Bern & Zurich

Two weekends ago I did a little Switzerland tour spending Saturday in Bern and Sunday in Zurich. I must warn, there was not much on the itinerary, I didn’t plan this weekend, some friends handled the task. And since northern Switzerland was a hotbed for Protestantism during their revolution, there are few Catholic sites to behold, so even when I checked for those kind of sites I didn’t find much.

We arrived in Bern late Friday afternoon, hiked to our hostel to drop off our gear and then headed out into the city for a pre-dinner walk. We saw the parliament building as well as the old town. We just wandered for about an hour. Traveling in Switzerland is very expensive, we could not find a sit-down place with agreeable prices for dinner, so I ended going to a street side kabob vendor, which while still expensive did not break the bank and was very delicious.

The next day we returned to the old town in the morning where an open-air market was well underway. There was of course fresh produce, cheeses, and meats but there were also vendors selling fresh churros and crepes. There was also a large section with purses, bags, hats, scarfs and all other types of clothing as well as Swiss knives, movies, precious rocks and all sorts of other nick-knacks. The coolest part though may have been the over-sized chess set in the center square.

After a bit of walking we grabbed lunch, but I stopped to listen to a man playing the accordion in the street. He was playing classical music and he was amazing. I listened for about ten minutes and ended up buying one of his CD’s. Afterwards we picked up our stuff and got on a train to Zurich.

An hour later we arrived. Zurich looked very similar to burn, cobblestone streets winding through lanes of beautiful renaissance buildings. Cleanliness is rivaled only by Germans, but prices are rivaled by no-one, and not in a good way. We stopped to sit in a plaza right outside a McDonald’s. A Big Mac alone was 11.70 CHF, which is the Swiss Franc, and it’s exchange rate is 1.06 Dollars to a Franc.  We walked the old town, grabbed dinner at a gourmet burger place.

Sunday I left the group sleeping in and headed to Mass. Zurich is close to Germany and its Catholicism is similar in that it has been unfortunately effected by much unapproved non-sense so Mass was a struggle. After Mass I hauled to the train station and barely caught the earliest possible train out and back home, but not before one of my favorite rides of all time.

Switzerland is a country so beautiful I could never write well enough to do it the slightest justice, but let me give you a glimpse at one of my favorite images of Switzerland. Northern-most Switzerland is comparatively flat to the majority of the country which is completely mountainous. There is a train track that runs from Zurich in the north, through the country splitting it in two, down passed Riva San Vitale to the boarder town of Chiasso all the way to Milan.

As the train enters the mountainous majority of the country moving southward it enters into a valley, and follows this valley all the way to the southern boarder. As the mountains rise the valley narrows and for a while becomes like a ravine, above are snow covered peaks, beside are countless little waterfalls draining water from the mountains into the river flowing through the ravine below. This scene carries on for nearly two hours, changing some, lakes appear and disappear, quaint picturesque towns with sheep and cows grazing, stone churches, all nestled in this sleepy narrow causeway.

Anytime I go north I take this route or at least part of it, and every time it is an amazing ride.