Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Our last day in Switzerland

My last day in Switzerland... :( I'm feeling a little sad about leaving because this is the place I've been in, and that I've called home for the past month and a half. It's been wonderful.

I'm in Geneva now, for the second time. (the first was with the rest of the class during the course) We were in Lausanne for the first half of the day, and yesterday as well. I will just recap what we did there.

Lausanne
We arrived tired and grouchy to the best guesthouse I have ever seen thus far! The Lausanne Guesthouse and Backpacker's is by far, the BEST backpacker's inn I have ever stayed in. Ok, that's not exactly a valid statement, cos I haven't stayed in many budget hotels at all.. I didn't intend to slander my Zurich accomodation, but the Lausanne one just makes it necessary to do so! This was everything Hotel Biber in Zurich wasn't! It was clean (I am absolutely anal about clean floors), had a good view, wasn't noisy with drunk people returning back at ungodly hours, was a non-smoking hotel, and it was just beautiful. :)

So that put me in a happy mood, and I wasn't little miss grouchy anymore. We met TJ and went to the Le Musee Olympique. It was awesome. I didn't even know Lausanne was the offical olympic city, and that all of the IOC offices and establishments were based here. The museum was good, I learnt quite a bit about Olympic history and facts. Used to be crazy over the Olympics when I was in secondary school. I followed the Sydney 2000 Olympics like a bee to honey, and I even skipped school for that! It was great to see names like Marion Jones, Pieter van den Hoogenband, Ian Thorpe, Cathy Freeman, Alexander Popov, and Inger de Buijin pop up once more in the museum. It reminded me of the days I used to go nuts over them with my fellow Olympic crazy friends Jan and Shan. :)

And being the Singaporean I am, I thoroughly flouted the No-photos rule. I felt like a spy carrying my little Canon and snooping around taking pictures flashless. I got pictures of so many of the memorabilia. Like the pair of Adidas shoes worn when the first sub-10 100m race was ran, the 'Boycott Moscow' propagandic posters, the beams and leotards used by gymnasts, all signed by the atheletes themselves. :) Haha

Earlier today we went to the Museum L'Art Brut. Which is a gallery that displays art pieces that have no artistic inclination, and are not bound by knowledge or art trends. Most of the artists were socially inept people, psychiatric patients, spiritual mediums, convicts, the unemployed and lonely.. The art pieces were very haunting, and sometimes I felt like the Intro Psych course I took last sem creep up again. Schizophrenia, multi-personality disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder... Shudder.. There were some pieces of art done by this man who was psychotic, and I guessed that he was probably schizo cos all his paintings had clusters of things and people huddled closed together, with many eyes and disjointed parts cramped in a single space. It was almost as if he was drawing out the voices and hallucinations he was experiencing. Very haunting, very honest. (and again I flouted the No-picture rule.. )

Geneva
We arrived in Geneva today in the late afternoon. Walked around town for a bit, and then we headed for dinner at Boky's. It's a very affordable Chinese/Japanese restaurant. We had fried rice and tofu with minced pork and thick sauce. It was fantastic. Then we finished the meal with Movenpick ice-cream and I scoffed down a raisin danish and another sugar pastry. Ugh, sin. Sin to my pocket, and sin to my tummy. :(

Walked along Lake Geneva after dinner. That was something we didn't get to do the last time we were here because it was all too hurried. It is truly beautiful at night. There is something distinctly Swiss about the whole atmosphere. Maybe it's the antiquated architecture, maybe it's the cobbled lanes, maybe it's the people eating al'fresco by the water, maybe it's the lake spray that marks out the centre of the water body. Maybe it's just the feeling I got because it's our last day in Switzerland.


Laid bare at 11:23 pm
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