Quality Bonding Time on Both Sides of the Lake

The next day was Friday, which we had off for Victory Day, the end of World War II. Leo and I decided to do something, since Monday begins three weeks of finals for him, so we were trying to do something relaxing, the calm before the storm so to speak. It started out a little rough, almost a little reminiscent of our trip to Paris back in January. We were headed to Lausanne and Evian, and I had a Eurorail pass and didn’t need to buy a ticket, and I also had credit with the train company so Leo wouldn’t need to buy his either. We went to the train office to redeem the credit, and the tickets were like 5 francs less than the credit I had. The lady made a big deal about it and said, oh well you can’t use the credit because we can’t give you the credit. We tried to explain that it wasn’t the end of the world for us if we lost the five francs, at least we could use the credit and get the ticket for free. But she told us the computer wouldn’t understand it and we either had to buy something that was more expensive than the credit and pay the difference or not use it at all. Obviously, because of the time we had and our planning, we didn’t want to go anywhere else, we wanted to go where we’d planned. So then we thought well maybe if we buy first class tickets that will make the difference and be enough to use the credit. But if we’d done that, my pass wasn’t valid for first class, only second. SOooooo, we eventually ended up just buying the other ticket, and saving the credit for another time. Luckily the tickets were really cheap.

We finally made it on the train and to the nice lakeside town of Lausanne. We’d both already been there, but it’s such a pretty town and neither of us had explored it much, so we decided it was worth a second visit. We wandered through Old Town and up towards the cathedral where there was a great view of the city. It was there that I pulled out the bubbles. Upon seeing them, Leo kind of groaned and rolled his eyes at how ‘lame’ it was, but after watching me for a few minutes blowing my bubbles and having fun, he broke down and asked to blow some too. Bubbles are hard to resist. After that, with the sun shining down on us and us being tired, we found a small park with a nice patch of grass and decided we’d lay down, just for a minute.

An hour and a half later, we woke up to the sound of the ferry we were going to take blowing its horn as it pulled into dock. The little town of Evian is directly across the lake from Lausanne, so we took a short boat ride across to get there, which was quite nice. Other than the fact that the brand name water is made there, Evian didn’t really have a whole lot to offer. But it was alright, we were not feeling touristy at all and just walked the path along the lake and enjoyed watching the storm clouds gathering. There was a 70 % chance of rain that day, but luckily we managed to avoid it the entire time. We didn’t time things great though because by the time we got off the ferry and were starving, it was three o’clock and everything was closing after its lunch hours. So we just got a little snack to hold us over and decided to have a nicer dinner later. We took the train back to Geneva and made our way to a nice little Thai restaurant which was sooo good, especially considering how hungry we were. It was then the end of our day together and we parted ways; nothing terribly exciting, but we are both quite busy people and it was so good to have a mellow, relaxing day and just spend time together knowing the end of the year would be coming all too soon.