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Grenoble and Geneva

Grenoble – Grenoble was the lamest place we have been so far. We had no reason for going there other than the fact that we wanted to see Florence and Geneva, and this town connected the two. We got there outrageously early in the morning – 3:30 AM, an hour earlier than expected. It had rained that night, and since Grenoble is in the Alps, it was freezing, especially after the heat of Florence. The train station didn’t open until 4:15 AM, and we had nowhere to go. We saw a sign for our hotel (very lucky, since our booking confirmation didn’t give directions) and we went there to see if they knew of any place that was open. The guy at the desk told us nothing was open and offered us a room for 48 euro, which was stupid because it was only 7 hours away from check-in. We turned him down, and walked up and down the streets of Grenoble until 4AM, when a local bread shop opened. We bought two croissants (fresh out of the oven!) and went to the bus station. There we bought a hot chocolate and sat freezing in the open-air lobby for about 45 minutes until they opened up the waiting room. We sat there for 4 hours. I fell asleep in a chair, and Alex read. We finally got sick of it and went to the hotel to drop off our luggage and then to seek out an Internet café. This took a surprisingly long time. The guy at the hotel told us where there was supposedly a café, but it didn’t exist. We stumbled on another one ourselves, but it didn’t open, even though it was supposed to be. We ran into another lady waiting for the same café to open, and she told us (in very bad English/French mix) that she knew where another one was, but we would have to take the tram. This was out of the question because we had no bus passes. So we walked around more until we eventually found this place for video game nerds that had wireless internet that the gamers used for playing on-line video games.
While we were there, Alex got an email saying that the Daily (student newspaper in MN) wanted to interview him that day or tomorrow. Since we knew we would be on the bus Wednesday evening, he decided to do the interview that day at 7pm. He wanted to do some research beforehand, so we decided that we would go back to the hotel, take a nap, and then he would do research and the interview while I hung out in the hotel room. He left around 4, leaving me alone to read, shower, and gather up my stuff to do laundry, which we really needed to do later.
I took a walk around 7:15 thinking that I might go grab something to eat and then catch him at the end of his interview. I looked at the Wi-Fi zone that he was supposed to be at, but he wasn’t there, so I just went back to the hotel because I didn’t think he could get it without me there, since I had the key. This turned out to be a bad choice, because he didn’t get home until past 9PM because the place he went was so far away.
We went and grabbed food at a little Vietnamese place (Pekinese pork for me; it was pretty good) and went home. It was so late by then, and Alex was so tired from the interview, that we decided not to run, and we just went to bed.
The next morning we got up late, since we had decided to run in Geneva later that day, and went to do our laundry at a Laundromat nearby. It was so expensive! It cost 6.20 euro to do a large load of laundry (17 kg washing machine) and 4 euro for 40 minutes of drying time, which didn’t even get all of our clothes perfectly dry. While we waited for our laundry to get done, we picked up some candy from the grocery store, got me a croissant for breakfast, packed up our stuff, and checked out of the hotel.
Then the adventure of the day began. We went to the bus station right when it opened, at 10 AM, to buy our tickets to Geneva. We hadn’t had time the day before because of Alex’s interview. We found out that the bus was full, and the next one didn’t leave until Sunday! We had no idea what we were going to do. We decided to wait and see if someone didn’t show up for the bus. After trying to communicate with the bus drivers, who didn’t understand us because they only spoke German, we managed to one of them to come inside and speak with the guy at the counter. There were enough empty seats for us to get on. In fact, once we got on, the bus wasn’t even close to full, and it never was along the entire trip!
The other really lame part of this was because Grenoble wasn’t on the list of cities covered by the Eurolines pass, we had to pay 25 euro each to go to Geneva. This was so lame because I know that Grenoble was on the list when we planned our trip! At least that lady back in Florence helped us out by allowing us to say we were going to Lyon instead of Grenoble, because that ticket would have been really expensive.
The bus ride was only supposed to take 3 and a half hours, from 11 AM until 2:30 PM. However, the bus driver was really slow and took really long breaks at every single stop. Then we were stopped at the border by the border patrol. They have really strict regulations about who can come into Switzerland since it’s a neutral country, so they had to check the passports of every single person on the bus (which was a lot more full, although not completely, by this time). There were problems with a few people’s passports, so the process that was supposed to take a half hour took over an hour. We didn’t get into Geneva until about 5PM, which put doing anything that day pretty much out of the question.

Geneva – So after a really stressful day, things just went from bad to worse once we arrived in Geneva. We found out the bus that we wanted to take the next afternoon to Vienna only had one seat available. I was starting to hate Eurolines because they won’t let you book in advance with the pass, so there was nothing we could do about making sure we got a seat. The guy tried to make a phone call to the Eurolines office in Vienna, but they didn’t answer, so he left a message and told us to wait until they called back. Alex took some swiss francs out of a cash machine and bought us a brat from a street vendor. To our astonishment, the brat cost 8 francs, and the exchange rate from dollars to swiss francs is 1 to 1.06. This place was even more expensive than London or Paris!
