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Published: June 12th 2008
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I repeat: Lucerne is nowhere near as “quaint” as the guidebooks would have you believe. Once you get past that, which took us a while, it’s a fine city.
We set out to see the “old city” of Lucerne, which is supposedly the finest instance of modern mixing with new. In reality, it’s far more new than old, but you can still find traces of the old with the city walls and random narrow alley/street. Getting to the old city brings you through the famous covered bridges, which are splendid, being lined with flowers and having illustrative paintings every few steps on the inside that tell the city’s history. It’s also overflowing with tourists so we hurried on to see the old city.
We tried the same random walk here that’s worked so well during the rest of this trip. Here, it sort of backfired. There’s not really much to see in the supposed “old city”—it’s all shops and restaurants, like a big outdoor mall. We did end up seeing the old city wall, but didn’t realize it at the time and were still not too impressed. By this point, we were kind of ticked at the disappointment of
an “old town” that’s basically a mall. We decided to go ahead and see an alpine garden attraction that seemed a bit hokey but probably worthwhile.
On the way, we saw the famous dying lion statue that honors the Swiss soldiers who died protecting the French King Louis XVI. It’s a nice change from the overflow of Romanesque stuff I’ve been seeing, and towers huge but well-hidden in the middle of such a modern and bustling city.
In the garden itself, we saw the natural, smooth pits formed by water in the side of the mountain (which are why the garden is there). It’s interesting, because when the garden was made they theorized that the pits were formed by boulders swirling in the flowing water rubbing off the surrounding, weaker rock. This theory has since been disproven, as the water itself suffices, but they still keep up a working “model” of the original theory. For posterity I guess.
We rushed through some displays of the natural environs surrounding Lucerne, and through an example old-style Swiss house. We hurried up the tower in the garden, hoping for a great view of the city but getting a mediocre view
of a third of it (when it was originally built it was probably enough— no longer). The park justified itself for me, however, with the next attraction—the mirror labyrinth.
This part was really fun, smacking of an Arabian fantasy with a triangular “gird” where each side of the tiled triangles could either be a mirror or not—and without feeling your way around it was very hard to tell which. Ergo there was a lot of wandering and bumping into walls. They interspersed different things through the maze that looked complete due to the mirrors but in reality were only maybe a sixth of what you thought you saw. And at any one time I could see a dozen or more of ME, which was hawt.
After catching up with Brent (who got to the end far faster than I) and playing with the mirror thingies they had at the end (human kaleidoscope, whee), we exited the maze. There, a selection of funhouse mirrors provided me with some more amusement and interesting pictures before we headed out of the garden.
We then decided to forget about the supposed “old town” and follow the lakeshore to see what we
could find. This was far more interesting, as we found an old church, some cool red Tudor-style houses, and a group of Swiss playing Bocce ball with skill I’d never seen before.
We headed back for food, ate some cheese fondue that cost far too much for its cheese-and-breadness, then headed to the tourist office to see what the heck else there was to do in this town, since we felt we had exhausted everything before 4pm. We took the suggestion to head to the walled church quarter, which was nice because it felt large and yet isolated from everything else. We also saw a huge belltower on the way that had been ringing for no particular reason all day, and was really exorbitant but cool and LOUD.
Afterwards, with a lot of time still on our hands, we decided to try to see the new Indiana Jones movie in a foreign country. After asking the tourism office for showing times and locations, we walked for 40 minutes or so to and from a theater that was closed. Thanks for telling us, tourism office people. Real smooth. I had to prove to them it was closed by translating
their own guide for them, and then had to prove to them that another area theater did indeed have it in English by translating a language I do not know again. Eventually they gave us bus directions to the MAXX theater which had a showing in about 40 minutes from the time. The buses were surprisingly nice, fast and frequent, so we made it in plenty of time.
The theater was great, and we had the English screening almost to ourselves. Not sure why the few Swiss couples there decided to watch the subtitled version instead of the dubbed one next door. One can only assume they know English well. The movie was fun, but should not be called an Indiana Jones movie, as it throws reality and character right out the window for fantastic scenes. And they paused (yes, paused—it literally said “pause” on the big screen like a DVD player) a 2 hour movie for a 15 minute intermission. Not something you see in the US.
After heading back to town, we decided to see the next soccer game (Holland and Italy). We found a huge watching party and sat apparently in the Holland area. Brent
and I deiced to each support a different team. I chose Italy. I chose wrong. Italy got whomped, 3-0. It was fun, though, to see a sea of people so excited about something. Hup Holland! It’s also cool how so many Germans were supporting Holland just as much as they did Germany.
We’re going to try to see Geneva on the way to Annecy, France tomorrow, so it’s an early day. Wish us luck!
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