Hotel Bern

... to catch the bus to Bonigen which was a quaint small town on Lake Brienz. The girl at the hostel had said that it was a 20 minute walk but in true Swiss style, we think that it was probably 40 minutes for any non-Swiss person. Bonigen was so quiet, hardly anybody was about but it was a good opportunity to see different styles of the ...

Bern is an incredibly picturesque city, especially the old town. You can walk along the banks of the Aare, on Aarestrasse, have a coffee and sip the afternoon away as you people watch along the river. I had a special connection with Bern as it was the setting on Einstein's Dreams, and the names of the streets and brükes (bridges) are so familiar to me!!
Bern, Bern, Switzerland zenergized

... for a change (shower no longer needed from my time earlier on the hot Italian train as the cool, clear Swiss water had already served the purpose of making me smell a little better), I went out to walk around and find some dinner. I ended up in this really cool market that was kind of like an upscale food court where I had a sandwich and a beer. After ordering the beer, the lady at the counter, who seemed ...

ARRIVED from Lugano

arrived early just to stop for the day on my way to Prauge. Bern had some interesting streets. skated through on the smooth sidewalks i could find. went to the bear pits (bern was named after bears) basically a depressing concrete pit with tourists ...

... celestial sign. On either side of the main street are numerous winding side-alleys, which are fun to explore. The shops in town are cute (though still too expensive) and every building sits atop a basement with more shoppes, cafes, or other businesses down below. Two large churches dominate the skyline of Bern, their steeples poking higher than even the house of the Swiss parliment. One church is quite massive while the other ...

... finishing today. We can't complain as we have been pretty lucky so far with our sightseeing and had even managed to miss the rain that had been falling most of the way from Chamonix to Bern. We lunched overlooking the river and spent a little longer wandering the cobbled streets marvelling at what a cute little city Bern is. Definitely worth a look if you love old medieval towns as I do. The Lonely Planet tells you to look for the Ogre fountain, which is a fountain of ...

July 30, 2006 Hello Switzerland! We arrived at charming, picturesque Lucerne, a gorgeous little medieval town surrounded by the towering Alps. The town is filled with cobblestone paths, open-air cafes, chocolatier shops and blooming flowers. I bought some authentic Swiss chocolate (undoubtedly the best in the world) and we strolled the shops for some Swiss army knives (so cool, there are ones that come with 1,000 gadgets---seriously anything you could ever need ...

So Thursday we decided it would be a good idea to go to Switzerland, so that is what we did. And wow, the country was as random as our decision to go. We took a train to Geneva, and tooled around the city for about five hours. Within the five hours we managed to see a VERY clean public bathroom, a band with soldiers, enormous chess boards in a park, a man dressed up as a prisonner (that we later threw ...

... Next morning we're off to St Goar (Germany). Only three nights to go! Nikki gives us a little Swiss info. on the way. All men have to do military service, which decreases as they get older. If you leave the country and still want to be a Swiss citizen you have to pay the government a percentage of your earnings. Swiss men are required to own guns in the best interests of the country. The country can be shutoff within minutes with strategically placed explosives ...

... of about 80 minutes before I turned a left then a right and there in front of me was ... no, not Rue de Vers... the train station. I had walked over an hour, never made it to "Lake Geneva" and ended up back in the same place I started. I called the place I am staying and they came and picked me up. Where am I staying? #2 Rue de something-or-other, Geneva. With a nice Swiss family that I met while they spent 2 months in Barcelona. They lived in the same house as Becky ...