Geneva

I recently went on a great weekend trip to Switzerland with my roommate, Brittany! I was looking forward to enjoying Switzerland's natural beauty, fondue, and chocolate, but I was apprehensive about overspending in an expensive country. I like to describe our trip as "reasonable splurging." We wanted to enjoy ourselves without completely breaking the bank.

Instead of a luxurious fondue cruise on Lake Geneva, we settled for fondue at a normal restaurant and this poorly photoshopped picture:

Instead of going to see a play, we watched a free light show at the university.

​Instead of staying at the Ritz Carlton, we stayed in a hostel and drank coffee at the Ritz's fancy lounge.

Instead of a gourmet chocolate train through the Alps, we bought cheap chocolate bars and ate them on our bus ride to a town in the French Alps.

You can see where I'm going with this. Our sacrifices were laughably minor, but I felt comfortable with the amount of money I spent. We also squeezed in a good amount of sightseeing for such a short trip. 

Day One

On the first day, we went to St. Pierre Cathedral, where John Calvin famously preached during the Protestant Reformation. The church is located in Old Town, which is so charming that it could be confused for a movie set. The inside of the church was nice, but the views of the city from the church's tower were the best part.

After our visit to the cathedral, we made a beeline to the lake in the center of town. After walking around for a while, we decided to stop somewhere for coffee. That's when the Ritz Carlton piqued our interest. We told ourselves we would just stop in for a second to check out the upscale décor. Five minutes later we were seated at the hotel lounge, waiting on our fancy coffee drinks. In our defense, those were the least expensive items on the menu. We even got free chocolate because we had to wait so long for our coffee. As the sun was setting, we made our way to the United Nations. We didn't take a tour, but we took pictures of the member countries' flags flying on the front lawn.

We decided it was about time for us to fill our stomachs with some Swiss fondue, and we walked to a nearby restaurant that had good Yelp reviews. The restaurant, Café de Soleil, was not the quaint fondue restaurant I had envisioned; yellow paint was peeling off the walls and the tables had a slight aura of uncleanliness. To our surprise, the restaurant was close to capacity, and we were lucky to be seated at all. My aesthetic concerns about the restaurant dissipated when I took my first bite of fondue-covered bread. Brittany and I spent 45 minutes in fondue heaven. When we were done, we waddled out of the restaurant and took a bus back to the center of town. There, we enjoyed the free light show projected onto the side of one of the university buildings. We ended our night with that because we had an early morning trip to Chamonix planned for the next day.

Day Two

As I mentioned before, we wanted to take a chocolate train through the Swiss Alps. Unsurprisingly, that was a cost prohibitive venture. However, we didn't want to go to Switzerland without seeing the Alps, so we took a two hour bus ride to Chamonix, a ski town in the French Alps. Chamonix has that unique duality of dazzlingly beautiful places. In person, it looks too perfect to be real; it has to be a picture. But, all the pictures I took that day don't do it justice. Taking a cable car to the top of a mountain was the most memorable part of the day. From there, we had a spectacular view of the tallest peak in Western Europe, Mont Blanc. The mountains were so magnificent from that vantage point that I was stunned into silence. We took an excessive amount of pictures, enjoyed hot chocolate and Toblerone, and just sat for a while enjoying our surroundings. 

I'm so glad we went on this last-minute trip to Switzerland. Geneva was a fun, relaxing city, and I will remember our perfect day in the Alps for the rest of my life!