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Europe 2024: Gloomy castle
posted : Wednesday, December 25, 2024
Day 3 - and it’s time to pack up and go again.
Plan was to spend the morning in Geneva and head off to Montreux after lunch. While doing trip planning I contemplated leaving early and spending half a day at Lausanne instead, leaving enough day light to explore Montreux in the afternoon. But it all felt a bit rushed, and I really only had one attraction I wanted to visit in Lausanne which is the Olympics Museum, but it seemed a bit out of the way from city centre and we didn’t have transport card in Lausanne. In the end we just stuck with Geneva in the morning and I left a couple of places to visit in the morning. But we packed up and checked out first thing in the morning, leaving luggage at the reception. Plan was to search for a cafe near the train station for breakfast, google didn’t turn up any interesting results so we ended up at a random place inside the station, before catching a bus on the back entrance of the station to our first stop of the day.  View from our room. Despite being quite close to street level, noise isolation was good and we didn’t hear much.  Cutting through Geneva station  Stopping by Migros to marvel at their selection and do a bit of lunch planning  Breakfast at this very generically named “Coffee and Friends” - introduced to a renverse which is basically a dirty - milk first followed by espresso shot  Bus to our first stop. It’s where we witnessed someone trying to game the PT ticket integrity system, but was super defiant about it and got into a standoff with police even - pity we never found out the conclusion  The broken chair  UN office at Geneva. Switzerland is traditionally a politically neutral country so it made sense to have offices like this and other governing bodies  Bye Geneva  Lunch during our 40 minute ride - courtesy of Migros. Remembered the potato dauphinoise to be really good.  Passing by Lausanne  Montreux station Headed straight to see if we could check in early, on paper hotel was one street away from the station but little did we realise said street is on lower ground so had to carry luggage down a flight of stairs hahah. And we got more than what we bargained for - scored a room upgrade for no apparent reason too heh.  Said flight of stairs  View from room, boo to the weather  Can’t see anything across the lake  Bear is not for us to bring home sadly. There’s a free tote bag though which came in very handy for our multiple supermarket runs throughout the trip  Place is called Mona Hotel! Room tour Agenda for the rest of the day was just Chateau de chillon, explore the town a bit, and dinner somewhere. We really are just making this up as we go heh.  Lounge at the lobby which provides drinks and free popcorn of all things  On the way out, loved the architecture of this hotel  Montreux’s version of the tourist card is called the Rivera card, which allows us to take PT for free and also discounts to attractions including our next one  The Chateau de Chillon  Entering the castle  We self guided without getting the audio guide - so what I gathered is that this used to be a wine making facility of sorts, there’s a poor prisoner in the dungeons, and above it is all the fancy castle rooms and halls and what not (fancy for that era anyway)  Won’t be spamming those castle pics though, feel like captioning will be an issue lol  One of the bridges within  So we bought one of their wines to try  Jetty outside the castle, nope we are not getting better weather like yesterday  Dropped off early to explore the town  Looking out to the lake  Along the lakeside promenade  Freddie Mercury lived here for a bit and it’s where he produced quite a number of his songs, and the town is proud of this. Jazz cafes is one of the recommended activities here but we neither had the time nor interest for it  Took a while but finally found a dinner place that looked decent, and it indeed turned out that way. Starter of tartare with grapefruit was refreshing  Remembered liking the pasta sauce but I can’t tell you what it is anymore  Pizza was decent too!  Place is called 1820 Urban Lounge and Restaurant,  Back to our room  Because dinner was actually quite early..there’s room for supper. Got this cheese platter from Coop in town, and paired it with wine and crackers which wasn’t the right kind but it’ll do. And that’s a wrap for Day 3… |
