Buckley's Tourist Trails: Part one

We had our first visitor staying with us from Thursday to Tuesday, and on Friday we headed into Geneva so I could show her the sights. I'll be honest: I hadn't done my research. My few visits into the city so far have all ended in coffee shops, and we've been a bit lazy about seeing the sights since we moved here. Fortunately, we had a beautiful crisp winter's day, so the city did most of the work for me.

First up, we took a walk along the lake towards the Bain des Paquis, from where you get a beautiful view of the lake, the city and the snow-capped mountains in the distance. There were swans-a-swimming, boats-a-rocking and even a very brave swimmer who launched into the freezing cold lake in nothing but his speedos. A lovely cafe for that obligatory coffee stop completes the idyll. In the summer, I'm told the jetty is crowded with swimmers and bathers making the most of the crystal-clear water, and the rare chance to get something for free in Geneva.

The harbour from the Bain des Paquis

The lighthouse at the end of the jetty

From there we walked up to Geneva's old town, which surrounds the cathedral and overlooks the modern city below. Along the way, Nikki asked things like: 'What's that monument?' and 'Where's the famous jet d'Eau'?' To which I shrugged unhelpfully and sheepishly proffered my little Thomas Cook guidebook. (There isn't a Time Out guide to Geneva, for some inexplicable reason, and I can't help feeling that the Thomas Cook guidebook is a little biased - everything is wonderful, beautiful, amazing, with absolutely no hint that you'll have to pay a fortune to enjoy it all. The 'cheap' restaurants they recommend start from 50 CHF for a meal for one.) As it turned out, I wasn't being entirely thick: the jet d'Eau wasn't doing its thing that day, so it wasn't that I had entirely failed to see the 450-foot high fountain of water.

After lugging my increasingly large bulk up the hill to the old town, we stopped for more sustenance at one of the many cafes on the pretty leafy square. Although it is a beautiful part of the city, so different to the gleaming boutiques and grand hotels elsewhere, it takes all of five minutes to walk around the old town and unless you want to buy expensive art or equally expensive chocolate, there's not a lot to see beyond the main square.

After lunch we met up with another friend and popped into the cathedral. Very much like Durham Cathedral, although not nearly as big, it is quite a sparse and unadorned building, but the real intrigue lies below. Recent excavations revealed the remains of three - yes, three - former cathedrals buried beneath the current building, dating back as far as the Roman Empire. And what remains is remarkably intact: in this huge underground labyrinth you can still see the extraordinary mosaics covering the floor of the Bishop's reception room, see the buried skeleton of an Allobrogian chieftan, around whom the first churches were originally built, and clearly discern the different layers of building materials that were laid down as the buildings morphed over the centuries. The only disappointment for me was that they didn't actually explain why these former buildings were buried by the current one...

Sadly, the weather turned for the worse at the weekend, and non-stop torrential rain rather limited our tourist options, so on Saturday afternoon we went along to Carouge - a suburb of Geneva filled with independent craft shops and cute cafes. It used to belong to the King of Sardinia, and the Mediterranean feel survives in the colourful shop fronts and narrow streets. Although we were too late for the market which takes place every Saturday morning, we stopped at a patisserie (of course) for a late lunch and Andy made a bee-line for the only climbing shop in Geneva (until this point I expect you were wondering how I managed to drag him along).

Sunday took us to Luzern to hook up with an old school friend. Beneath the pouring rain and the mist, it was still clear that it's a stunningly beautiful place, although I'm afraid my photos don't do justice to it. Unlike Geneva where the mountains are visible in the distance, in Luzern the mountains tower over the town, and being in the German region of the country, the buildings are more reminiscent of the chocolate-box style towns in southern Germany than the grandiosity of the Genevan banking districts.

Looking across the lake as it cuts through Luzern

Thanks to the rain, we saw a lot more of the inside of cafes than we did of the town itself, but this did give me the chance to have a go at understanding the bizarre Swiss-German dialect they use here. As a semi-decent German speaker, I was looking forward to impressing Nikki with my multi-lingual skills, but I have to say I was flummoxed. They could understand me fine, but I haven't a clue what they were saying. It was unlike any kind of German I've ever heard before, and apparently it's only spoken and not written down. Nikki was seriously unimpressed with the fact that a single country - and not even a big one at that - should be so divided linguistically and culturally, and suggested that Switzerland should just give the French bit back to France, the German bit back to Germany and the Italian bit back to Italy. Surely a popular suggestion with the Swiss, no? It is a slightly bizarre set-up for a major European country, one in which you are driving along the motorway and the road exit signs change suddenly from 'Sortie' to 'Ausgang' without any warning. I'm told the Swiss call this dividing line the Röstigraben, which translates literally as the 'rösti ditch'. In other words, the Swiss divide their country according to the way they cook their potatoes. Seems like a sensible geographical policy to me.