Today was a rain day. I had had a thought of doing a hike up a different mountain. I’m glad I didn’t.

Instead I went to CERN. There was a tram route that has its end-of-the-line at it. When I got there, there was a big metal globe towering several stories over the road. It screamed science. I tried to get closer, but it was part of a tourist thing that is closed for several months. I tried to look around for CERN, but I couldn’t find it. And the rain started to pick up. I wandered half a block down before I saw a gate on the other side of the road. There, a security person directed me back to the tram, but on the other side of the road. If you are going to have a big science ball, you need to have better signs to indicate that you should go the other way.

I was expecting it to be the European equivalent to NASA, but it wasn’t nearly as good. In their defense, I didn’t reserve a place on their tour and just showed up. So I only got to go into their exhibit hall, but there were interesting guides there. The exhibits are all dealing with tools for trying to detect things that are very small, so it loses out in a big way to NASA there. It can’t compete with interplanetary spacecraft. 

The guides were good. They did put things into perspective. Physicists usually have a theory as to how things are going to go, but they are disappointed when their theory is shown to be correct. That’s because the interesting things happen when something doesn’t happen as predicted.

They also gave an analogy of what their work is like. If you smash two helicopters together (don’t smash helicopters together) you get broken helicopters. If you smash them together at a higher velocity, you get debris that can help you figure out what the helicopters were made of. But if you smash two helicopters at high energy together, you might get a dinosaur. That’s essentially what they are doing, smashing protons together at high energy in hopes of seeing particles that existed at the dawn of the universe.

There wasn’t much else to do at CERN. So I returned back to the hostel and tried to figure out what to do. With the rain you couldn’t do much outdoor stuff, and that is what I find most interesting. I eventually dug out my rain jacket that was for the UTMB and decided to go out and climb a monument.

Fortunately, I never needed it. When I went out again, the rain was stopping and it never picked up again.

My monument of choice was St. Pierre’s Cathedral. I had missed climbing it when I was last here, and it was time to pop my Geneva cherry. This did, of course, unfortunately necessitate me getting some culture. A cathedral is positively dripping in it. But if you avoid eye contact, you can pay your five Franks and start climbing spiral staircases. There were 179 or 178 steps to the top, depending on which tower you go to. The route splits off on the way up. The south tower was disappointing and contained only what looked like a classroom, with a single privy locked away. The north tower was much better, with open views of all of Geneva. I took a lot of pictures up there. 

In the middle of the tower, they had a scale model of the cathedral, but for some reason they had locked it away and it was inaccessible.

After that, I randomly wandered Geneva. I watched chess players in the park. I watched the Rhone flow by. I walked the waterfront. Then I had an idea. My sister likes flags, so I wandered off to the United Nations and took a picture of their flags. Unfortunately, they were all wet and there was no wind to cause any flapping. So they will be impossible to identify.

I cheated and took a tram back towards the hostel, stopping off for some pizza at a place my cousin recommended.

Tomorrow I need to get up early and get to Mont Sala.

2015-8-24 23:35