Cityscapes

Here's some images from around Lausanne.

View from our balcony.  Really.

 

Heading down our street to the train station.  Kids on scooters.

An intersection near downtown.

The Lausanne Cathedral.  A 12th century church that's the most famous building in town and (according to all the guidebooks) the most impressive Gothic church in all of Switzerland.

Inside the Cathedral. The Cathedral was a major Catholic church from the 12th century until the Reformation.  It was filled with statues, tapestries, and paintings, and it had a gold Virgin Mary near the altar where Mark is standing to take this shot.  During the Catholic period the seats would have been facing the altar.  On the right hand siide, about half way down, you can see the raised pulpit that the reformers built after the Cathedral became Protestant in the 16th century.  The reformers stripped bare the interior, whitewashed the painted walls, melted down the gold virgin to make coins, and reoriented the pews to face the raised pulpit.  Today, organ recitals played on the Cathedral's magnificent organ draw the crowds.  The organ sits on the floor at the far end of the photo.  There's someone playing it, and the seats now all face the organ -- backs to what once was the altar.  So this shot illustrates three epochs in European religious history:  from Catholic Sacrament to Protestant Word to Contemporary Aesthetics.

Lausanne is basically built up a steep slope from Lake Geneva, so you can see the lake from most anywhere in town.

Not everything is beautiful and charming.  There's lots of graffiti.

One of the oldest streets in town.

Downtown has several pedestrian-only areas.





We bought lunch in this little store.  That's Matthew standing in the doorway.

Eating lunch by this 13th century fountain in the oldest (not counting the Roman ruins down by the lake) part of town.