Lausanne and Lake Geneva, Switzerland

For the past two days, Phillip and I have been in Lausanne, Switzerland, home of the Olympic headquarters and a beautiful city on Lake Geneva. Yesterday, we walked in the old city, up the hill from our hotel, and today we walked along Lake Geneva and visited the Olympic Museum, down the hill from our hotel. I say hill, but it is actually the side of the mountain. My guidebook described Lausanne as a "vertical city" and that is true... I found that Google maps for Lausanne are 2-D images for a 3-D city.

I took over 350 pictures during the past two days, so I'll just be captioning the pictures to describe our adventures. The Lausanne Cathedral with its stained glass and Lausanne cityscapes were yesterday. Lake Geneva, the Olympic Museum, and the Alps across Lake Geneva were today.

The stairs that were the one block "street" from the train station to our hotel. That's Phillip at the top, doing his Rocky Balboa impersonation.

Google maps told me to turn left here. It thought I was on the street below us.

We were on a sidewalk, not a bridge, when we took this picture.

Statue of William Tell. The story of him shooting the apple off his son's head to save their lives is a Swiss legend. 

Gargoyles on the Lausanne cathedral. I love these things! 

Stained glass of the cathedral. This one represents the consecration of the cathedral in 1275.

The cathedral became a protestant cathedral in 1536, during the Reformation. Most of the glass and artwork is a restoration done in the ealy 1900's, as the protestants covered and removed most of the original artwork. This portion, however, is original.

The cathedral's pipe organ was replaced in 2003 with a new one. These are its 7000 pipes, suspended over the church entry.

Another of the many stained glass windows

The outside of the cathedral had intricate work also

This is another "street" we used, this time downhill to get to our hotel from the old town.

Exit from a Metro station. The top of the station was also planted with greenery. This is a wall of plants.

Ouchy is the port neighborhood of Lausanne on Lake Geneva. We walked almost directly downhill from our hotel to reach this point.

We think this rotates to show wind direction for the many boats in the Ouchy harbor.

One of our many pictures of the Alps as we walked along the paved path that circles this part of Lake Geneva. Lake Geneva is the largest alpine lake in Europe, fed by the Rhone River.

The top of the Alp mountains are visible above the clouds in the distance.

The Olympic Museum is in Lausanne because the Olympic Committee headquarters were moved here from Paris during World War I. 

The Olympics were originally in Greece, starting sometime before 776 BC. Every four years, athletes would compete in Athens, believed to be part of the festivals and cult of Zeus at the time. The games were abolished by the Greek emperor in 393 AD because he thought they spread paganism. They weren't revived until a French baron, Pierre de Coubertin, was able to get them started again in 1896. 

In addition to the Olympic timeline and stories, the museum contained one of all the modern day Olympic torches, arranged in order in a display. 

Rooms of actual uniforms and equipment used by the athletes, labeled with the year, sport, and athlete.

Medals for each year were also on display. The Summer Olympic medals are required to be made a certain way, but no such restrictions are on the Winter Olympic medals, so some of them were unusual and intricate in design.

The museum had three floors and on the final floor, some of the displays were interactive and allowed the guests to test their balance and speed. The museum also displayed many of the posters, created by regular people, that were used for the Olympics. This was my favorite one.

After the Olympic Museum, we continued walking east, taking pictures of the Alps in the distance.

And sometimes, we'd sit and rest. We walked about four miles around Lake Geneva, just a fraction of its 45 mile length. We rode the train back to Lausanne when we'd walked as far as we wanted.

Lots of birds, ducks, and geese. A few people on our walk were feeding them bits of bread.

Frequently, small steams would feed into the lake and these streams would be full of diving ducks.

Phillip on the left. He's watching a dog swimming out after a stick that the lady threw for him. 

My main reason for walking east instead of west along Lake Geneva. These are the Lavaux Vineyard Terraces, a UNESCO World Heritage site. They stretch about 30 km on this side of the lake.  The vineyards trace back to the 11th century when Benedictine and Cistercian monastaries controlled the area. We didn't walk up the mountain to get a closer look, as this was the terminus of our walk. 

Our final picture of the Alps. We could actually see more mountains than when we had started. 

Tomorrow, we leave Lausanne in the morning and travel to Bern to spend the day. We catch a train in the evening from Bern to Basel where we will spend two nights before heading out of Switzerland to Germany on Friday.