Lausanne: The Nearly Perfect City
A combination of geography, weather, and peaceful sanity make Lausanne hard to beat
For some people, life seems to pass quite tranquilly. For others, life can be a roller-coaster. My life has tended toward the roller-coaster side of things, with some amazing highs and some painful lows. When life gets difficult, I like to remind myself that there are good things out there and so I often return to happy memories in order to help get through difficult patches. And so it was that I recently found myself thinking back on the twenty months I spent living in Lausanne.
For those unfamiliar with the city, Lausanne is in the Swiss canton of Vaud. Geneve (Geneva) is a short train ride to the west and Montreux is a short train ride to the east. Like both the aforementioned cities, Lausanne sits on the edge of Lac Leman. It’s not a big city — which is good, because I loathe big cities — but with a population of around 150,000 it’s just big enough to have some culture (music festivals, art festivals, a museum, etc.) and because around 40% of the inhabitants come from elsewhere, Lausanne has a far more cosmopolitan feel than similar-sized cities like Bern, and arguably more than even larger cities like Geneve and Zurich.
