I’m sitting on the train leaving Bern. Two men just got on the train carrying
assault rifles and placed them in the luggage compartment. They are, of course, members of the Swiss
army. Welcome to muthaflippin’
Switzerland, b****es.
DAY ONE
Actually, Bern really isn’t as interesting
as the event articulated in my opening paragraph would seem to suggest. Breakfast at the hostel was good, though
quiet. I was staying at another official
HI Hostel, and I have to say it was a very similar experience to the last
one. It seems to me that HI Hostels are
primarily occupied by older generations trying to feel young by entering a
place designated ‘youth’. They bring the
youthful feeling of the places right down, though – I met plenty of older
people in Lisbon particularly that managed to keep the hostel atmosphere
lively, so I thin it is mindset far more than age.
(As an aside, my ticket was just inspected
and, for the first time ever, the guy actually stamped my Eurail pass. Um… what?)
The one benefit of a HI Hostel, though, is
that they do decent breakfasts. Well,
actually, that’s not true of all of them.
But it was true of this one. In
that it had bircher muesli (I’m easy to please).
For certain reasons that I’m not sure I
will communicate here, I had revived motivation to complete my PhD
application. For those not in the know,
I have been putting together an application to complete a PhD at St. Andrew’s
university in Scotland. All the
excitement had made it very difficult to find time to work on it, but I was
adamant that I would have it finished before leaving Switzerland.
But I didn’t want to spend my first day in
a new city writing a PhD application. I
also needed money, since Switzerland likes being a pain and not taking up the
euro. I had some GBP left over from
England, and concluded that I wouldn’t be spending too much, so I could just
use that and save having to change any euros.
Swiss banknotes are plastic (I think… they
certainly don’t feel like paper) so much closer to what I am used to. Then there’re the coins. From sf5- down, you use a silver coin in the
expected denominations (though sf0.5 is written as ½ on the coin itself). You can also get denominations less than one,
which I dubbed Swiss Franken Cents (hurr hurr hurr).
I walked up the hill to get some
money. The bank I went into was huge,
but had very clear signage so I was able to find the exchange desk. The clerk couldn’t speak English, and I can’t
speak German, but she was clearly used to bumbling English-speakers wandering
in, and pointed to an instructional sign written in every language under the
sun, took my money, put it inside some kind of official counting machine (which
counted all four of the notes I had given her!) and gave me sf108-.
Armed with cash, I left and decided to go
to the bear pits. Bern means bear. Bears are popular. They are the heraldic animal, and there are
paintings and statues of them sort of everywhere (at least in the old town).
Bern is a really pretty city, and it isn’t
just me who thinks so. The whole old
town is a UNESCO heritage site. Which
sounds rather excessive for a series of chain stores, fast food outlets and
entertainment complexes.
After wandering around trying to find a
bridge across the River Aare (not sure how to pronounce that – I’ve been saying
“Aaargh” very dramatically) I found one.
It had barbed wire along the edge.
You know, to stop people jumping off.
Maybe they should consider something like that on the Storey Bridge (I’m
kidding, it’s stupid).
The bear pit was right next to the
river. Seeing a bunch of tourists
goggling down around the pit, I got excited – the bears must be doing something
interesting!
The bear pit is exactly what it sounds
like. A pit. With bears in it. Four of them.
Only you couldn’t see them because they were sleeping. Turns out all the tourists were just having
their photos taken with a large plastic model bear, put there just for that
purpose. Weirdly, I read a couple of
signs, one saying that the bears in Bern don’t hibernate because it’s not cold
enough and there’s plenty of food, and one saying that the bears might be
hibernating if you couldn’t see them.
Well… I couldn’t see them.
Disappointed, I noticed a large hill in the
distance. I didn’t really know what it
was, but I decided that I would go there because otherwise I would feel like I
wasted the day looking inside an empty pit.
On my way, though, I saw a sign pointing towards an animal park, or a
zoo, or something.
(Another aside – the train is passing a
powerplant that is spewing thick white smog into the sky, which is literally
turning into the chain of cloud that I’ve been able to see out the window for
the last five minutes or so).
I got to the zoo. It was alright – you could see flamingos and
ducks and donkeys for free, but then I reached a paid-for section and couldn’t
see the point. I’d already made up for
the severe lack of animal in the bear pits.
So I went toward the hill.
To get there, I was walking through
suburban sprawl. To be honest, it was
nice to get out into spaces after being cramped up in tight, winding, busy
cities. There was quite a bit of snow
lying around, and I regularly took detours to walk across a particularly
settled-looking section of snow.
Unfortunately I had no-one to enjoy the snow with, so it just ended up
with me looking silly taking very big stomps on tiny patches of snow by the
side of the road to get a nice crunch.
