Friday, December 5, 2008

A Trip to Switzerland_Day 4

Bern

6th Aug. 2009
Finally, this is the last day of our trip in Switzerland. We had lots of events that we didn't expect to happen among us. Even though we had some disagreements and mistakes during our trip, we made a peace fortunately. We shared unforgettable and valuable experiences and memories together.


We took a train at 8 a.m. from Interlaken, and we arrived at Bern around 9 a.m. Bern is a small city, so we planned to stay here only for a half of the day and go to Zurich-Airport on the same day.


Bern is a capital city of Switzerland. We didn't know that until we decided to travel Switzerland. Most of the people think that Zurich is the capital of Switzerland. It's because the cities of Switzerland have their own economic, political, diplomatic specialties. And Bern is an official and political capital city of Switzerland.



Every must-see places in Bern are close to each other, so we could see them by walking through. After we went out of the Bern Bahnhof, Spital Gasse was in front of the station. It was a good start of the day easily finding the place and read the map in Bern.

Spital Gasse has well protected beautiful and classic buildings. I could understand why UNESCO appointed the Old City of Bern as cultural heritage. There were fountains in a row on the street from the main station. I heard each fountain has its own history, but I couldn't find any travel books wrote about it.





Unlike Interlaken, Bern is somewhat busy city combined with old and new. Brown roofs with a bit of yellow made Bern attractive.








We saw Kafigturm, as we walked along the Spital Gasse.











Then, we saw Zeitlockenturm, which is a tower with a big and luxurious clock on the outside of the wall. I heard that the clock provides clock show with dolls every 57 minutes, but we missed the show. Actually, I didn’t expect much about the show. I had seen similar show in Muenchen before, but it was very boring with slow and simple movements of the dolls.

















Bern is also the city known for its fountains.
There are probably 100 or more of them in the city and what few I found have very powerful images. The most interesting fountain was Chindifresserbrunnen, Child-Eating-Ogre-Fountain in English. The ugly looking Ogre was decorated with gold(of course not a real gold), it seemed ridiculous but impressive.




There were many shops along the Spital Gasse.
The street was interesting for me
because the buildings on the street are not in a straight line,
but they were all next to each other.








We visited Einstein Museum, which used to be Einstein's house. The museum is located in the middle of the busy street, so we were confused and strayed for 30 minutes to find the museum. Einstein had lived here for 7 years, and he wrote a first draft of theory of relativity here. We saw some stuff that Einstein had used at the museum.



















Then, we headed to St. Vincenz Church(Munster Church). It took more than 400 years to complete the church
and it is the highest church in Switzerland.
But the view near the church with Are River
was worth to see rather than looking inside the church.




We went back to Bern Hauptbahnhof around noon. We had lunch at a traditional restaurant of Bern before the train at 2 p.m. The waiter recommended us Roesti and we all tried the same. It was similar to Buchimgae with chopped potatoes. Actually, it didn't seem special and it looked easy to cook, but it was delicious anyway!





It took 1 hour from Bern to Zurich. We arrived at Zurich at 3 p.m. We had enough time to go to the international airport named Kloten Airport from the Zurich main station. It took only 10 minutes to go to the airport and there were trains every 10 minutes. Our flight was at 17:45( From Zurich to Paris, from Prais to Incheon) . It was sad that we couldn't stay in Bern until night, but it means there was some room to go there again.


Lastly, we were ready to finish our short but memorable trip in Switzerland.


Thanks for my tripmates Eunjee, Yongmin, and Suming for sharing a happy memory with me in Switzerland.
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