I heart Washington state smoking laws!

We're in Geneva, Switzerland today. I’d never imagined how different two places in the same tiny country could be until we left German Switzerland and came to French Switzerland…the language is different, (which is proving a hard adjustment after a couple weeks of trying to figure out German), the buildings are different; the culture is different; it‘s just hard to remember we‘re still in Switzerland!
We took a late morning train from Interlaken and it was only a little over 2 ½ hours to get here. The Lake Geneva region is beautiful as we passed through it on the train…vineyards sloping down to the blue lake and it looks like some low mountains on the other side. Very pretty. One of Switzerland’s guidebooks called it the Riviera of Switzerland :) . Geneva is a cool city…lots of twisting little streets and stairways, a big, old city wall, lots and lots of “green space.” It was really a pain when we were trying to navigate it, but once we’d found what we needed to find and just started to explore and wander, it grew on me :). Our goal here is to see the Reformation-related sights in town and we found most of them this afternoon before dinner. We started with the Plainpalais Cemetery because it’s just across the street from our hotel. It’s a little cemetery that’s old but still pretty empty…it’s now reserved for city and state figures, but John Calvin was buried there in 1564, a very plain grave in a cemetery of fairly elaborate headstones. We kind of stumbled upon the Reformation Monument or Mur des Reformateurs in Bastian Park. It features four huge statues of the major figures in Geneva’s Reformation history…Guillaume Farel, John Calvin, Theodore de Beze and John Knox. The rest of the wall features prominent figures in the Reformation history of the other countries where Calvin’s teachings were spread, as well as telling the story of the Reformation in relief carvings…pretty cool, but only partially in English so we figured out what we could and decided we would have benefited greatly from some translation :). Next we found the Auditoire de Calvin…a tiny little church dwarfed by the St. Pierre Cathedral next door where John Calvin would teach daily at 7 am for anyone who wanted to attend before they started their work day! He did that for two years until his death and then other reformers, including John Knox, continued the tradition. The Auditoire also became a refuge and worship center for Reformation-related religious refugees in the early years, nursing an international church body. Today, the building hosts Scottish, Dutch and Italian congregations in Geneva. We’re planning on attending the Presbyterian Church of Scotland service there tomorrow morning and are really looking forward to that. A nice gentleman at the Auditoire directed us to the Reformation Museum which wasn’t on any of our maps, but by that time they were closing so we plan to see that tomorrow.
Instead, we wandered down to the lakefront, saw Geneva’s famous flower clock (all decked out for the Euro-Cup), and the Jet d’eau, a fountain out in the lake that shoots a jet of water into the air (yeah, that translates “jet of water,” romantic name, eh?) By that time, we were ready for dinner, so we found a restaurant near Geneva’s Fanzone (yep, the Euro-cup is here too!) and watched the Spain vs. Sweden game on the big screen while we ate. We would have stayed for the Greece vs. Russia game because the restaurant had a nice “local hangout” feel, but it was also very smoky! We can’t wait to get back to Washington state smoking laws! Now we’re trying to pack for our night train tomorrow, listening to Spanish fans celebrating in the streets below, and catching up on pictures and internet. There's two new blogs for me today if you're trying to keep up :). Thanks for reading, it's fun sharing this with all of you!