Then it started going uphill. I had assumed that the hill would be some
kind of nature park or something, but the houses continued up the hill as
well. About halfway up they stopped
continuing and it became more clear footpaths.
There was a layer of ice over the paths, which were very steep. Luckily I had come prepared with some spiky
straps that I put over my boots. From
that point I had no trouble with slipping, except when the straps came loose
and I lost a spike. I didn’t fall over,
though.
I kind of expected there to be a castle at
the top (I can dream, can’t I?) Instead
there were a series of restaurants and a large sledding track. I didn’t have a sled, so just watched the
toddlers being dragged around by their parents.
Bern seems to be a city filled with young families – I saw so many
babies and toddlers in my time there.
Walking a little further, I came across a
view of the alps. Wow. Wowowowowowowowowow. It was like a 360 degree panoramic postcard. The mountains had a painterly quality to
them, making them feel ethereal. It was
stunning. So I left to go back to the
hostel.
I tried to do some work on my application
that night, but kept getting sidetracked.
I booked myself in for dinner at the hostel, concluding that this would
be an opportunity to meet a few new people.
It wasn’t. I had a silent dinner,
booked my next couple of hostels and went to bed.
The next bit’s a little… gross… but I’ve
made a conscious decision with this blog to discuss all aspects of my
travels. You may want to skip this bit
if discussions of awkward bodily fluids aren’t really your thing.
The fact is that males have certain…
evening functions that they are unable to control. Not really wanting to have a wank in a hostel
shower in order to relieve tension, wet dreams can become a bit of a problem. At home I have managed to develop a kind of
system whereby I wake myself just in time to get to the toilet, interrupting
the flow if need be with a nearby tissue.
This saves on the painful process of having to change sheets late at
night.
But in a hostel the toilets are on the
other side of the building, and the last thing you want to be doing is
stumbling through a dark room, clutching at your doodle surrounded by people
who are probably wide awake because of that one guy who snores. But you also want to avoid the awkward
conversation where you go to the front reception and ask for new sheets because
you spunked up the last bunch.
I’m going to be honest with you, I haven’t
got any real solutions. If anyone has a
suggestion, I’m all ears.
DAY TWO
I woke up that morning to discover my towel
was missing. I had left it hanging up to
dry next to another towel, which had also vanished. They had both been present when I went to
bed. So, having been in Lisbon, Madrid
and even Barcelona, the first time something is stolen is in Switzerland. Go figure.
I worked on my application until about
11am, but at that point I felt a little like I was intruding on the hostel
staff and their cleaning, so went out for a bit.
(Another brief interjection – just changed
trains at Zurich station. Oh my
God. 54 platforms! That’s total insanity!)
Well, I started off in the old city. The plan was to be out just long enough for
the cleaning to be done, around 2pm, then head back and finish my work. As an incentive I planned to go to
Grindelwald an Jungfraujoch in the alps the next day if I managed to finish my
work.
Walking around the old town I was
distracted by a sign pointing me towards the Bern Historical Museum. I had three hours to kill, a museum would be
smart. I had kind of left in a rush, so
was wearing my slippers rather than boots, so an inside activity was certainly
preferable.
Well… I stayed in the historical museum
until it closed at 5pm. They had a floor
dedicated to Einstein (with a crazy mirrored staircase going up to it) and it
was really interesting, outlining his entire life, theories, discussing the
first and second world wars (Einstein was an activist for peace and a Jew) and
including information about Jewish faith and Swiss history. It seems that the idea that Einstein was not
very good at school is false, attributed to the fact that German and Swiss
results are measured in the opposite way from one another (that is, in German 6
is the worst, while in Switzerland 6 is the best. He got 6s in a Swiss school for most maths
and science subjects.)
Upstairs there was a floor dedicated to the
history of Bern. There was a lot of
information, but the stuff I mainly remember is that Toblerone was from
Bern. I also found the perspective of
the two world wars from a neutral territory interesting, especially in regard
to the Second World War.
It was back to the hostel, then, to do some
more work and have dinner. I failed to
complete my application, unfortunately, so the trip to Grindelwald was not to
be. Instead I was intent on finishing
the application once and for all.
The reason I failed to complete my
application was that I met two Australian girls. I had to strike up the conversation with them
at dinner when I heard them speaking with an Australian accent. They were about my age, and I was craving
conversation.
