Switzerland Alpenventure: Lausanne

My Swiss Alpenventure is starting to come to a close with my journey to Lausanne.  Two days and then onto Geneva, where I depart from.  The journey from Zermatt to Lausanne is more than just a 3 hour train ride.  It is a shift from German speaking Switzerland to French speaking Switzerland.  Good news is I know just as much French as German!  Which is about nothing!  The trip was unfortunately a bit of a dud, due to rain.  Good news is the rain quit shortly before reaching Lausanne.  My train car had a kids playground space on it which was kind of cool though.  Also, traveling by train in the morning on a Wednesday is apparently not a huge travel day.  The train was close to empty, which was nice.

This is inside a train!

The first thing I had to do when getting to Lausanne was figure out where to ditch my bags for a few hours until I could check in.  Since I was staying at another AirBnB, storage wasn't an option.  But there were some other places willing to store bags for a few hours.  And in order to get there I had to climb the hill.  Lausanne is not flat.  It is very not flat. I was impressed watching a woman in 2-3" heels walking down cobblestone streets.  I would have DIED!

Steep!

So after dropping off my bag I kind of started to wander.  I started heading for the cathedral because that seemed like a good place to start.  As I was standing outside, I recalled a scavenger hunt that I had found online and pulled it out.  Good news was I was right up by the starting point.  

Lausanne Cathedrale, also known as Notre-Dame de Lausanne, was built in the 13th century.  Began as a Catholic cathedral, it was Protestant Reformed, and if you've read my other posts, you'll probably understand what that means: a certain lack of ornamentation.  But it still has a grand bell tower which offers one of the best views of the city as the church sits up on a hill.

View from the bell tower at Lausanne Cathedral.

I had never been in a bell tower like this cathedral before.  I've been in many historical churches on my travels, but never a true bell tower.  The tower still has 7 bells of various sizes that chime the hour (I literally just missed being up there by about 10 minutes and I stuck around to see if it would chime the quarter and half hour, but it didn't).  The bells are hung on wooden scaffolding, and when I say wood, I mean probably 1ft by 1ft logs.  It was amazing.  In seeing how the bells were hung up there, I also began to better understand a statement made by a firefighter who responded to the fire at Notre Dame de Paris in 2019.  They had made a statement about how they knew they had to keep the flames from the bell tower because if the wood holding the bells burned and the bells fell, the whole towers and with it, likely the whole church, would fall.  Anyways, this church had bells strung up on two different floors.  And on the first floor of the bell tower, between the two bells was a little room.  You could almost imagine Quasimodo living in there.  Likely, however, it is used by the lookouts.  To this day, the church still maintains lookouts who call out the hour during the night, and keeps an eye on the city for fire.

The Quasimodo room inside the bell tower.

After my journey to the bell tower and a trip around the inside of the church and then the outside, I set out for the next location on the scavenger hunt.  Up next was Place de la Palud.  I have no idea what that means, but it was a square in the heart of the old city.  And up on a building right there in the square was a clock that gives a couple minute performance on the hour, and it turns out I was in luck.  It was about 5 till the hour.

The animated clock of Place de Palud.

The scavenger hunt then took me to a newer section of the city known as the Flon district.  It seems like a area with shopping and restaurants in one of the lower lying areas of the city.  Nearby was also the Bel-Aire hotel, the tallest building in the city.

I then wandered to a mural depicting some well known comic characters and an interestingly dressed wolf statue. 

Sexy Wolf

The last stop was the Palace of Justice.  The most important thing I learned in front of the Palace of Justice is that William Tell is a Swiss folk hero.  I am obviously familiar with the name, but pretty much only due to the William Tell Overture (look it up, you are all familiar with that song).  I was not familiar with the origin of the story, which is that Tell's assasination of an Austrain nobleman led to open rebellion, which led to the creation of Switzerland.

Deciding my feet were done at this point, I went and collected my bags and then headed for my AirBnB, where I spent the rest of the evening just relaxing because I was reaching the point where I was just tired.  For like 2 weeks, I had been averaging about 10 miles of walking a day and I think my body was just reaching exhaustion point.

The next morning I got up and set out to experience the one reason I chose to stop in Lausanne.  The Olympic Museum.  Lausanne is the home of the International Olympic Committee, and also most major sporting federations.  Here you'll find the International Baseball Federation, International Canoe Federation, International Federation for Equestrian, International Fencing Federation, International Golf Federation, International Gymnastics Federation, International Hockey Federation, International Rowing Federation, International Skating Union, International Table Tennis Federation, International Triathlon Union, International Volleyball Federation, World Archery Federation, World Boxing, World Taekwondo, and even the International Chess Federation.  

The International Gymnastics Federation Building

I had 3 stops I wanted to make on my final day in Lausanne: 1) stop at the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG), 2) visit the Olympic Museum, 3) Find Olympic Headquarters.  If you know me at all, you known I LOVE the Olympics.  I've was sucked into it as a child and I look forward to spending 2 weeks in front of my tv watching every sport I can every 2 years.  So this trip to Lausanne was almost a pilgrimage.

