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Day 2 Trip - Visit to Bern, it's Capital

Friday, May 12, 2006

8.30 am: We caught a train and is on our way to Bern. Remember the train that we took from Zurich? It's the same kind. Now, we are sitting on the upper deck. The only difference is that we're now higher up, thus we could see the scenary that we couldn't before.

2.40pm: I'm feeling sleepy already. Now I'm back on the train towards Thun, hoping to catch the ferry that travels Lake Thun, back to Interlaken West.

The time that we spent this morning is quite a mouthful. Immediately after we left the train station at Bern, we took a bus (No. 12) to the Bear Pit. It was at the last stop, that we realised that we took the bus to the wrong direction! Luckily there wasn't that many stops. We took the same bus and went straight to Bear Pit, with the help of the bus driver. He's our shoten zenjin (buddhist god)!

At the Bear Pit, we saw 3 bears. Big Brown Bears! Wow! We managed to take their photos, but without me. Why? I had always disliked myself on the photos. But I did try to be part of the photos, but my aunt is such a hesitater, and she always make me move here move there to take better photos. I told her that the camera is with her, she should be the one moving, as she would have a better picture of what is on the screen Besides, she takes such a long time to adjust this and adjust that, that my eyes, which were facing the sun, hurts.

Speed is a very important factor for a photographer, as once you missed the best time, you'll miss it forever. She had learnt photograhpy once upon a time, and yet she seem not to understand this theory. I wonder where her learnings went to..

We saw the Bern Show, which talks about Bern's History.

We went to Rosengarten too! We saw a great deal of flowers, only after climbling up a very long and very steep slope. I think we climbed for around 15 to 20 minutes! The slope was so steep, that I didn't dared to walk down it!

We passed by an old lady whom she said was 77 years old, although she looked younger, and she told us that tulips were just over last week. So, Hui Kian should have managed to see it if she visited the Rosengarten. Although the old lady also said that most of the flowers have not bloomed yet, we still saw lots of yellow flowers. Besides flowers, we also had a great view of the whole capital.

As we dared not walk back down from via the slope, we decided to exit from another gate, which made us walk through the streets where ordinary Swiss lives. Again, we saw art graffittis. I also saw that they have speed cameras too! It looks just like ours. Amazing!

As we walked, blindly, we managed to find the busstop that has bus No. 12, and got back to Bern RailCity. From there, we took a BernMobile to Gurtenbahn. This rail is just like a train, but the tracks are not the rail tracks with stones, but the tram tracks. It walks on a 2-lanes car road. So imaginea train, with around 4 cabins, on the road, concurrently with other buses and cars, and wires above it. I think if it were to walk a Singapore road, it would jam up the whole place!

We arrived at Gurteuban Station (which is something like a bus stop), and walked around 5 minutes, up a slope to the tram station, where we took the tram at CHF4.50 each (with discount with Swiss pass), up to Mount Gurten. On the tram, I was thinking "Oh no! How are we going down again?!" The tram moves up a very steep slope! So steep that I felt that it was a slow version of the roller coaster! But when we reached the top, we realised that we did not make a bad choice afterall. We could see the whole Bern at birds' eye view, just like the map!We took our lunch at the mountain top, as we enjoyed the scenary. We walked around for another 1/2 hour, before taking the tram back down. This time, I bravely sat at the front row, and realised that it wasn't that scary afterall. So here I am, now - Thun.

LA~mour @ 11:59 PM