Exploring Lucerne

A really quiet start to the day. There is plenty of upsides to staying in one place for 3 nights, however one downside is things can get a bit untidy. So after a sleep in and a bit of a tidy up we got to breakfast at 9.30.

Lucerne is certainly not cheap. We are staying in a tourist hotel which is very comfortable but basic. So whilst the breakfast is not particularly cheap it is a good way to fill up for the day and not to have to worry about lunch.

We spent the day looking around Lucerne and the old city. It reminds us a lot of Queenstown and Wellington in New Zealand but just on a bigger scale.

We had a 'cultural' eye opener. There has been a notable number of police officers around. For the first couple of days we just assumed this was normal as the city feels really safe to walk around. However this morning a lot more of them were wearing body armour.

We discovered that tonight Lucerne were playing a Swedish team in football and this soon become evident as the pubs along the riverbank got louder and louder as the day went on. By the time we finished our wanderings at 7pm the police were fully armed with shields and weapons etc as there were masses of very 'vocal and happy' Stockholm fans everywhere. When we stopped to ask if it was safe to walk back to our hotel the reply was 'at the moment yes...'. As we walked back we passed masses of Lucerne fans so we suspect we may be staying near the stadium. So that put an end to our plans to go back into the city later on and we ended up having dinner at the same place as the first night.

We are not sure what happened at midnight. It was possibly fireworks, given that Lucerne won the game and the two-legged tie, but given how well prepared the police were and the previous history of rioting football fans, it could have also been those heavily armed police using their resources to disperse the fans...we will never know.

I'd loved to have got a pic or two of the armed police. However the officer I spoke to, whilst polite, had a very steely look in her eyes and she certainly was not to be messed with!!Read more