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Rtw Day 15: Leaving Geneva

September 25, 2007 23:39 +0000  |  'Round-the-World Switzerland Travel 3

I'm just about to pack up my stuff and go to bed so I can be on an 11am train to Milan tomorrow. Geneva isn't really worth a longer stay and I certainly can't afford it anyway.

The thing you have to remember about Switzerland is that they're intentionally independent. Surrounded on all sides by countries united around a common currency and a common international political position, and Switzerland is perfectly happy to just be Switzerland.

The United Nations

As a result, this is the only leg of my trip where I have to worry about currency differences. Where everyone else uses the Euro (1€ = $1.42CAD), the Swiss use the Swiss Franc ($1CHF = $1.16CAD). So basically what prices you see, is what you pay... but what you see is a lot higher than usual. My less-than-impressive hotel has cost about $220CHF/night... not fun.

For the most part, Geneva is pretty ugly. As I mentioned earlier, it's loud, dirty and car-ridden. The cycling infrastructure is shit, but still better than what you might find in Canada (how sad is that?) and the transit system is kinda neat (though the doors are mean... I got caught in them twice in one trip).

It's not all bad though. I had some fabulous icecream from a local vendor and their chocolate is pretty good as well. Though stay away from the chocolate yogurt, that stuff is nasty.

The reason I came out to this place though was the UN. In nearly every sci-fi story out there, for some reason, the world courts and/or governments always seem to be hosted here, in this tiny Swiss town... I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

I took the guided UN tour and sat in the very room we see on TV where our world leaders speak. I walked the same halls walked by peace makers and peace keepers from dozens of generations. I saw where the League of Nations rose and fell and rose again as the United Nations. It's a hell of a thing, and well worth the shiny coins and coloured paper it cost me to come here.

As an aside, I should mention that all my pictures taken to date are now in my imager. You can follow the links from here to Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Berlin, Nuremberg, and Geneva or just go to the imager and look around.

UTF-8 Encoding

September 25, 2007 08:43 +0000  |  Blogger Geek Stuff 'Round-the-World Switzerland Travel 6

Pavel will appreciate this, but the rest of you might wanna read this anyway. I've added a single thing to my site that *should* fix the problem some of you have been running into when trying to post comments. For some reason, when some people tried to post a comment with a non-ASCII character in it (like curly quotes or non-English characters) the post would get truncated. I *think* I've fixt this by adding a charset definition to the HTTP headers. Apache will do this transparently when you add this to your VirtualHost.

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

So, don't necessarily go about trying to break my site by posting fake comments, but if you post something and it doesn't come through exactly as you intended, please email me what you sent and I'll try to figure out what broke.

Oh, and I'm in Geneva today. So far, it sucks. The town is small, noisy, dirty and kinda ugly. No snow, not much in the way of mountains, just cold. I'll be going up to the UN headquarters today as well as the Red Cross museum though. That should be interesting :-)