Day 189: Old City of Bern

Since Switzerland is so expensive, we'd decided that our journey through the country would be as crammed full as possible - no time to relax and basically going closely point-by-point to the UNESCO sites. Maybe we'll come back another time and do a few other bits.

Out quite early this morning, since our parking expired at 9am and Swiss parking fines are apparently quite expensive. We were heading into the Old City, a fairly small and compact area so it made no sense for us to drive in. Instead we headed for a Park & Ride carpark about 15 minutes away, where we dropped the car off and caught a bus into the city. Quite quick, only 10 minutes to the main bahnhof.

The Old City of Bern is a long, narrow peninsula of land surrounded on three sides by a river. It's quite a high hill as well, since the river cuts sharply through the local sandstone. It's all very distinctive too, since the city burned down in the 15th century and was all rebuilt in sandstone at the same time. Every street has these long columned arcades for pedestrians, underneath the actual buildings - it was weird to read a sign about an interesting shop front, while being completely unable to see it!

I've also just realised I didn't mention it was a World Heritage site, so yeah. We wandered around for quite a while, filming and exploring. One of the cooler things they have is Renaissance era public fountains. These are mostly in the middle of streets, all topped with allegorical figures. Some are biblical, like Moses and Sampson, others are mythological like Lady Justice, the founder of Bern wrestling a bear, and of course the famous one - an ogre eating a baby. It's wearing a typical Jewish hat, though it didn't look stereotypically Jewish so I'm not sure what the point was. Awkward.

Walked past Einstein's house, where he lived from 1903 to 1905 while working as a patent clerk. It was also the house where he developed his special theory of relativity. The house is now a museum, but at 6 francs each we decided to skip (particularly since he only lived there for a couple of years - we felt another "Mozart's Birthplace" coming on).

After about an hour of slow walking and exploration we arrived at the two bridges over the river, right at the far end of the city. The water was a luminous green colour, obvious glacial run-off and with a very strong current. Some locals were in the water, floating along either on rafts or just on their own momentum. Looked like a lot of fun, but we decided to pass.

Here we also encountered the bear pit! There was some hazily-explained legend about the founder of the city wrestling a bear, but it's now the symbol of the city and they have three large bears in an enclosure overlooking the river. They looked pretty hot, poor guys, since it was pushing 30 degrees! One of them was paddling in a pool though.

We walked up a hill to the Rose Garden where you get a fantastic view back across the river at the old city. Filmed some stuff here, then discovered the restaurant with a nice view as well, so decided to indulge. We both ordered roughly the cheapest mains on the menu - I had a sausage in onion gravy with a potato rosti (think a very large hash brown, but with fingers of potato rather than reconstituted like at McDonalds), while Shandos had a sausage with sauerkraut, and we shared a tasting paddle of beer since the venue also brews in-house. All up, it was about 50 francs, though the food was quite good.

Walked back across the bridge into the old town where we explored the last couple of areas we hadn't been to already, including the 15th century cathedral. It's very impressive, and the tallest cathedral in Switzerland at 120 metres, but inside was very plain as most of the religious icons and relics had been destroyed during the Reformation. Seems to be the way in protestant countries!

We grabbed an ice-cream and sat in a nearby park on the cliff-tops for a while, since it was still really hot. Eventually we wandered back past the Swiss parliament house (Bern is the capital city, not Zurich or Geneva!!) then hopped on the free bus to our park and ride, and then the drive home.

Thankfully the road markings were finished, so we were at least able to park out the front this time! For these blue marked spaces, they have a very trusting system. Every car has a parking disc which you put on the dashboard, indicating to the nearest half-hour when you arrived. Since most blue spaces are one hour, it's quite trusting to assume people will indicate accurately when they arrived! Though I guess you'd have a much larger fine for falsely indicating as opposed to just overstaying your allowance.

Spaghetti with pesto again, and we spent a bit of time chatting with our hosts as well.Read more