The day started at 6:30am, when I woke up to meet the rest of the group at 7am to make our 7:45 train. I was running off of less than five hours of sleep, so naturally I got coffee at the train station. After which point I realized I had a two hour train ride to Bern that I could have been sleeping on but no longer would be able to...oops, my bad. But hey, I got to see some awesome scenery. Switzerland is probably the most beautiful place I've been so far in my life.
We got off the train and tried to orient ourselves in the city. We were now in the German part of Switzerland (just when I had gotten used to French speakers...I am loving how cultural it is here and how short a distance you need to go to reach somewhere so culturally different!), so we were trying to read the signs. We were obviously unsuccessful because we immediately went off in the wrong direction. It was fortunate that we figured this out only after 20 minutes of walking. But it turned out ok, because we ended up wandering through a university's campus that looked out over the city. B-e-a-utiful!
Our original plan had been to follow a walking, self-guided tour type thing that Kevin had found, and we followed it for a few of the stops, pausing to take pictures of all the fountains that were right in the middle of the street. Definitely strange. Also, the buses don't exactly stop for people standing in the streets, which I almost found out the hard way while admiring one of the fountains. Luckily one of my friends had my back. We continued along the tour, weaving through markets set up along various streets and in large open squares. I had never been to a farmer's market or anything of the sort in the States, but I imagine it was something like the portion we passed through in a large square. The thing was that we went down one street filled with carts selling everything from cheese to pastries to flowers, turned the corner to find an enormous square filled with seemingly endless carts of more food, and crossed the street to the large square in front of the Parliament building to find that also filled with carts of food. I had never seen anything like it in my life. The area was teeming with people buying produce, meat, and cheese. And of course bread. You can't forget the bread.
We wandered to the Parliament building and noticed that there were free tours happening that day (I'm not sure if there were free tours only that day or every weekend or every day). We discovered that there was a tour at 11:30 that we could join. There was one caveat - it was going to be in German. But we got pamphlets that explained everything (in much less detail of course) that we were going to see in English. So we decided to do it. Let me tell you, that building was beautiful. Unfortunately, there are no records or pictures of this experience because we weren't allowed to bring anything in with us, but take me on my word. It was impressive. We saw the Domed Hall and both Chamber rooms, and they all were beautifully decorated with stained glass, statues, ornate carvings, or intricate murals. It was well worth our time, even though we couldn't understand what our guide was saying. But luckily, she explained some things in English, knowing we English-speakers were present.
We continued down the cobbled streets, and passed some cafe called the "Einstein Haus." We knew Einstein's house was located in Bern and thought this cafe was a funny play on that. But then we noticed a sign saying something like "Closed due to water damage." Something rung a bell in our heads...someone had told us that tours of Einstein's house weren't going on because it was closed due to water damage...Wait a second. This WAS Einstein's house! We checked the address number...yup, 49. We were standing in front of (and almost completely passed by) Albert Einstein's old house! I'm sure the people peacefully eating lunch were thrilled when our group of eight physicists started fervidly taking pictures of everything around the house: the number, all the signs, the house itself...yeah, they were definitely staring at us. Did we care? Not one bit. I mean, it was EINSTEIN'S HOUSE!!
We continued on, heading towards Bern's most popular attraction, the bear pit. At one point, we crossed the river the makes a peninsula out of the city of Bern, and I couldn't believe what a striking blue-green color it was. I had never seen a river that color before! And it was FAST. I don't know how fast rivers usually go, but take the speed of a typical one and multiply it by two or three. There were people in rafts and tubes floating not-so-leisurely down it (because how can it be leisurely going that fast?!), along with people simply swimming down it. We noticed people lining the river a little way up and decided to go there to relax for a bit.
It turned out that where the people were lining was where the bear pit was. We started down the stairs that led to the river bank and noticed two bears playfully fighting down below. Fenced off of course (thankfully the bears don't roam the town...that would be quite unnerving). We stopped to take some pictures before sticking our feet in the achingly cold river water. Yup, my numb feet could confirm that it was most definitely a river of snowmelt. We tried to figure out how to get a raft to float down the river to no avail. So instead we headed back to the restaurant that overlooked the bear pit. We had been told previously that the restaurant was also a microbrewery, so of course we had to check it out. Let me tell you, beer with the bears in Bern was pretty good.
Afterward we climbed 100m or so to a beautiful rose garden that overlooked all of Bern. It was probably the best view of the city you could get. In the near distance, we noticed a castle-looking structure and decided that would be our next stop. To our eventual dismay, it turned out to be the history museum of Bern, which also happened to house the Einstein museum...well darn. Being physicists, we were extremely disappointed that it had already closed for the day.
Our last stop was a late dinner in one of the squares in front of the Parliament building, which had been completely cleared of all food carts and now had children running through fountains. We wearily made our way back to the train station and crashed hard on the way back to CERN. I even fell asleep on the train. That never happens! What a long, eventful, and fun day!
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