Honestly don’t have too much to report – spent the past three days in Bern, and whilst it’s a nice city, having come straight from Interlaken I am ashamed to admit we’re a little bored!
It’s a pretty enough city (it IS the capital, after all), like all Swiss places clean and safe, but lacks the natural beauty of Interlaken and its surrounds, bar the beautiful turquoise river that flows through.
Bern for me has been a city of small let-downs – the forever spoken about ‘ogre fountain’ whilst cool in that it depicts a giant eating wiggling babies, its only a very small fountain that doesn’t stand out at all. The ‘amazing clock’ that does something special on every hour was a couple of chimes and rotations of some figures. Whether we came at the wrong hour or it was broken, I don’t know. I just know I was expecting a lot more. However the mini not-let-down I had was the bear pits – although I didn’t see any bears, I thought it was going to be a horrible, tiny bare (haha) concrete enclosure. It certainly was tiny and concrete, but had a lot more rocks and green in it than I had imagined, so and so because I didn’t actually see the bears I wasn’t overcome with sadness for their lives.
The one stand-out thing for me was visiting Einstienhaus – Eienstein’s house where he lived whilst working in a patent office here in Bern and where he formulated his special theory of relativity (and the very beginnings of the general theory). Also a partial let down because it was much more of a memorial and autobiography than a museum, however I was thrilled that I was in the place where Einstein had walked and formulated and discussed his physics-changing theories, and I even got to sit at his original desk from the patents office!!! You may be able to see the ecstasy in my eyes (if you are looking for dilated pupils, we really shouldn’t be friends) in the photos taken there.
But apart from that, not much else to report. I did just buy a book called The Red Queen, which looks like it applies the Red Queen hypothesis to sexual selection, an interesting way to look at human nature. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, the Red Queen hypothesis essentially says that evolution is relative in relationships (biological relationships such as predator and prey) – an example is how we are forcing bacteria and viruses to become must nastier as we continually get cleaner and cleaner. It’s called the Red Queen hypothesis because it’s based on the red queen in Alice through the looking glass – remember, how she kept running and running and got absolutely nowhere because the world was moving with her? Anyway, I’ve just read the first chapter and it seems like a really good read.
Missing you all a little extra today.
XX
Bern photos
