By Athena Lucero
During my visit to Geneva, Switzerland, on the southwestern tip of Lake Geneva, I would not be strolling the luxury shopping promenades, racing through the city's outstanding art museums or sunbathing at Jetee des Paquis, the popular beach peninsula on the lake.
Geneva, the City of Peace, is the capital of canton Geneva and is the hub of dozens of world headquarters — the International Red Cross, the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the European headquarters of the United Nations at Geneva (UNOG) to name a few.
Visitors can tour some of these headquarters, so I strayed off the beaten path to discover art exhibits of a different kind, stimulate my brain cells and for a change of pace detour through a village built by the king of Sardinia.
My local guide, Cylia Bart, and I navigated the busy streets of Switzerland's second most populous city — with more than 196,000 inhabitants — until we reached the Palais des Nations, home to the UNOG (the United Nations' world headquarters is in New York City). Flags representing its 193 member states lined the Allee des Nations leading up to the palais.
The Palais des Nations was built in 1929 for the League of Nations, which was formed after World War I. It was replaced by the United Nations in 1945 after World War II and today continues the mission to develop international peace and security in partnership with the world community.
In front of the Allee des Nations I stopped in awe of the "Broken Chair," a monument that towers over traffic and passersby.
"One leg is broken," Bart explained, "a reminder of the devastation caused by land mines."
The wooden sculpture was a project of Handicap International in 1997 in support of the international treaty banning cluster bombs.
At the entrance to the UNOG the line of guests waiting for guided tours moved slowly through the security check. But patience had its rewards.
The general tour includes visits to the Assembly Hall, the Council Chambers (where many historic negotiations have taken place), the Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations Room, and the Salle des Pas Perdus with a view of the "Celestial Sphere" in Ariana Park. Also known as the "Armillary Sphere" — designed with 85 gilded constellations and 840 stars in silver — it was donated by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation to the League of Nations in 1939. It's the most well-known sculpture here, and it symbolizes Geneva as the center of dialogue and peace.
Thematic tours are also offered at UNOG (reservations required): art, flora and the history of Ariana Park on which the complex is built; architecture and construction of the Palais des Nations; and a combination of the general tour and the League of Nations tour inside the library, which was donated by John D. Rockefeller Jr.
Ariana Park and its Botanical Garden, one of Geneva's most prestigious parks, is renowned for its plant biodiversity. Once privately owned by a Swiss family, the 114 acres were bequeathed to the city of Geneva in 1890. The city offered the park for the building of the Palais des Nations and for use by the United Nations "as long as the U.N. exists."
Strutting peacocks shared the walkways with us around the park, a horticultural oasis with more than 800 species of plants and 100-year-old trees from around the world. And maintaining the park and buildings is a model for environmental responsibility: water for air conditioning comes from Lake Geneva, solar panels and lamps as well as motion sensors are used for energy-efficient lighting - and noisy leaf blowers are unheard of because herds of sheep mow the lawns.
Sculptures placed around the park are gifts that have been donated through the decades by member states, private sponsors and artists. Other gifts include precious paintings and exquisite art pieces that are showcased inside the Palais des Nations.
By the end of this inspiring tour there was still time to catch the tram to Carouge to let our hair hang down in the "Greenwich Village" of Geneva.
The short story is that Geneva was once part of Savoy, until it gained independence in the early 1600s. A feisty King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia (a descendant of the dukes of Savoy) decided to commission Italian architects to build the Royal City of Carouge to rival powerful Geneva across the River Arve. That is, until the French Revolution changed things around — Carouge had become the capital of the Department of Mont Blanc and by 1815 was annexed to the canton of Geneva.
Today the Mediterranean village is a national landmark recognized for its architecture and design of passageways, courtyards and hidden gardens.
At the Place du Marche we lunched on panini next to the fountain while we took in views of the church and Italianate buildings that have given way to the bohemian atmosphere so embraced by the locals. Artisan shops, antique stores, cafes, a cinema, night clubs and its famous Saturday open market that has been welcoming shoppers for 300 years have continued Carouge's everlasting joie de vivre.
Fast-forward to the future. I wondered what the king of Sardinia would think of CERN's 16.5-mile-long Large Hadron Collider ring that circles underneath the Swiss-French border at 330 feet below ground. Hopefully he'd be as impressed as I was after touring the world's largest research laboratory that's only a half-hour train ride from Geneva.
CERN — Conseil European Pour la Recherche Nucleaire in French — was formed in September 1954 by an international group of scientists with the common goal of understanding the physical universe and finding answers. How did the universe come to be? Did the Big Bang really happen? What is the origin of mass? Do other dimensions exist?
In the depths of the Large Hadron Collider, high-energy particle collisions take place while four main experiments at various points in the tunnel convert this raw data into digital information so that scientists can study energy, matter, time and space.
One of the experiments is the ATLAS detector that involves more than 3,000 scientists from 37 countries, including over 700 physicists, engineers and graduate students representing American universities and national laboratories. At the ATLAS visitor center guests can observe (through a glass wall) real-time activity inside the ATLAS Control Room.
And inside the iconic Globe of Science and Innovation — its shape represents Earth — even the most non-scientific-inclined guest will have a blast watching the Big Bang theory and the workings of the LHC come alive.
Sarah Charley, an American intern from Fermilab, was our tour guide.
"It's a lot like a big university campus here," she said. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt as we followed her around the grounds and finally through a labyrinth of corridors looking for the office of Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist from Great Britain. He and his international colleagues at CERN were desperate to find a better way to share scientific data between countries. Then in 1989 he invented a way to connect millions of computers using the Internet. The World Wide Web was born - and forever changed the way information is shared around the world.
WHEN YOU GO
Tourism Switzerland: www.myswitzerland.com
Swissair: www.swiss.com
Swiss Travel Pass: www.swisstravelsystem.com.This provides unlimited travel on trains, buses and boats as well as free entry to 480 museums, but it must be purchased before leaving United States.
Geneva Tourism: www.geneve-tourisme.ch
Grand Hotel Kempinski: www.kempinski.com/geneva
United Nations at Geneva: www.unog.ch
CERN: www.cern.ch
Athena Lucero is a freelance writer. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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