I started out heading to find FIG.  Really other than the name on the exterior of a building and a FIG flag on a flagpole outside, you wouldn't know there was anything special there.  There was a private drive to the building so I didn't attempt to go in to offer up advice for the next Code of Points, or try to convince them to bring compulsories back.

I can almost reach it!

After stopping by the FIG building I headed to the Olympic Museum.  The first thing I came across outside were high jump standards set at world record height.  It is absolutely insane how high jumpers can jump.  They had a similar setup with pole vaulting standards set to Armand Duplatis' current world record.  There were also a men's and women's shotput out there.  Those are so much heavier than I imagined they be!

Yes, it's me, the Olympic champion!

Once inside, I bought my ticket and headed into the museum.  The first floor I entered into was split into Summer and Winter Olympic halves and then a center section.  On each side belonging to the specific Olympics were areas split up by era.  Each had items of note: a ski sweater worn by an early Olympian, an early bobsled, skating outfit, helmets, etc on the winter side.  On the summer side you had shoes worn by Jesse Owens, one of Usain Bolt's shirts, a pair of Michael Phelps' swim trunks, Kohei Uchimura's leo from 2016, Simone Biles' leo from 2016, and Rebeca Andrade's leo from 2024.  Also in each area were screens with stories about competitors.  Like did you know at the first Olympics, an American nearly missed the Olympics after sailing to Italy, getting mugged there and had his train ticket stolen, but pursued the man and caught him retrieving his ticket, before finally making it to Athens, only to find out that due to calendar differences (Greece was still using the old calendar), his first Olympic event was that day?  And then he went on to win it, becoming the very first Olympic champion in anything in the modern Olympics (James B. Connolly).  Also, did you know that Tug of War was an Olympic sport for the first few Olympics?

Jesse Owen's shoe.  Adidas before it got its third stripe.

King Kohei's leo from 2016!

2024 Leo of Rebeca Andrade (yellow) and 2016 leo of Simone Biles (red).

In the middle of all of this was a section with Olympic medals.  They had one medal of every color for each Olympics there.  For the most part, Summer Olympic medals all have a very similar design, as dictated by rules as to what can be on them.  The Winter Olympics don't seem to follow those same guidelines and do whatever they want!  The medals have gotten so much bigger over the years.  The first medals were probably somewhere in size between a half dollar and a quarter.  Now you're looking at something probably about 4" across.

From there then I went to the area talking about the history of the Olympics, like ancient Greece Olympics.  It then transitioned to talking about Pierre de Coubertin, the man who brought us the modern Olympic Games.  They had a section with torches from each Olympic Games.  The torch relay has occurred every Olympics since the Nazi Olympics of 1936.  It was the one cool idea Adolf Hitler had, though of course it had racist reasoning.  

I think one of my favorite sections was the area where they talked about creating the Olympics.  Like what it takes to broadcast the Games.  Picking color palettes and a market scheme that fits the city.  They had all the mascots there.  They also talked about how since 2015 they have changed their philosophy on host cities.  They said it used to be about how a city can change for the Games, and now they are trying to figure out how to change the Games for the city.  I think that's great.  They also talked about trying to reduce white elephants and making sure that what is made for the Olympics will benefit the city, such as new housing.  

Costumes from the 2026 Olympic Games.

Costume and drum from the Beijing Opening Ceremonies in 2008.

There was also an area with some costumes from Opening and Closing Ceremonies.  

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the museum and was glad I went.  After leaving, I set out for Olympics HQ.  It was just a mere 2 miles there from the Museum.  I regretted my decision to walk about halfway there, my feet being on their last leg, but I continued anyway because you have to suffer a bit if you want to make it to the Olympics!  Part way there I came across the Olympic Clock which counts down to the Opening Ceremonies of the next Olympic Games, which I'll be attending!  The Games, not the Opening Ceremonies.

I finally made it there, and boy do they have a lot of security around that place!  But I got some more Olympic Ring pictures!  On my way back to my room, I was through some old Roman ruins, like right next to the Olympics HQ.  I ended up stopping by Aldi to grab something to eat and then heading back to my room to crash.

Just me stalking the Olympics!

The next morning I got up and headed to the train station for one last train ride.  This one heading to Geneva.  I took my bags to my hotel near the airport first and then headed into the city.  Really my one main goal was to buy some chocolate to take home and share with friends.  After accomplishing this, I returned to the hotel and repacked things.  And I realized that because of all the chocolate I bought, I was going to have to pull out an additional bag for the way home.

My flights home were all on schedule and for the first time in a long time, all of my travel went according to plan going both directions.

Switzerland was amazing!  Expensive, but amazing!  I'm definitely glad I went and I will be going back for round two at some point.  Probably in winter.

Did I do Switzerland right?