Switzerland, day three

On Thursday, I went into Geneva again with the goal of visiting the Palais des Nations in mind. 

Unfortunately, the Palais only offers two morning tour times, and I arrived 15 minutes too late for the first one and 75 minutes too early for the second. Never fear: after acquiring my ticket, I marched next door to the Musée Ariana I had noticed earlier, a museum of glass and ceramics. 

Here are the reasons one should go to the Musée Ariana:
1. You're super into glass and ceramics.
2. It's cold outside and you need to kill time before your tour of the UN office in Geneva.

All jokes aside, however, this museum was fairly interesting. Decorative glass is always pretty nice, and the man at the front desk was extraordinarily friendly. Unfortunately, I didn't get to completely explore the collection, due to needing to make my tour time! If you're ever in the neighborhood, check it out.

So back to the Palais! The Palais des Nations was built to house the League of Nations (the creation of which is one of my favorite lol US History stories), and is currently home to the UN functions that happen in Geneva! It's full of history and important people and is also a really nice building.

The Broken Chair symbolizes the dangers of land mines and stands outside the Palais.

As a visitor to the Palais des Nations, you can take a one hour tour where a guide will show you the most important rooms of the building and give you a detailed oral history of the facilities at the same time. It's all really quite fascinating, though the small children on my tour didn't seem to agree with me. But how can you not get excited about the fact that there's a room you can't go in because part of the UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL is meeting right under your nose?

I've never been to UN headquarters in New York, and I don't know how they deal with visitors there, but after this visit I would very much like to take a tour of those facilities. You get to see where so many incredible things happened, and you get to see people working together. Like seriously, folks. The fact that this messed up world has something like the UN is just so, so cool.

The only weird thing about my UN experience was that our tour guide kept asking us fairly easy quiz questions that nobody apparently knew the answer to--like if anyone knew the name of the Secretary General of the UN. Nobody volunteered Ban Ki-moon. To be fair, however, I guess I knew the answer to this question and didn't respond, so maybe everyone else was just kind of shy like me. I'm not sure. It just made things vaguely uncomfortable because I think the guide thought we were idiots.

Meeting room!

In any case, the Palais was magnificent, I'm really glad I went, and history is awesome.