Day Thirty-One
Bern
7 September 2007 22:58

Justine woke me from my slumber this morning by tapping on the bottom of my bunk bed (on an overnight rain from Rome).  She did it so I didn’t miss out on the amazing view of the sun rising over a Swiss mountain range.

Having never really seen large mountains up close, I didn’t have an idea of the scale until I saw a group of 10-15 storey buildings at the base of a mountain.  The buildings barely finished 20% of the way up the mountain.  Probably less.

After walking in the wrong direction from the station, and getting no help from three people that didn’t speak English or recognise the street name I wanted, we found our hotel.

Dumping our stuff, we walked into town and shared a large cappucino.  It was so large we had trouble getting through it all.  Everything is extremely expensive here and even finding cheap food is tough.

We went into town and saw some lovely scenery as well as another astronomical clock; not as nice as Prague’s.  Bern’s old town is World Heritage listed and is quite pretty.

Across the river from town is tiny “bear pit” which, like it sounds, has bears.  In a pit.  The two bears did not seem pleased with their accommodation and all the onlookers making a lot of noise.

Up the hill, which was a steep walk, is a rose garden.  We admired the city view, wandered the garden for a bit and came back down.

Bern has 6km of undercover shopping in a concentrated promenade.  So we walked along there for a while marveling at the high price of everything.

For lunch, we bought some sandwich supplied from a “Mignos” supermarket — still costly — and ate at the hotel before going around the corner to the post office to send another package.  I was a lot easier this time!

After showering and washing socks and jocks; Justine took it upon herself to wash all mine leaving me none, before I saved a pair and borrowed some sock, we headed out again.

We wandered through the old town and into another supermarket where I noticed that the drinking age here is 16, but for beer and wine only — for spirits it is 18.

I bought a local beer, Feldschlösschen, which I drank while waling the streets to our hotel.  Since it’s not legal back home it felt rather naughty.

We hadn’t seen any beggars until then, when a massive group of maybe 20 were in front of a church harrassing all passers-by.  It felt like running some sort of gauntlet where you are being tested.

Tomorrow, we head to Luzern for the day to check out the scenery.