Autumn Travel – Day 7 – Geneva

A look around Geneva today with the temperature reaching 33 degrees Centigrade in the early afternoon. That’s around 91.5 degrees Fahrenheit for the people who use that scale.

The famous Jet D’Eau started at 10am and proved quite popular with people on coaches, although you can see it from most of the waterfront. The water taxis looked lovely as they sneaked under the bridges from the River Rhone to Lake Geneva. The domes of the Russian orthodox sparkled under the clear blue sky. I saw a plaque dedicated to George Eliot who stayed in Geneva in 1849 – 1850.

I headed to the United Nations on the 15 tram from Cornavin station. As I was walking along the path outside the UN, a security man accosted me and asked what “two security men together” meant. I shrugged so he continued that I could proceed no further and that I should turn around and go somewhere else. There was no indication that tourists like myself weren’t allowed to proceed. The man was utterly charmless and I thought back to the previous day and the officials at the airport who were humourless.

I went to the remarkable International Red Cross and Red Crescent (IRCRC) Museum up the hill by the Red Cross HQ. This is a place to become thoughtful about how people caught up in wars had little if no rights until Henri Dunant found the Red Cross based on his experiences after the Battle of Solferino in 1859.

In WWI, the Red Cross managed to deliver nearly two million messages between captured combatants and their families as well as twenty million packages. The filing system involved was straightforward but the number of prisoners approached 600,000 so that’s where the complications started. Switzerland was neutral in WWI. This involvement by the IRCRC continues to be appreciated and their involvement in The Balkans, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and Sudan is well documented.