I’ll confess up front that going to Bern was a bit of an unnecessary extravagence. I forget now exactly how much the return fare for two people turned out to be, but I know I did a double take when the machine asked me for the required number of francs and wondered hopefully if I might possibly have pressed something wrong. I hadn’t, but my desire to escape French speaking Switzerland to a part of the country where they use a proper language was great enough for me to pay for the tickets regardless

It was actually a beautiful train journey. For over forty five minutes to Lausanne we travelled along the length of Lake Geneva, which is actually shockingly big. The weather still wasn’t amazing, but as the journey progressed further we were able to get occasional glimpses of the Alps in the Bernese Oberland and even when we couldn’t, the hilly countryside outside Geneva was pleasant enough. I spent ages what the weird little trees they were growing in all the fields were, until my boyfriend confirmed he thought they were vines. En route the train passed through Fribourg/Freiburg which is a town that fascinates me, by virtue of the fact that it sits right on the Röstigraben, the imaginary trench which divides German speaking Switzerland (where they eat Rösti) from French speaking Switzerland (where they do not). At one point I nearly booked for us to stay there but in the end I decided against because the accommodation wasn’t substantially cheaper than in Geneva, and the location less convenient.

Arriving in Bern I was struck again by what a bizarrely uncapitallike capital it is. I suspect that even a lot of people who can successfully differentiate Switzerland from Sweden have no idea that Bern is the capital city, and indeed if you were picked up off the street by a gigantic hand and transported there, you could probably walk around the place all day without realising, returning home with the impression that Bern was nothing more than a sleepy little town.

The reason, from what I understand, that Bern is the capital is that the French speaking Swiss felt Zurich was too Germanic a city. Germanic or not, Zurich is at any rate not an attractive city despite being situated next to a naturally beautiful expanse of water, and it is a place where I have never felt particularly safe. Bern is much more pleasant and inoffensive and quite possible to explore on foot in a day even without a town plan, which the tourist office are too mercenary to give away for free.

There is no lake in the town but there is however the river Aare which flows through the southern half of the city centre at a very fast pace. It is not the sort of river you would want to fall into. It is also not the sort of river which is very conducive to playing Pooh-sticks, although when I made this observation to my boyfriend he looked at me in blank incomprehension as his poor little mind went into overdrive trying to figure out what a Pooh-stick might be! Nevertheless it’s a pretty river, and we had a little walk along it en route from visiting the main attraction of Bern;the bear pits.

The population of Bern have been keeping pet bears outside the city for hundreds of years now. Currently they only have two, another couple having recently died, and they are in the middle of renovating the existing pits and turning them into something more modern. We were able to jostle with schoolchildren for a few minutes to watch the two gorgeous female bears pacing around and catching pieces of carrot which were being thrown to them. They looked very amiable, despite their size, but it is a fact that within the last five or so years a drunken reveller on his way home from a night out had the misfortune to fall down a bear pit, and there was precious little remaining of him come the morning

Other than that, the sights of Bern are not terribly exciting. We saw the Swiss Parliament building which has some really cool little water jet fountains outside it, but otherwise is quite understated. We also had a look around the cathedral, although we didn’t pay to go up the tower, and strolled for a while up and down the strange little side streets with their covered walkways. My boyfriend came across a shop called Dick which appealed to his sense of humour, and we found another department store restaurant to eat in. We also succeeded in buying some stamps to send our postcards (i say succeed because it was a rather confusing post office!), but the most exciting purchases of the day were in an amazing little second hand bookshop we discovered in Rathausplatz. A lot of the books were antique looking and beyond our price range, but some others were unbelievably cheap and the most exciting thing was the breadth of languages which were represented. I picked up an anthology of Swiss literature for a couple of francs; just the sort of thing I’ve been looking for to give me a better indication of what to try and buy when I’m out there, and the fact that it dates from the year I was born doesn’t matter to me. Rather excitingly, my boyfriend picked up a copy of the Hound of the Baskervilles in French I am hopeful that maybe one day my French will be good enough to read it too; I know the story well in English and have already read it in Esperanto too, so that would be quite cool.

The train journey back passed quickly on account of our new reading material, and we were able to head back to the hostel to eat some rather tasteless slices of meat before heading out for a twilight walk round the streets of Geneva. We actually found the main shopping street, identifiable by a large Starbucks, which we had somehow managed to miss on all previous excursions The weather in Geneva was set to improve tomorrow, and I had managed to convince my boyfriend that he wanted to go up a little cable car

Tags: bears, Bern, holiday, switzerland

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 8:47 am and is filed under Holidays and outings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.