Botanical Gardens, more Reformation and a papal mass

Woke up and felt the effects of all the travels plus the sky was overcast so I decided to start the morning with a stroll up the west side of Lake Geneva. As the clouds lifted and the sun appeared, I felt a bit better and more than an hour later, I realized I walked all the way up to the botanical gardens! The flowers were beautiful and they had a special exhibition on botanicals; different plants which should fix various maladies plus a section on plants which could be made into poisons! They also had a small section for animals which had a herd of some sort of central Asian deer which look like American deer but are the loudest animals I have ever heard! They looked like Bambi but brayed like donkeys and wagged their tails like they were nursing sheep!


The gardens with the backdrop of the lake and the mountains were lovely. I peaked briefly into Swiss science museum on the way back. I think my brother would have loved it but a good bit was well, too scientific for a Sunday vacation.






Headed back into the old town and decided to check out the religious museums. I also decided to work on my language skills so I requested the German audio tape. The Reformation museum had lots of fascinating artifacts on religion from the 16th century through to the current. Of course since I decided to listen to the lecture in German, I am not sure my actual knowledge of any details has improved all that much! The museum started with Martin Luther and included a 16th century English Bible. It also had a lot on John Calvin and John Knox, as well as a bit on Beze who was one of yesterday's giant figures I had never heard of. I am pretty sure he was a leader here in Switzerland after Calvin. There was an entire display of artifacts leading up to the St Bartholomew Day massacre under Catherine deMedici and her sons. I followed the detail of that display based on knowledge of Alexandre Dumas novels. There was another on Protestant 17th century writers. I was glad the German audio tape gave me a reason to skip that room!
The Mayflower was again prominently shown, along with information on how the city of Geneva really grew into its own as a sanctuary for other fleeing Reformers. Something like 200,000 French Huguenot's fled here. Makes you wonder why the Pilgrims fled to Massachsetts, this place is a heck of a lot closer and hardly as hostile as Massachesetts Bay was in the 1600's! The 19th century exhibit focused on all the charities which grew out of the reformed movement including the Red Cross and the international SPCA. The 20th century exhibition centered on men like Nazi martyer Dietrich Bonhoffer who I read in college so I found that interesting. Also, Billy Graham was prominently featured and they had a copy of the 1966 copy of Time with the headline "Is God Dead?". That was cool.
While summarizing this makes me realize I did understand some things, I decided to switch to English for the narrative and tour of archeological Geneva. Descending underground, I saw a tomb of an Alloboges chieftain (knew those five years of Latin were good for something - I can spell Alloboges and actually know they were one of the tribes Caesar fought!)








As we were one or two stories underground, you could see burial sites from before Christ as well as everything built on that same site since, baptism fonts from the 5 th century, the mosaic tiles of the bishops house from the 7 th century. There are some tops of Roman columns that have been recovered and the remaining shell of a huge building built slightly before Westminster Abbey was started. I am told what makes this site unique is that archeologists have been working on it for 30 years so the learning from this site is vast. The tour referenced a couple other old churches as the original site of a pre Christian burial, so I went looking for them and realized there was another free concert being offered tonight. This one was by a male group who sang a cappela-and sounded like Il Divo x 3. This place was standing room only as they sung a famous papal mass. Could have been the debut of a papal mass for all I know of the subject but they were phenomenal-albeit not as cute as Il Divo.
Finished the night with a dinner of French onion soup-possibly the best I have ever had, and fondue, also pretty darn good. I think I need tomorrow to come so that I can start working off tonight's dinner. Tomorrow the group gathers and we head to Chamonix!