Switzerland with Brad

NOTE: I added a few pictures a few hours after I first published this entry.

After London, I flew back to Switzerland where Brad was staying in the northern city of Basel.

Basel would be a nice place to work and live. It has clean streets, excellent trams and a cosmopolitan environment. I sat at a Kebab restaurant on my first afternoon and heard a jazz trio perform with a female voice in the neighbouring cafe. I walked around and noticed at least three restaurants selling Japanese bento (lunch boxes). I didn't get to go to any bars or clubs, but two of the girls in my hostel went to a pitch black restaurant where a blind hostess leads you to your table where you are order a meal and then eat it in the dark.

As for landmarks; I saw a few half-timbered shops; although most buddings were made of stone brick or concrete. The city hall was painted a bright red and had painted murals and a stature in it's courtyard. Somewhere downtown there was a fountain made by an artist called Jean Tinguely. Tinguely was known for taking broken things lade of metal and turning them into works of art. His fountain in Basel is a menagerie of junkyard metal shaped into moving fountain parts. You can pick out old bicycle wheels, watering can spouts, pistons and the like.

Brad spent his days at a lab affiliated with his in Australia. His work was taking considerably less time then he anticipated, so he was looking to see more of Switzerland than he thought he had time for.

We spent our two evenings with grocery store food and beer in the kitchen in my hostel chatting; being stupid and formulating plans for the following days. We decided to head to Luzern which was supposed to be scenic in a typical Swiss way.

The next day in Luzern was a blast. After dropping out bags at the hostel we headed out into town. There were clouds up in the mountains, but we decided to head up one of them rather than wait for a cloudy day. Pilatus is a famous mountain right next to Luzern. At 60 dollars to get up and down, it is also one of the cheaper mountains to get up. We took a train to the base of it and then waited for the Funicular, which Brad read was the steepest one in the world (it was too expensive to make a longer and less steep track). The engineers found a way around the dangerousness of a steeper track, and added an extra set of teeth on the tracks so that two sets of gears could pull the carriage up the mountain.






Once at the top of the mountain we spent about three hours running around taking pictures. The clouds persisted for most of the time but we got a few good breaks in the clouds (which was fog at that height). There was one path that was too close a steep drop for my liking and being afraid of heights, I chickened out before we could get anywhere.



At the end of the trip something amazing happened. For the first time in 3 months, I got excited about souvenirs and actually bought something. I got a Swiss army mug for Sunny (teacher in Korea) and a knife and poster for myself.

There was a bit of mythology about the mountain too. I was too distracted to read atop the mountain; but brad was into the multi lingual displays. Apparently, the local townsfolk have though a dragon lived atop this mountain for a long time. A few people went missing, so that dragon lust have gotten them, right? Brad also read that the mountain was named Pilatus because Pontius Pilate was believed to be exiled or buried there after the whole Jesus mess. He could have been thrown in a lake too.. I'll have to ask Brad. The last amazing thing is that Odea Shupe, originally from Caledonia, NS stayed in the hotel on the mountain when she was checking out a tour that her employer, Travel Cuts, sells.

Heading down the mountain on a series of Gondolas, Brad and I took some shots of us walking around and sitting in the grass. He found a dry spot to sit on, I was busy setting the timer on my calendar and sat a soggy patch of dead grass.








Back in town, Brad and I wandered around the quiet streets (it was the night before a holiday so shops were closed). Climbing up the old city walls we could see over the town and across the lake to the mountains beyond.

We stopped by the river and had cheese fondue; it had wine in the sauce and Brad was feeling it.





We then headed to

The dying Lion of Lucerne [Which], is one of the world's most famous monuments. It was carved out of natural rock in memory of the heroic deaths of the Swiss mercenaries at the Tuileries in 1792. Mark Twain described the Lion of Lucerne as "the saddest and most moving piece of rock in the world".

Mark Twain was right, it was pretty sad.


I said goodbye to brad before we went to bed and then got up early (while he slept) to make an early start for Grenoble, France. I took the long way around and managed to stop in the Interlaken region for a few hours. The train ride and the stop were beautiful.