Bern

On Sunday, I got a train to Bern, which is the capital city of Switzerland.

It took about an hour to get there, and cost 17.50CHF for a ticket. Although that was one way, and half price. That’s because I bought a Half-Fare card for 150CHF, which gives you 50% off train tickets, and a Gleis7 card for 99CHF that gives people under 25 free trains after 7 at night. (So I waited until 7 to get a train back).

Still much cheaper and faster than travelling to Canberra.

The actual city itself was really cool, lots of massive and old buildings. In particular the Berner Münster was really cool, will make a separate post for that. And I somehow walked into a natural history museum, which was also cool.

It was a reasonably hot day, and there was lots of people at the public swimming pool (which is free apparently), and swimming in the river. There was also tonnes of tourists like myself, I guess because it was a weekend.

This house had an elevator garage-thing, and they were waiting for it to drop down so they could drive the car on top.

I seriously thought the people in the below photo were real for like half a second. In fact, most the houses and buildings around here have really cool murals and stuff painted on them.

There was steps like this all along the river, with handrails to get in and out.

There was lots of people at the swimming pool, and also in the river.

This apparently is the Einstein Museum. I have no idea what that means because it isn’t open Sundays.

Sam, in response to your comment on one of the other posts, I haven’t tried any real Swiss chocolate yet. I’ve only bought stuff from the shops. They have different brands to us (and some the same) but other than that they are about the same, although definitely a bigger range. The chocolate in this shop looked amazing, but it was closed. And also probably very expensive.

Group of tourists on a tour….

This guy had mad-skills, and was walking along this cable tied to the bridge. Then he did it backwards.

I spent ages looking for some free water, and ended up buying some bottled water (for like the 2nd time in my life). I read briefly on the net that you could drink from these public fountains, but was dubious about it and didn’t see anyone else doing it. I looked it up on the net since though and apparently they are all okay to drink unless there is a sign saying otherwise.