April Alpine Adventure - Part 2: Bern Baby Bern!

April 27th:

We woke up early again and spent the morning in the Bern Temple. It was a beautiful day both inside and outside the House of the Lord.

Peter and I cooked up a quick lunch in the temple hostel kitchen and walked past the temple to the Zollikofen train station...

We got on the train to Bern and read about the city in the guidebook that we had...

We arrived in Bern and found it busy and bustling. We walked right into the old town and had a look around...

Bern is Switzerland's best-preserved big city and the interesting streets and houses with flags of all sorts flying about made it all the more festive...

Bern's most famous landmark is the Zytglogge or tower clock. It was built early 800 years ago, though the current look of the tower dates to only about 500 years ago. In it's day it was a highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art device, ringing the hour out with style as a little show of mechanical bell-ringers marched in and out of the clock...

One of our first stops was the Albert Einstein house, not far from the Zytglogge.

Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany (about two hours west of Munich by train). He went to school in Munich and then settled in northern Switzerland for a time and studied math and physics.

Not long after marrying he moved to Bern and took up a job as a clerk in a patent office. He lived with his wife and their son in this house (you can see him in the window)...

Inside was a small museum. There wasn't a lot to see, but the woman who manned the desk was so excited about Einstein that it made for a very enjoyable museum-going experience. She told us how this was the very desk that Einstein used at the patent office. During duller moments he would work out mathematical and physics problems and keep all his notes in the upper-right-hand drawer (the one you see open). The newspaper is a copy of one that advertised for the patent-clerk position when Einstein arrived in Bern (the Scotch tape and calculator are not originals)...

The Einsteins had only a small living room with the original furniture, wallpaper and other things very well preserved...

Here is a photo of the Einstein family against the very wall where the picture now hangs (you can even see the wallpaper is the same)...

Here is the light in the living room. Who knows but if Einstein sat on that couch staring up at it wondering about the properties of light...

He had a nice view from his window as well...

We left the Einstein house and explored a bit more of the old town....

One of the fun things about Bern is all the little statues and pieces of artwork that decorate fountains, pillars, houses, and windows.

A lion-tamer...

An old knight...

An architect...

A parade of children and geese...

A royal lion next to the flag of Bern featuring a bear...

Another knight with a rather conspicuous codpiece and a baby bear shooting a pistol. These sort of fountains were everywhere in the old town...

Elaborate artwork above the main entrance to the minster cathedral...

Inside the Bern Minster...

Peter and I stepped into a store to check out the Swiss chocolate selection. There wasn't much to choose from...

Everything you see here is chocolate (except for me)...

By the way, that Toberlone bar cost 99 Swiss Francs (the Swiss Franc was more or less equal to the dollar when we were there. A Big Mac value menu at McDonalds cost 12 francs).


We went back to the train station and met up with Matjaž and a friend of his who was also at the temple with us named Lala. Lala lives in Paris but she is originally from Madagascar.

We took them on a tour of Bern showing them the things we had discovered earlier...

Peter (standing), Matjaž, and Lala and the Zytglogge...

German, French, Italian, and Romansh are the official languages of Switzerland, though German is spoken by the majority with French in second. Switzerland began as a confederation of independent cantons who decided to band together to stay protected from the territorial ambitions of the Germans, French, and Holy Roman emperors. Though German-speaking Zürich and French-speaking Geneva are both larger cities than Bern, when it came time to choose a capital, Bern was chosen as being a nice middle-ground between the two halves of the country and the two languages.

Thus Bern is the capital of Switzerland and here is the Federal Palace...

Next door is the Swiss National Bank (I've always wanted to have a Swiss bank account and I was tempted to go in and apply for one just so I could say things like, "I want the money wired to my Swiss account.")...

There was a lively game of giant chess nearby...

It was tense...

We wandered the streets enjoying a few more sites of the city...

It seemed to me that I saw more German on the signs and buildings, but I heard more French in the street. Here is an old French advertisement however...

And then we crossed the Aare river to the open-air bear pits...

Since ancient times the emblem of the city of Bern has featured a bear and so why not build an open-bear pit on the river?

Of course it cost nothing to see the bears and so we went over and had a look...

There was a good-sized crowd watching the bears climb around...

Nate on the Aare...

We walked back across the river taking one last look at mama and the babies...

We were getting tired and hungry so we went to a grocery store and bought some food and went to a small park next to the Minster to sit and eat. This park featured sand boxes for children and some of the nicest public toilets I'd ever seen. My idyllic image of the park was slightly bruised as I was offered marijuana. I declined...

There were nice views of fancy buildings overlooking the river on either side of the park...

And so we sat and ate, chatted, people-watched, and enjoyed the pleasant evening...

I bought a Rivella to drink. It is a famous Swiss carbonated soda which includes a small amount of milk by-products to give it a special Swiss twist...

The sun started to set as we walked by the fancy casino...

And we caught a nice evening view of the Minster and our park as we crossed one of the bridges...

And the Federal Palace...

We walked back to the train station, stopping only occasionally to ogle at the chocolate in the windows...

We made it back to the temple hostel in Zollikofen and slept well.

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