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Published: April 5th 2009
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... this lead to the city been called Bern.
After having a delicious breakfast with Sabine and wishing her luck with her studies I was on a 9am train to Berne. Bern (or Berne) is the capital city of Switzerland and actually the old town is on the UNESCO heritage list.
Thanks to the Eurail pass me and Nadz got there I got to take the train without buying a ticket. When I got to Bern the tourist info centre was there. So that's where I went first. As usual I hardly know wherever to visit in a city so I thought why not ask the tourist office where they would recommend. The girl gave me a map and told me to have a walk along the route from Spitalgasse to the Rose Garden to the bear pit, to the rose garden to the parliament house and back. So I did. It took me a leisurely 2 hours to walk the whole thing. It was a nice city to walk through. I went to the bear pits eventually.
Bern Bear Pits: Legend has it that the founder of Bern, Berchtold V von Zähringen, killed a bear on the Aare
Berne bear.
He looked so sad. peninsula and this led to the town being called Bern (from German "Bär") and explains why the city's coat of arms features a bear.
The existing Bern Bear Pits have been in the same location since 1857. In 1995/96 most areas of the Bear Pits underwent renovation with the aim of providing the bears with a habitat more naturally suited to them. I don't know it was a bit sad when I saw the bear in the pit, he or she just looked so lonely and forlorn at the people staring at him/her and I felt like the bear was saying to me get me out of here. Then I went up to the Rose Garden. It was all snowed over but the view from up there was spectacular - that's the picture with the whole view of the Berne old town. I had lunch - the salami and bread I had left over from yesterday.
After lunch I headed to Bern Historical Museum/ Einstein Museum. I think I spent about 2.5 hours in the Einstein part of the museum maybe 3. The museum had a historical section as well and some stuff about Hallen - who was
something of a genius - At the age of four, it is said, he used to read and expound the Bible to his father’s servants; before he was ten he had sketched a Chaldee grammar, prepared a Greek and a Hebrew vocabulary, compiled a collection of two thousand biographies of famous men and women on the model of the great works of Bayle and Moréri, and written in Latin verse a satire on his tutor, who had warned him against a too great excursiveness. When still hardly fifteen he was already the author of numerous metrical translations from Ovid, Horace and Virgil, as well as of original lyrics, dramas, and an epic of four thousand lines on the origin of the Swiss confederations, and went on to study medicine (in Lieden in the Netherlands) and teach it and write all these crazy works... and well the guy did everything.
But really for me the focus was on the Einstein bit. See I know he created something about the Relativity theory and specifically mass-energy equivalence, expressed by the equation E = mc2. They had some interesting information showing how the theory of relativity worked in the museum. I thought Einstein
was like this nerdy scientist who sorta stuck to himself and maybe even killed himself? But no turns out he lived to a nice old age. And he was amazing at the violin. I was pretty surprised by that I guess cause they are so very different things right science and instruments? maybe not. But also this guy was a bit of a player and a womaniser i mean he had women left right and centre from his first wife whom he broke it off with to his next wife whom he had multiple affairs with other women while being married to her. I was like wow this guy seems alot more human with I guess all these faults. Also he was asked to be prime minister of Israel at one point. The exhibition was quite good and also there was a nice historical bit about Switzerland going back in the early 20th century for example Lenin lived in Berne?? And it was interesting to see which countries the German Reich occupied during the second world war.
Anyways after that museum I headed off to Berne station caught the train to Basel, waited for a while for my night
train and then got a bit of sleep before getting to work Monday morning. Whew!
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