They were leaving early the next day to go
to Madrid. They were very excited to get
to a party city (sigh) as they had found Bern quite boring. I expect from that you can work out what they
were looking for in a city. One of them
in particular was extremely dismissive of museums, sights, and really any
daytime activities. I decided to make
them feel guilty and uncomfortable by complaining about all the Australians I
had met in Barcelona that had craved McDonalds and just gotten drunk all the
time. Maybe it was a little unkind (and
certainly not subtle) but I am sick to death of coming across Australians who
spend their entire trip hungover in bed and judge a city on how big the parties
are. Especially when all the other
cultural groups I’ve come across have been so adept at mixing their cultural
exploration with their nightlife activities (with the exception of that group
in Madrid, but I will forgive them as it was Madrid and that was really the
purpose they had come for that weekend).
I don’t want to seem a party pooper – in
the right circumstances I really quite enjoy going out, and was put out that I
couldn’t take advantage of Madrid’s nightlife due to fatigue – but really.
DAY THREE
To make a long story short, I did. I had a quick walk around old town from 11-2,
bought a new towel, bought a Bratwurst hot dog (yummy) and got right into
it. And finished.
I needed to reward myself somehow, so I
went to the cinema to (finally) see Django
Unchained. My thoughts in a moment,
but first, the way cinemas work in Bern is interesting. Assumedly, as the old town is heritage
listed, they can’t just build a multiplex.
The alternative that they went with appears to be to have the multiplex
spread out over a number of single and dual screen cinemas all over the
city. My understanding is that they are
all owned by the same organization, as each screen screens one film and one
film only. I had to find the right
screen for my screening.
The cinema was packed. I’d managed to find a screening in English
with French and German subtitles. There
were only two screenings of the film that day – one at 2:30pm, one at 8pm. Halfway through the film (for those who have
seen it, the moment after Leonardo di Capri says, “Gentlemen, you had my curiosity,
now you have my attention”) the screen went blank, the curtains closed and
everyone started chatting and getting some snacks. They had a fifteen minute intermission in the
middle of my damn movie. I found that a
tad irritating.
Anyway, the movie itself. Perhaps I had built it up for myself too
much, or I am too much of a Spaghetti Western fan. Having seen the original Django, a number of other Sergio Corbucci films, and considering
the Leone westerns the best of the genre, I was hoping for something
genre-defining, or at least mildly reminiscent of the great moments. But… it wasn’t. It was funny, it was entertaining, it had
some great characters, the plot was reasonably well structured, but the
references to spaghetti westerns were just way, way, way too obvious. WAY too obvious. I mean, come on – crash zooms? That’s like ‘baby’s first spaghetti western’
kind of techniques. I expected more from
a supposed expert like Tarantino. Where
was the coffin containing a machine gun? (Ok, so machine guns weren’t invented
at that point, but come on, in his last film Tarantino had Hitler killed at a
film premiere by an American hit squad – I don’t think historical accuracy is
his primary concern).
The references to films like The Great Silence were far too basic,
revealing nothing about the genre, about America. And any character who wasn’t a main character
was a dumb caricature. It wasn’t long
before the racial thing got tired, too.
Anyway, I think that anyone who just has a
passing interest in westerns rather than, you know, having actually studied
them extensively for a year, will find an entertaining film, and that’s really
all you’re supposed to expect. I guess.
DAY FOUR
This isn’t a real day in Bern. In fact, today is day four, and I’m sitting
on a train writing this blog. I’ll
probably only be able to upload it in Rome, unless the Milan train station has
free Wi-Fi.
I’m taking a scenic route through the
Alps. It’s snowing fairly heavily, so
you can’t really see anything. It’s
pretty, anyway.
Well, that was the most beautiful train
journey ever. The carriage snakes its
way slowly up through the Alps, tossing snow to the side as it goes. And the snow gets thick. People would take the train up to one of the
skiing peaks and then ski down to the station again. The sky cleared up and you got the panoramic
postcard effect that Switzerland seems so good at.
Somehow, though, I seem to be unable to
have a train journey without incident.
It started off pretty well – all of my tight connections waited for my
train to arrive before leaving (the Swiss trains are a well-oiled machine –
they have all the delays listed on their website with complete details of the
reasons for the delay. My favourite was
“accident involving people”.)
On the train that would take me to Tirano,
on the Italian border (actually, it’s on the Italian side) the train stopped a
few stations short. And turned off its
engines. I, not expecting there to be
any troubles on a Swiss train, stayed seated.
Everyone else got off.
Fortunately the conductor noticed me and
waved me off, indicating (he couldn’t speak English, I couldn’t speak German or
Italian) that I should take a waiting bus.
As we drove down the mountain he pointed out what had forced this change
– part of the mountain had collapsed onto the railway.
Just as it had between Spain and France, everything
changed after crossing the border.
Suddenly things were brown rather than green, drivers honked and tried
to hit anything that moved (and most things that didn’t, too). The roads stopped making logical sense.
I had reached Italy.
TO BE CONTINUED
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