The Long Road to Lausanne

So far, this has been one of the smoothest international travels I've done.

One of my biggest concerns about getting to Switzerland was how Saori was going to fare. If, dear reader, you recall that Saori works saturday from 6 am to 10 pm saturday AND sunday, you can begin to understand the challenge of undertaking an international journey at 6 Am monday morning. Needless to say with the packing, Saori and I got less than three hours of sleep sunday night.

We caught a cab outside our apartment at 6 am, and somehow, we checked in and cleared TSA security before 6:30. So we lingered at the table inside terminal two, enjoying our bagel breakfast. It's been a long time since I was in there- its really a shame such a midcentruy modern classic airport terminal had to be sliced up and partitioned like it was. It's really disgusting to think about all the extra crap that's been shoved in there in since it was built in the early 50s. At any rate, our flight to Washington DC was not full and Saori was able to sleep a little bit on the 4 hour flight over.
In what sounded to me like "Washington Dullest Airport" we ate greasy subs and wandered over to our gate. We had about three hours of layover, so we changed some money to CHF, grabbed coffee, and played cards until it was time to board. Our flight less than 3/4 full, which was really nice since it allowed Saori and I to switch off sleeping laying full out on a row of 3 empty seats.

I dont know if its a recent thing, but United seems to have really amped up thier customer service. It was like going to a nice buisness hotel. Impersonal, but professional, polite, and accomodating. They still made you buy food on the flight to DC, but they were nice about it. I've been on flights where they pretty much whip the peanuts at your head and the stewardesses are engaging in a secret contest to win the coveted "most disgrunted employee" award.

The flight was less than 8 hours long, which in my book is the longest you ever really want to spend on a plane, and we landed in the early morning here in Geneva. Dad met us at the airport and we hopped on a local train to Lausanne.

Names here are confusing. Lausanne is pronounced like "luz ahn" and Luzan is pronounced like "Lucern". It doesn't help that every city in Switzerland has three different pronounciations, depending on the language being spoken.

The city is similar to other European cities I've been to- dense urban fabric, that European city smell of fumes and old cobblestone, centuries old buildings mixed in with euromodern glass and steel, pedestrians all in black, corner pharmacies with green neon crosses. One thing that sets Lausanne apart is its topography- its a city on a generous slope down to Lake Geneve, so the streets and buildings wind thier way uphill. The older architecture too, has a distinctive blend of Swiss, French, and Germanic Gothic.