Geneva.

We got back a little earlier than I was expecting today, so I will write a little before falling into bed. Today was our day in Geneva. The head of our program organizes a scavenger hunt around Geneva. He has 4 pages of things we need to find, like what was written on a wall in one particular place, or what direction a statue of a man on a horse faces. Some of the things we have to ask a local to find out the answer. We have to take public transportation or walk from one place to another. It's his way of getting us to see and learn Geneva. We went from CERN to downtown, across the bridge over the Rhone, up to Old Town, down to the Jet d'Eau, on a ferry across the lake, up to the international section of town, and finally to all meet together at supper. We saw a statue protesting landmine use, the United Nations, the Reformation Wall (again), another wall that Mere Royaume tipped a cauldron of boiling vegetable soup over onto the heads of the Savoyard army who were scaling the walls and saved the city in 1602. We saw St. Pierre's Cathedral and home of the World Intellectual Property Organization. We even had to calculate some of our answers, like how many liters the Jet d'Eau pumps into the air per midsummer's day (23.4 million in case you are wondering).

We had been broken into 4 groups of 9 for this exercise. In my group I had Cedric from France and his girlfriend Peg; Keith, Michelle, and Ana from UK; Giovanni from Italy; Fuminori from Japan; and Mark from California. We were also supposed to have Hassan from Rwanda, but we somehow lost him to another group at the first bus stop.

It was another warm day today, the hottest of the year. We walked for about 5 hours, only stopping once for a break. We were so looking forward to the restaurant, only to find that we were inside on the upper floor. Forty people packed into a room, already sweaty, with open flames on the tables was incredible. We had cheese fondue and white wine, amazing to eat but very heavy after our day. As someone in our group said, I've never had fondue while sitting in a sauna before. CERN picked up this meal as well as our pizza meal from last week, so I shouldn't complain too loudly. We also graded our scavanger hunt answers, and our group won. We were pretty serious about the whole thing, so I would have been disappointed otherwise!

Once back at CERN, a shower felt amazing. I don't think I have ever sweat so much in my life, at least since yesterday. The World Cup is on in the cafeteria and I can hear yells, but I have no energy left to go watch.

I have attached some random pictures of our day. I will try to load the rest of them, along with the Tour de France pictures up onto Facebook.