I spend a lot of time on trains these days, and I keep forgetting to post one of my favorite sights in the train stations: the vending machines. You can get candy, chips, and soda, sure, but you can also purchase vitamins, lighters, condoms (center), smoothies, coffee, and cannabis tea (bottom right, orange containers).Right, so I made it to Bern without any of the above items and headed straight for its colorful fountains. I think I took unneccesary pictures of most of them, but I liked this one in particular. It's the child eater, and it's ghastly. I then wandered along the cliffside, heading downhill. Bern was founded on the tip of a finger of land jutting into a hairpin bend in the Aare River, and the train station's right where the rest of the hand would connect. Heading toward the tip, you pass huge swathes of open land where succesive city walls used to be. The Bernese have torn them down and claimed the spaces for pedestrian squares. They've great green stone buildings everywhere, interrupted periodically with old towers and ornate edifaces of grey stone, like the theater off of Markplatz. Since it's famous, here's the clock tower. It was pretty neat to watch it chime, and I liked the zodiac and lunar clocks as well.
The main street down the city is lined with arcades, shops, and restaurants. I stopped by Albert Einstein's house, then admired the well-maintained cellers under each store. They used to be wine storage, back when the XXX was a huge city granary. The cathedral was nice, but nothing special. I'm getting spoiled on all the architecture and old churches. I did like all the terraces, though. Bern's finger of land is considerably higher than the nearby river, so it has great views and pretty terraced gardens. I skipped the smaller Kirsch and Rathous in favor of the bears. Bern's heraldic animal is the bear, so they've a super-touristy bear pen just across the river from the tip of town. The locals like their bears as well, but they're agitating for improved quarters for them. You can see why.
I walked back along the other side of the river for a while, enjoying the day. After crossing back into old Bern, I visited some more fountains and the remains of the last city wall. The prison tower is all right, but the Dutch tower has a better history: soldiers returning from WWI had picked smoking up from the Dutch, but they weren't allowed to do it in the formerly wooden Swiss capitol city. They hid in the tower to feed their habit and miraculously never burnt it down.
I also checked out the parliament, where a group was protesting the Turkish government. Odd, for a non-EU country, but perhaps I missed the point. The parliament abuts a large square, under which the Swiss government keeps its gold. It was tough to imagine that I could be brushing past muckitymucks and standing on billions of dollars. Bern is a very laid-back capitol. I wanted to jump in the river for a float downstream, like the Bernese do all summer, but they informed me that it wasn't warm enough yet. I ate my lunch by statures of bears and hopped back on the train to head for somewhere more exciting.
I headed to Kerzers very briefly, mostly just to see the countryside out the train windows. I was up in the northwest of Switzerland, just south of the Jura mountain range. This is where Neuchatel is, of the cream cheese, and it is Switzerland's best farmland. They have incredibly rich, dark soil here, and the touristy thing to do is rent a bike and either go on a "vegetable ride" through the fields or cycle up to the summit of Mont Vully to see the vineyards and look out over the farms. I wanted to see all I could, though, so I skipped the bike rides and admired the land from another train's windows.
Murten is right on the border with French-Switzerland, so about a quarter of its citizens call it Morat instead. They've got a full city wall there, available for a rampart stoll for any aspiring guardsman.
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