After German and Scandinavian hotels, breakfast here was a disappointment. No buffet, just three pieces of breadstuff per person, with an allocation of butter, jam and creamy cheese. To his credit, the guy did offer a second glass of orange juice, but still… this is how people starve on continental breakfasts!
One thing I do like, however, is the way the Swiss serve coffee: it arrived with a pitcher of hot milk. You pour simultaneously from both, and end up with something that’s about 50% milk, and hot enough to be good.
Went out into a chilly, cloudy morning, walked across the bridge to the rose garden. Very pleasant, very peaceful. Followed a Wanderweg sign, ended up in a large Friedhof. No really old stones, and nothing like as religious as a Bavarian Friedhof. (This is another difference between Switzerland and Bavaria: the religion in Bavaria becomes cloying, even disgusting after a while, with its crosses and corpses, religious murals, elaborate churches, shrines; in Switzerland there will be a church in the village if you care to look for it, but it will be plain and small. If you want a cross, you can probably find a few in the cemetery. But never a cross with a corpse. To my taste, much better.)
Back into town, stopped for another look at the bears, who were eating fresh evergreens this morning. (Well, and why not? Doubtless it’s high fiber.) There are three pits; we saw four bears (there may be more). One was sitting on his butt, each hind foot clasped in a front foot, snapping food out of the air. Someone threw down a bit of carrot that overbalanced him a little, and he rolled onto his back, caught the food in mid-air and just stayed there, grabbing the next few morsels in the same way. I can see why they’re favourites.
In Switzerland, Münster translates to Cathedral. Fairly plain, but decorated with dark paint to simulate stucco sculpture.
We climbed to the top of the tower, a long way up – a hundred meters, according to the bumpf. Nice views out and down.
We especially liked the self-portraits of the architects and artisans, arrayed around the gallery all the way at the top.
Went to the Bahnhof. Bought a train ticket to Thun from the machine (SF 5,70), only to notice that it was valid only on the day it was sold. Oop! Went to the ticket counter, where the woman refunded my money without a squawk and told us to buy our tickets tomorrow.
All the windows have shutters. And many of the doors have knockers.
On the way to the Bahnhof, we had noticed a sign for a vegetarian restaurant, Govinda. We went there. Third floor, via an elevator large enough for two if they’re close friends. Indian paintings on the wall, Indian music on the little stereo. Shoestring operation, clean and pleasant. A third of the tables were low, with cushions that allowed you to sit on the floor if you preferred. The waiter-owner was a Brit who said he’d been here seven years, didn’t speak Deutsch. Prix fixé, pretty good. He offered a second helping, and I took him up on it. Outstanding.
The town is amazingly full of bookshops, some new but mostly antique, interior furnishings shops, some new but mostly antique, toy shops, knick-knack shops, gift shops, jewelry shops, art shops, new or antique. All this is very nice, but after a while, you start to wonder where the real people are, where the real people shop. (This is why there’s an infrastructure layer down by the river – that’s where we found a grocery store, for example.) I’m reminded of San Francisco – the tourist center seems to be too good to be true, and it is.
Still, a great place for vacationing, walking. With an unlimited budget, it would also be a great place for shopping.
Noticed a sign for a Pferdmetzgerei. Checked their counter: they had beef and chicken, but sure enough, most of their meat was horse.
The tourist information center at the Bahnhof sold us tickets to the 4:30 tour of the clock tower. In the meantime, we wandered through the produce market, got a basket of blackberries. Walked and sat and munched until – surprise! – the berries were gone. There’s a funicular cable car from parliament hill down to the river. The district below is home to a dialect called Mattenenglisch: Matten meant low, and englisch meant unintelligible! Strolled along the shore – very nice.
If you’re a muralist, what better way to advertise your wares than a mural?
There’s a weir, a diversion, and the river splits. My nasty, suspicious eye immediately suspected a power canal. We followed the canal for a while; at the point where the river again becomes one, my nasty suspicious eye saw a powerhouse. If you looked, you could even see the tailrace where the water rejoined the river. I imagine a lot of people, those without nasty, suspicious minds, see this every day and it doesn’t occur to them that megawatts are being created right here beneath their feet. Under the Nydeggbrücke we stumbled onto the mostly hidden remains of a really old city gate.
Back to the clock tower, the Zytgloggenturm, just in time for the tour. The only other people were a British couple with a ten-year-old son, so the guide spoke English. Originally, this tower was a gate in the city wall, and was open on the side facing the city. It was only completed as an enclosed tower after the city expanded to a new set of gates.
The clock and the works were ignored, abandoned for many years; only in the 80s did they become a labor of love for the old guy who maintains it today. He fixes everything, lubricates everything every day, hunts for spare parts, keeps it all going. I heartily approve of this little show of private initiative, even though the clock is owned by the city.
It turns out this was actually a standard for many years: all distances were measured from here; reference models of the standard units of length (both English and metric) are built into the wall; and the clock’s time was the standard until the Bahnhof was built and the railway clock superseded this one. So it was with considerable surprise that we found a pendulum only about two meters long, swinging through at least 30° of arc! Some standard!
But fun. Large stone weights. Our guide showed how they keep the clock running while they crank the weights back up every day. Elaborate artifacts on the outside: as well as the ordinary clock hands, there is a complete set of figures, bears, hunters, a rooster that crows (bellows activated by the clockworks!), a figure that beats the bell with a hammer, and father time conducting the whole ritual.
This is merely the entertainment part. The thing is also an astronomical clock, with the moon and the zodiac. The guide showed us how to use the clock to tell time in the system of unequal hours! Considering its technology, it’s pretty impressive.
The entire clock, frame and all, is assembled with clamps and cotter pins, and it has ever been thus. About 75% of the clockworks are original components, mostly cast or wrought iron. The escapement, in particular, has been replaced with steel – makes sense; that gets a lot of wear.
Speaking of standards, we’ve come across three streetside standards stations in Bern. These are little kiosks, very modern, that permit the average citizen to sate his curiosity regarding the current temperature, barometric reading (both via mercury columns), humidity, and, on an engraved steel plate, the exact latitude, longitude and elevation above mean sea level.
We hunted out the Thai restaurant we saw last night: Shoog Dee. It also had seating on the floor for those who wanted it. A big Stammtisch group, a collage of Euros and Thais, children. Good, very hot, much better value for our money than last night’s pizza. Back to the hotel in time to see a cat climb out a window onto the roof opposite and curl up in a very private niche under the eaves.
About 9:30 we took a short walk to see the city by night. Very pretty.
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