Geneva is a quite expensive city I have heard, but your family will have told you that already. I only passed through Geneva a few times, never visited.
You think you can make time to visit the accelerator at Cern for one day in those two weeks? It is not too far from Geneva but I have not been there either, so I do not know what there is to see for tourists who visit. Well, there should be enough spin related stuff and maybe even some traces of a top quark.
I'll get free lodging and mostly free food
Yes, the CERN is on top of my list. In addition to the visitors exhibition, there is a free guided tour 3 times a day to visit the Synchrocyclotron followed by the ATLAS detector, about 1.5 km walk. But no underground visit: the accelerator just started a new run. Only 11 persons per group and there are no reservations, so I'll need to be early.
