Bern

By the way, I messed up in my last post, the town we stayed in was called Gimmelwald...I realized right after I signed offline. Anyways, we left Gimmelwald yesterday after hiking to a waterfall which was really pretty. You are even able to go behind the waterfall so I got some neat pics of that. The only not so fun part was it rained on our way back down to the town, so I got pretty soaked. But the best part was we got to walk through a cloud! From halfway down he mountain we could see the town get enveloped in a cloud and then it continued on up to us. So in two days I got to touch both a glacier and a cloud. We took the train to Bern in the afternoon, only 50 mins from Interlaken. By the time we got to our hostel here it was raining again so we had a lazy night of eating dinner, reading, and doing laundry. I was especilly excited about the laundry part, although both the washer and the drier had multiple problems and I now know the nightstaff of our hostel pretty well.

Today we slept in until 9 (way late for us as of late) and went out to explore the old city of Bern. I really like Bern, there are 3 main streets with lots of shops and resturants. One of them is obviously the alternative street and has tons of tatoo, piercing, and erotica shops. First we went to Albert Einsteins house and toured around the small flat and saw a video on his life. This was the place where he thought up the theory of relativity. His life was a bit strange with me mostly wondering what happened to his first child, a daughter with a woman he later married. All the video says is that his illegitimate daughter was "possibly" given up for adoption...it leaves the mind to wonder. After that we went to the Bear Pit. The bear is on the Bern flag and is a major symbol here. In the bear pit was one sleepy bear named Pedro. I don't know what kind of bear he was, but he was pretty big. We also went to the Bern Cathedral, which was very nice although now that I have seen Notre Dame I am a little spoiled when it comes to cathedrals.

We grabbed a small lunch for a big price. Everything in Switzerland is so expensive! We went to a Starbucks to grab some drinks, but the hot chocolate was 6.80, for a small! Ridiclous. Thank goodness our hostel includes breakfast. We got back to the hostel at about 5 and now Mark and Steve are doing some laundry. Especially nice about Bern are the flowers everywhere (especially a lot of morning glories) and the pretty river that runs through separting the old town from the new town. Our hostel is near the old part of town directly behind the parliament building. Another nice thing here is that almost everyone speaks English and the public transportation is reliable! Those are both a bit of a change from Italy...

Tomorrow we leave for Frieburg in Germany and hopefully things will be a bit cheaper there!