An interesting place Bern.
Full of happy and polite Swiss, clean, tidy and with an
ultra efficient and extraordinarily quiet public transport system.
When we arrived, we were expecting a city devoid of
attractions based on previous reports that we had read. I suppose that if you
are in your 20s, that may be true. But
not for the “olds”
Back to the story so far......
After arriving in Bern and taking the No 9 tram out to our
hotel, (trams are like trains here – when the tram leaves its station at its
designated time, the doors slam shut and off the tram goes. We saw people separated
where some of the group had alighted the tram and some the group had not when
the doors closed) we decided to return to the train station to purchase our
train tickets to Cologne. This was, in hindsight, a very wise thing to do.
As previously mentioned, Switzerland is not cheap. I decided
that I would buy a ticket to the first German town from Switzerland (Frieburg)
and buy a ticket from there to Cologne, all on the basis that train tickets
were probably cheaper in Germany. To buy a ticket from Bern to Cologne was
around $500 on the internet in Australia, and I reckoned I could do better. Off
to the ticket machine I went and keyed in Freiberg. The machine told me that 2
tickets to Freiberg would cost 24 euro. Knowing that the price to Interlaken
was twice that for around a quarter of the distance, I decided that there had
been a glitch, so I started afresh.....for the same result. Wary of the
problems I had encountered in Paris trying to buy tickets from Dijon to Bern, I
sought out some assistance from station staff. It was at this point that I
discovered that there is a nearby town named Fribourg (which the ticket machine
converted to after I typed in Freiburg) As it turned out, I couldn’t buy a
ticket on the ticket machine and had to queue for around 20 minutes to buy our
tickets out of the country – the machine only sold tickets to Swiss
destinations. As we were running on somewhat of a tight timetable on our train
travels, Gloria expressed some relief that we discovered this today rather than
the following morning and missing the train that we wanted – the whole process
took nearly an hour....
We wandered around the city centre and Gloria browsed
through the usual clothes shops. We wandered along the riverbank and came
across a bear park – yes, a park with bears in it. Admittedly, the bears were
behind reinforced glass walls but it the closest either of us had been to any
sort of a bear....
Not far from there was the rosengarten, which as the name
suggests, is a park full of roses. We sat on a seat here and ate our
crystallised orange pieces dunked in chocolate and a very nice pomegranate
tart. The Swiss know how to make a sweet.....
The best of Switzerland –
5. Fast, quite and efficient public transport.
4. Chocolate.
3. Very friendly, happy and polite people.
2. A males paradise – I have never seen so many beautiful and
attractive women.
1. The stunning scenery.
And the worst –
1. The prices –
extraordinarily expensive.
