Day 13: 24/04/06 Geneva/Bern

Foreground = Yj, Background = Jet d'eau

UN: In order to take this picture, Yj braved his life to get to the centre of the road for the best angle.

We found this in Geneva! The duck was not bad but the rest were similar in standard to the Biopolis foodcourt.

Tk and me on a bridge near the hostel in Bern.

Bern's old town has retained the original Medieval layout and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

What are you looking at?

Since we reached Hwee Keng's place rather late the day before and we spent quite a lot of time searching for a street directory on the net in vain, by the time we woke up it was already close to 10am, a record for our trip. The night before we asked Hwee Keng for directions back to the train station, and we hope to navigate from there.

Since we knew the general direction we walked to the train station, and we took the Mont Blanc Bridge to admire the Jet d'eau on our way there. The Jet d'eau, literally 'water fountain', is the landmark of Geneva; it is situated inside Lake Geneva, with a capacity of bringing 2000L of water into the air up to 140m at any one time. We took some photos of it from the bridge. Before we reached the train station, we located a chocolate shop which we subsequently went to purchase numerous boxes of chocolates to bring back to Singapore.

Geneva is a lakeside city that belongs to the French-speaking part of Switzerland; it was indeed not easy to navigate mapless when we did not know the language at all. Even all the abbreviations for the United Nations organisations seemed so unfamiliar. Luckily, we were adequately prepared by Hwee Keng the night before. Anyway, Geneva is very metropolitan; it is the most vibrant among all the 3 lakeside cities we visited.

Since Yj did not know anything about Geneva other than Jet d'eau and the United Nations, the only other place in Geneva we could visit was the United Nations complex.

There were some construction work going on at the plaza in front of the United Nations building. We could not get in and we did not have time to partcipate in the guided tour, so we just went in front of the gate and took a photo of the classic avenue with the flags of the member states lining it. After that we took a tram back to the train station, where we went to a Chinese restaurant 'Boky' (initially we thought it was a Japanese restaurant as we were attracted to it by the sushi sets it offered), and we had noodles and fried rice. My beef brisket noodles were not very good, but Tk's roasted duck was rather nice. Anyway, our first taste of Chinese food in Europe :)

We left Geneva for Bern after that. After we arrived at the train station Yj, without informing Tk and me where he was going, went ahead and expected us to follow. Tk and me decided to let him stay in front and we would just follow him wherever he led us, including the walk to the hostel, without helping him with the navigation.

Yj went to the tourist information to get a map. Tk and me went to look at other brouchures and discovered that, Bern, being the capital city of Switzerland, was a UNESCO world heritage site due to its well preserved medieval city style; it was also where Einstein came out with the theory of relativity. There were quite a few museums, buildings and monuments which were of interest. And all Yj told us about Bern was 'there is nothing much to see there, just a bear pit'. Well, that was what happened when he did not have a travel guide with him...

We went onto a shorter route march (compared to Heidelberg) to the hostel; the hostel was on the other side of the old city, which we reached after ~30min of walking. All the way Tk and me did not assist Yj in his navigation even at times when he was confused. Our consensus: since he did not know how to navigate, it would be possible that he gets lost in a desert with no gas station within 900km radius with his grand-junior in a car that has exhausted its petrol. Hence for the safety of grand-junior, he needed practice which he lacked. Anyway, his navigation was quite successful and we ended up in the correct place without losing our way. A round applause for Yj.

After we settled in we went to the rose garden to look for roses; there was no rose as usual but we did find a lot of ladybirds whereby one pair was corpulating. It was a nice place to take a panaromic view of Bern too. From that angle, the whole old city, which was surrounded on 3 sides by the river Aare, was visible; with the setting sun behind the church towers illuminating the whole city, it was very beautiful.

The bear pit, which Yj featured, was nearby; it was actually just a round structure built in the ground with bears in it. It was really nothing much; the bears in Singapore zoo were much more impressive. I did wonder whether Yj knew the significance of bears in Bern: the bear is the symbol of Bern, it is in the coat of arms of the canton. It is believed in legend that the founder of the city named it after a bear he killed.

We went round the old city after that. There were numerous fountains in the middle of the roads in the old city which used to serve as wells for people to collect water. There were a lot of interesting sights within the old city: 2 clock towers (which I had forgot the names, and their significance unknown due to lack of information), Einstein's house, shops located in the basement of the houses accessible through trapdoors in the ground, etc. We saw an Einstein soft toy (it was really cute) which we were so fascinated at but we couldn't buy it as the shop wasn't open.

For dinner I had beef tripes in tomato sauce; initially I didn't know what that was and when the waitress repeated the order I thought she was saying 'chips'. I was asking where my 'chips' came from when she realised I didn't know what was 'tripes', and explained it to me. (If you also do not know then take out a dictionary please..) As a Hongkonger deprived of that in Singapore I really welcomed that. The food came in a pot with fire constantly heating it. The sauce was really good and the tripes were at their optimal texture. Tk had some pork stuff as usual (haha I can't remember what; can't tell from the picture Yj took also), and Yj had these beef cubes with numerous sauces which cost Fr30+. He needed to disperse his francs which he had too much to spare I reckon.

We took a very long time to find our dinner place and hence it was rather late after our dinner. We went back to the hostel for a while and went out again to the Parliament to admire the fountain in front of it. It was basically the kind of fountain with numerous water jets shooting out from the ground like that one in Bugis Junction, but it was larger in scale. The fountain was spitting out jet by jet when we arrived and we were thinking that we were being cheated when it started to shoot all at one go; illuminated with blue light the fountain gave the empty plaza a rather serene atmosphere. We took numerous pictures and tried to get a good one with our hopeless skills and cameras, and some indeed turn out quite well.