Blog 3 Sunday May 24

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Dairy is very important in the Swiss culture because the Swiss make most of there products out of raw materials and the cows are very important part of this process. I think that Lucerne is very accessible for foreign tourists because it is in an area that is easy accessible to other countries and close enough for driving to other cities in Switzerland.


Today we visited a cheese making factory (Bergkaserei Aschwanden) where we learned about Mr. Hans and his cheese factory. The business is family owned and his father works with him. He told us that he is very picky about what they making in the factory and that he only makes cheese nothing else. He told us how he has 16 farmers and 200 cows that he does businesses with. He personally has to travel to pick up the milk from and most of the people are related to him. He told us that his truck holds 2,300 litters of milk per day and that he pays the farmers 80 cents per litter. He also told us that his cheese is a local cheese and that he doesn’t ship it out because it is too hard to get raw products such as his products to make the cheese to pass and be able to get it out of the country. He did however inform us that the U.S. is the biggest distributor of Swiss cheese. At the end we were able to taste some cheese and had the best apple juice ever. It was made by his cousin and had no sugar added. It was probably sweeter than the apple juice back home that does has sugar in it.

After or visit to the cheese making factory we went to Luzern and had a walking tour given by Doris. She explained that the population in Luzern was 60,000 and that at the end of the 12th century Luzern was officially a city. The city had many swans and she told us that the first swans that came to Luzern were a gift by French King to Swiss mercenaries. She told us that history of how the Chapel Bridge was the main line of defense. And part of it burnt down and to this day the Swiss are unsure of how this happened. The other bridge they have is the mill bridge and all the pictures on the bridge were paintings theme of dance of death. After showing us around some older areas of town she then took us to see the lion’s monument, which was symbolic of loss of lives of 800 men and mercenaries that died in Paris. The Soldiers defended the royal palace but didn’t engage the French people.

That night we went to the Feldshloschen restaurant that was at the top of the mountain. The salad was amazing and we had pasta for dinner. After dinner we went outside to look around and take some pictures and there where cows out back were very friendly and you could walk up and pet them. The cows here seem less skittish then cows back home, I think this is because the cows here are handled more than our cows back home. After we got done playing with the cows and taking pictures we returned back inside and had dessert then we got torches from a lady and took a 40 minute walk down the mountain back to the hotel.

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