So they didn’t call back for an hour and half, and they didn’t even give any conclusive information. They said that we would just have to come back tomorrow at 1:30 and see if people didn’t show up. He also told us we would have to pay 15 francs each as a tax for the tickets, which was ridiculous: we’d never paid more than a 5 euro tax. Plus his whole exchange was really confusing because the man at the counter spoke to us in a mix of English, German, and French, and it was almost impossible to understand him. He gave us directions to our hostel too, but we had to ask someone in a hotel along the way because we had no idea what he was saying.
So we got to our hostel, which turned out to be really nice, similar to the Stayokay. Thank god, because we were both in terrible moods by this time. They did, however, charge us 6 swiss francs each extra because we weren’t members of some international hostelling association, which just made us even angrier. We did get a good deal on the internet though; 10 francs for 4 hours. We put our luggage away and went to go find something to eat.
We ended up eating a Chinese restaurant, and for a diet coke, a pot of tea, sweet and sour pork, and chicken with pepper and black beans, we paid over 40 dollars. We were supposed to run soon after we ate, but we were so upset and depressed from our bad day (I actually cried during dinner because I was upset about the day and also missed everyone back at home) that we decided to download Just Friends using our wireless internet and watch it before we went running.
Watching the movie, buying some really good hot chocolate (although it was 1.50 franc for a small cup), and going on the internet for a while helped to cheer me up a bit, and we were in a good enough mood to go running around 9:30 that night. As soon as we walked downstairs from our room though, we discovered it was pouring rain and freezing outside. We knew we’d get sick running in that kind of cold, so we had to call it a night. I was really pissed because I hadn’t been running since Marseilles and I really wanted to burn off some steam. I was in such a bad mood that I just decided to read for a while and go to bed. Alex bought me a candy bar (Bounty – coconut and milk chocolate – which I had been wanting to try for a long time) and some fizzy apple juice to make me feel better, which helped a bit. He went downstairs while I read to go look up things to do the next day, and I fell asleep reading before he even came back upstairs.
The next day (today) we woke up early, around 8AM, for the free breakfast and a run. I actually woke up with my voice gone and really congested, which didn’t surprise me because I guessed I was getting sick in Florence. I was going to sleep in, but I decided against it because I wanted to have breakfast. I figured I could always quit the run early if I didn’t feel good.
The day started great with that breakfast. It was the first real breakfast I’d had on this entire trip. We got blueberry or plain yogurt, granola or cornflakes, as much toast, jam, and butter as you wanted, orange juice, and coffee or hot chocolate. After starting the day with granola bars or croissants or even nothing at all, it felt so good to start the day with a full stomach.
We were supposed to go for a five mile run, but we had to cut it short because we had to check out by ten. We went three miles at an 8 minute mile pace. I think we went so fast because we hadn’t run in so long, and we had so much pent up energy. The air was so clean up in the Alps, but you had to breathe harder because of the altitude. I felt better after the run since the fresh air loosened up my sinuses.
We checked our emails back at the hostel, and we found out that Alex got the job at the Daily! He is so excited, even though it’s only 10 hours a week and pays around 5 dollars an hour (which they can do legally, since he’s an intern). He will get some good clips this summer though, and he should be a shoo-in as an intern during the school year. So it looks like he will be living at the frat this summer and working at the Daily, Starbucks, and American Eagle.
After showering up and checking out, we went on a short tour of all the cool, free things to see in Geneva since the place was so expensive! We walked along Lake Geneva, which is a beautiful dark blue and very clean and clear. We saw the famous geyser in the lake that isn’t really a geyser; it’s just some part of a water cleaning plant that they made into a geyser for no reason at all except that it would look cool. We saw a monument to this guy who donated all his money to Geneva when he died with the one condition that they build a monument to him that replicated a famous monument in Rome. We walked through the English gardens and saw the flower clock, which has the largest second hand in the world. We then saw the longest bench in the world, which is 1200 meters long. And of course, we admired the Alps, which surround the city and are absolutely beautiful. We also admired Swiss Army knives, chocolates, and watches along the way. We did end up buying some Swiss chocolate ourselves, but, as has been our tradition lately, we bought it from a grocery store. We got three kinds: dark, Swiss milk, and milk with rice crisp in it.
By this time, we had to go back to the bus, so we picked up our luggage and went to the bus station. We bought a sausage and a chicken sandwich from that stand again for lunch, and by the time we were done eating, the bus came. We found out the reason why the seats ran out so early for the bus: it was a “mini-bus,” aka a van. Luckily, there was enough room for us (there were actually empty seats the whole way). The bus driver was really nice, even though he only spoke German. He took really long breaks at the stops, but that was OK, because the bus was so cramped and stuffy that it was nice to get a long chance to stretch your legs in the fresh air.
Luckily, we got to get off the mini-bus in Zurich and got a regular bus on our way to Vienna. I didn’t get to sit next to Alex, which sucked. We got our passports checked when we left the country, and they took Alex’s. They were driving away before he got it back, and he freaked out. He ran up to the front to tell them to wait, but the bus drivers had the passports, so it was kind of funny. We were both very hungry on this trip, but we didn’t stop to get food until almost one in the morning. Alex and I split a sandwich and I finally got to try a Magnum ice cream bar, which was delicious. I tried to sleep after that, but it was impossible because I couldn’t rest my head on anyone’s shoulder. We didn’t get to Vienna until 6:20 AM.