Geneva Part III

We were happy that Saturday morning was not quite as windy.  However, we lost the clear blue sky and it started snowing a little.  This was our last day in Geneva.  We spent some time at the apartment looking at the pictures from the trip to Africa Denise and Jean-Michel took for their honeymoon.  They went to Morocco, Ghana and Cameroon for about three weeks.  Their adventures and pictures were amazing.
We decided to take the tram out to the end of the line and see CERN, which is where the big particle super collider is located.  

Kate, Denise and Jean-Michel on the Tram

There is a little museum there to explain what they do at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.  It is in this large wooden globe, called the Globe of Science and Innovation, which was built for the Swiss National Exhibition Expo in 2002. It was disassembled and rebuilt on the CERN site in 2004.  

Kate, Denise and Jean-Michel

The museum interior was dimly lit and symbolized the interior of an atom.  We learned there that it was CERN scientists who created and named the world wide web in 1990 in order to share information between CERN scientists.  We saw a computer server and the proposal Tim Berners-Lee wrote in 1989 about sharing information over the internet using hypertext.

Museum Display about the Big Bang

Kelly Listening in an Egg Chair

Kate Reading a Display

The underground super collider on the Swiss-France border took 10 years to build and has a circumference of 17 miles.  We learned about particle physics, the big bang and matter and anti-matter.  It was all a bit overwhelming!

We headed back on the tram to downtown Geneva to eat lunch at Manor, the big department store.  Manor had a large, upscale cafeteria with lots of good food.  It was 2:30 and the place was still packed!  I got a Pad Thai with shrimp and chocolate mousse for dessert.  Kelly didn't read the right sign for his lunch-he ended up with some kind of a stuffed pizza.  What he didn't realize was that it was filled with pizza sauce and tuna!  Kelly is not a tuna fan.  Kate shared her broccoli with him and her two desserts-flan and chocolate mousse.

Next we headed to the bottom floor which is a large grocery store.  It had a huge section devoted to Swiss chocolate.  We chose a few bars and Jean-Michel bought us a box of Favarger chocolates.  He said when he was a child he walked past the Favarger factory every day on his way to school.  Kate wanted more of the Ragusa chocolates that we had had after lunch the day before that are filled with praline.  I of course went for the Cailler with hazelnuts.

Swiss Chocolate

Denise and I went to the other side of the store to find sweetened condensed milk.  I would like to make my cheesecake while we are in Paris.  It requires cream cheese, which I have never been able to get in Paris until this trip.  I found Philadelphia Brand cream cheese at the Monoprix when we first arrived.  But sweetened condensed milk was proving elusive.  Denise had found it in Geneva, and I was determined to take some back to Paris.  We looked in the canned baking goods aisle but no luck.  A clerk told us to look over by the fresh milk.  That sounded a bit strange but we followed her directions and still could not find it.  We asked another worker and he pointed right behind us to bright blue tubes of sweetened condensed milk.  No wonder we couldn't find it-we were looking for cans!

Yes, it actually says "sweetened condensed whole milk" right there in French!

We hurried back to the apartment for our luggage and headed for the Geneva train station.  It was hard to say goodbye to Denise and Jean-Michel.  They are such a cute couple and they showed us a really good time in Geneva.  We would have loved to have spent more time with them exploring-maybe next time the weather will be a little warmer!