Post by Lauren

Unfortunately, many Geneva museums are closed on Mondays*. However, one that is actually open is the Swatch exhibition in the Cite du Temps building. They have an entire floor dedicated to the quirky Swiss watches.

So, Monday, Pascal, Gisele and I enjoyed browsing the Swatch timeline and seeing the models from all the different years.

Everyone had a Swatch story. I actually have a vivid memory of mine. We were all visiting my family in Eastern, NC. My cousin C was older and a lot cooler than me. He wanted to go to the department store to look at Swatches. You see, he’d been saving for a long time and just received a monetary gift during this visit that I think got him to the $25 that he needed for the Swatch. We got to the store and…..he realized the money was gone. It was confirmed that it had been lost.

I was probably 6 or 7 at the time but I remember thinking that was the most awful thing in the world. He was so upset. Poor guy!

I think my other aunt & uncle actually volunteered to buy him the one he wanted. We’ll have to see via their comments if this is how the story went as I can’t remember that detail. All I remember is the lost money that was supposed to buy the watch.

Years later, in 1988, I received my first Swatch. Yup, used to rock this baby out in middle school:

In addition to me finding my gem, Pascal found the one his brother used to have. Then we started going around and finding our favorites which were the kooky ones.

They even used to run some risqué Swatch advertising. Check this out…..

I actually received my second swatch this year for my 32nd birthday, a gift from Gabe’s parents. I had been eyeing it because it was casual chic and if you can believe it, I didn’t own a watch for 10 years prior to this one. Since I didn’t even have a phone the first four months in Geneva, it was really hard to know what time the bus came without a watch. They were kind enough to give me this nice gift. Good timing (no pun intended) as it is embarrassing to be late in Switzerland.

*Fast fact – Patek Philippe makes the most expensive watch ever sold at 11million USD. After checking out the Swatch museum, we headed “upstream” to the Patek Philippe museum to check out their collection of watch history. However, it was closed. Monday. Very rookie mistake of me to not know this Monday museum thing. Oops! I promise I’ll be better by the next visitor!