We had a visitor! From Sunday October 4th until Tuesday October 6th we were busy exploring Switzerland with Dr. Rachel Levine.  Rachel was a fellow grad student, and former roommate of Melissa’s at the University of Minnesota, who recently received her doctorate in Chemical Engineering.  Being between school and a job, she took the opportunity to travel to Paris, and was able to squeeze in a visit to Switzerland too.

On Sunday at 11:30 a.m., she arrived in Lausanne by train from Paris.  We had a quick lunch at our apartment, then headed back to the train station to begin our sightseeing.  Our destination was Lucerne, a very stereotypical Swiss city in the German language region.  Train rides in Switzerland are just as worth it as the destinations, and our ride flew by as we rode through the idyllic countryside, with the  snowcapped Alps visible in the distance.  It was a good time too to catch up with Rachel, and to enjoy a bottle of wine that we had brought along for the ride.

In Lucerne we exited the train and were greeted by a carnival featuring a huge Ferris wheel and lots of noisy people along the glacier lake front.  We made it through the crowd, and then took a short walking tour of the city’s sights.  We first slowly walked along lake Lucerne stopping often to take pictures and admire the view of the lake with the mountains in the distance, then we came to Lucerne’s famous crying lion monument.  It commemorates the defeat of a Swiss regiment defending the king during the French revolution.  From there we walked through old narrow cobblestone alleys to the river, and the Spreuer bridge, which houses my favorite sight in Lucerne, the plague paintings.  The paintings, nestled in the rafters of the covered bridge, show different scenes of people and skeletons and have poems below them in German that basically say we’re all going to die.  Below is a link I found to a scanned book from the university of Dusseldorf that has reproductions of all the paintings and English translations of the poems.

http://digital.ub.uni-duesseldorf.de/urn/urn:nbn:de:hbz:061:1-77608

The translation of the above German poem is:

“So soon a child is born it’s cry

is woe, it’s first plaint too a sigh, 

it’s message thus the world doth send,

that every hour a life shall end.”

For dinner we found a restaurant next to the river, and ordered fondue and Rosti, the most traditional Swiss dishes we know of.  Shortly after dinner we boarded another train and came back to our apartment to rest for the next day.

Monday was our busiest day of sightseeing.  Melissa took the day off of work, and after a breakfast of croissants we were off to the train station again.  Our first stop was Montreux, a scenic town on the eastern shore of Lake Geneva.   We had a lovely view of the lake and mountains from the town’s long lake walk, and ran into a sculpture exhibit along a portion of it.   For lunch we had a cheap meal of sandwiches, with a bottle of Swiss wine, but ate it enjoying million dollar views of the Alpine landscape.  Melissa was watching the time for our next train, but misjudged it.  We lingered a little too long at the Freddie Mercury statue, and when we came back to the train station we saw our train just pulling out.  The wait for the next train was an hour.  We spent it walking through the hilly side of town until we found a park with a scenic view to hang out at, that also was the hang out spot of some very European teenagers taking a smoke break from school.

The next leg of our trip was to the Cailler chocolate factory in Broc.  From Montreux we took a train that looked like it was straight out of the 1930’s called the golden pass line.  It took us high above the town, through dramatic mountain valleys, and after a long tunnel, into the canton of Fribourg.  We changed trains in the town of Montbovon, then rode through green valleys filled with Swiss cows, past the picturesque Gruyere castle, and finally to the town of Broc and the chocolate factory.

Melissa and I had already taken the tour, but it was still fun to re-experience the corniness of their animatronics, and of course to sample all the chocolate at the end.  I was proud that I restrained myself enough to not get a stomach ache, and during the tour I paid enough attention to learn that Switzerland became famous for chocolate after the 1870’s when a Swiss man invented milk chocolate.  After the tour a light drizzle started outside so we waited at the factory, doing a little chocolate shopping and sitting in the cafe sipping espressos until our train out arrived.

It was around 5 p.m., but we still had one more place to see.  From Broc we navigated the train system until we made it to Bern, the capital of Switzerland.  Despite a confusing mass of tram ways, and after a wrong turn or two, we eventually found our way to the historic old town of Bern.  We started our exploration by a large clock tower called the Zytglogge, which stands on the site of where the city’s wall and western gate were in 1250.  From there we walked along a large street, called Kramgasse, that went through the heart of the old city.  There was surprisingly little car traffic, so we were easily able to walk out into the street to better see the fountains and rows of uniform old German buildings.  The sidewalk of the street was tucked in amongst the buildings, open to the air, but with building space above keeping the rain out.  Shops of all kinds were on the ground level, and interestingly some cellar doors were open with stairs leading to different stores below ground.

After a couple blocks on the Kramgasse we took a right turn to find our way to the cathedral.  Bern’s cathedral is in the gothic style and very ornate. To me, the most interesting things were the very well preserved painted statues above the main entrance that are supposed to depict the last judgment.  We found a quaint restaurant for dinner, but when it came time to pay the waiter said they only accept cash, which was strange, and the first time we ran in this in Switzerland, and of course we didn’t have enough cash.  Rachel offered to walk to an ATM, and luckily was able to find it and return quickly.

On Tuesday Melissa went to work, while Rachel and I slept in and had a lazy morning with crepes for breakfast.  It was raining, but by around 11 a.m. we left to begin sightseeing around Lausanne.  We first went to the train station to store her bags, then looked around the EPFL campus while we waited to meet up with Melissa.  The three of us went to Lausanne’s city center together and ate lunch at a microbrewery.  Then we toured the old winding streets of Lausanne up and down the hills and to the cathedral as it continued to lightly drizzle. We also visited a few shops to help Rachel pick out some decidedly Swiss souvenirs – a pocket knife and cheese. While Melissa and I are well aware of how the Swiss pride themselves on their building quality, a small old Swiss woman helpfully reassured Rachel (in French) that the knives here are top notch.  Loaded up with all her quality Swiss goods,  Rachel said goodbye and caught a train to back to Paris at 4:30 p.m.

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