Old Town

If you stay in a hotel in Geneva, you're entitled to a free ticket for the public transport system in zone ten of Geneva. The Geneva public transport system is all one entity, so you can use your ticket on the buses, trams, train and the boats across the lake (mouettes). It seems like a pretty good deal.

Today, we made use of our tickets and caught the first mouette to the Old Town. The boat passed the Jet d'Eau, a huge fountain in the lake, which we seemed to have become enamoured by. We aimed to have le dejeuner in a vegan burger bar in the Old Town. But first, le petit dejeuner in a boulangerie, where I used my recently learnt French to acquire us a pain au chocolat and a coffee each.

After that, we looked for the burger place to see when it was open: not till later, so we went for a wander round.

When I wrote my PhD thesis, I dissed morphemes, and with good reason: they're flawed. Ferdinand de Saussure invented what he called the sign: the signifier (e.g. a string of sounds such as a word) paired with the signified (i.e. the meaning of the signifier). For example, cat is represented as, using my thesis's formatting, [/kat/: '(domesticated) feline animal'].

The study of words is called morphology. Some morphologists went too far in assigning meanings to strings of sounds, and so created an overly complex system that has too many flaws and exceptions, and can't model real language adequately. Other morphologists took a step back and did things better. My thesis does things even betterer. Saussure has a lot to answer for!

The relevance of this much-shortened diatribe is that we saw a plaque dedicated to Ferdinand de Saussure on the wall of a building in Rue de la Cité (see extra 1). My phone translates the inscription as:

'We can therefore conceive a science that studies the life of signs within social life.
'We will call it semiology.'
General linguistics courses

Ferdinand de Saussure
(Geneva 1857 - Vufflens 1913)

Look up semiology if you want to know more.


We saw a plaque to another de Saussure, apparently unrelated, this one called Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, who had been very interested in Mont Blanc and Chamonix, where we've just been and saw no sign of. The science museum we went to yesterday had a whole display about him and his trips along Chamonix and up and down the Alps and whatnot.

The Old Town is very steep, with some steep steps, but nothing as steep as the double-steep steps of the Hadrian's Wall Path.

It started raining, so we took shelter in a café–bar, where we had to sit outside (under umbrellas) to have only a drink and where we were given the bill straight away, so as not to invite a second drink.

We also took shelter from the rain in the cathedral, St Peter's, which might have been Catholic once, but very much isn't now.

In another café–bar, we were seated inside, but were promptly ushered outside again when it became clear we only wanted a drink. The drinks came again with the bill. When I went inside to pay, the lady picked up the card reader machine, but it wouldn't work. She plugged it in, but it still wouldn't work. She unplugged something or other, and took the whole computer system out.

There was a lot of flapping about, a lot of discussion, a lot of standing around. Meanwhile, there was no explanation or apology given to me. Other people were dragged into it, but still nothing useful or helpful happened.

After a week or two, a lad approached me and told me, in English, that I'd have to pay in cash. Alas, I didn't have any Swiss francs; I only had euros. Ah, mais, oui, they take euros. Thankfully, I hadn't spent all of them in Chamonix. They gave me my change in Swiss francs.

We had lunch in the burger place: weird, but nice enough. The crispy fried mushrooms, a best-seller, were the best thing. I'd eat a lot of those given half the chance.

Wandering up to the lake, we noticed a pier that led out into the lake, all the way out to the Jet d'Eau. I walked along it, towing Mr Pandammonium in my wake. The further we got to the Jet, the more the spray and the wind sprayed and blew us. Mr Pandammonium was less than impressed, but I wanted to go as far as possible – to the barrier between us and the base of the fountain. We were quite bedraggled looking by the time we emerged (see extras 2 and 3), and bumped into Mr Pandammonium's boss!

We walked up the lake to the boat stop where we'd have the longest boat ride back to our side of the lake. It wasn't due for a while, so we went back to a café–bar type thing, where our beer again came with the bill. The sparrows were bold here (see extra 4) as they'd been in Chamonix.