a Swatch exhibition. The exhibition supposedly had all the watches Swatch had ever produced from 1983 onwards, though there were some missing ones, perhaps under repair? We had a fun time trying to spot our Swatch watches in the collection.

Swatch with Champagne cork

So far, it still feels like we are on a 2 weeks holiday or something, perhaps when we are into our first month, it will feel more like our major big adventure.