Today we got up again around 8am, and headed down for another Hostelling International breakfast buffet. They’re always the same: bread, jam, yogurt, cereal, some form of fruit, juice, milk, coffee and tea. After breakfast, we packed up and headed off to the train station.
We took the 10.18 train directly to Bern Bern Bern
After dropping our bags, we headed off to visit the bear pits. The town has had bears in a pit for a historical number of years. At some point, the animal activist groups got angry at the pit that they animals were living in, as you can probably understand from this picture:
They built an underground tunnel into a large green area next to the river, and I would say that the bears have quite a large amount of space to romp around in now. We spotted them in a corner enjoying the afternoon sun:
We had lunch on a bench near the pits, and the birds immediately spotted us eating. I’m pretty sure they’ve figured out how to identify people eating food. They were just little finches, so we didn’t mind too much; pidgins are much more annoying. The finches hopped right up to us and waited until crumbs fell from our bread (we had bread, cheese, and pears). They seem to flock here the way pidgins do in other cities – there were quickly a dozen little birds looking up at us expectantly.
After our lunch and having a look at the bears again, we did some window shopping and walked around town. On our way through town, we stopped at the largest munster
We saw one of the old city gate clocks that has a mechanical display that goes off every hour. We haven’t seen the clock go off yet, but hopefully we will pass by it sometime tomorrow.
We headed back to the hostel for 3pm, and got checked into our room. We used the internet to do some research on what we could do for the rest of the day, and after settling in for a bit, we headed off to visit the Rose Garden that is up a large hill and provides an excellent panoramic view of the city.
Unfortunately, many of the roses were not in bloom, but we enjoyed smelling a few of them. One particular rose, the Sutton Gold, was extremely aromatic.
There were gardens around the rose garden that were fully in bloom, and provided a nice dash of colour.
After our trip to the rose garden, we headed back to the hostel for dinner and laundry. Mary largely dealt with getting the laundry going while Jeff cooked up some tasty dinner. This evening we had spaghetti with canned tomatoes (cooked down into a sauce), diced zucchini, and grated carrot. We also drank half a bottle of Swiss wine – a Pinot Noir from the Valais region along the Rhone . It wasn’t particularly spectacular. Tasted like wine, but was definitely drinkable. Jeff says “It probably could have used a decant”.
While making our dinner and cleaning up afterwards, we had to deal with other people that weren’t very respective of other people. Someone had left a pot of soup on the stove and a number of pieces of cutlery scattered on the counter around it. Someone else had left a large bag of groceries on the counter, and was nowhere to be seen. With the limited counter space, and only 4 small burners, we definitely had to make an effort to work around the mess that had been left.
We finished our wine leisurely, cleaned up our mess in the kitchen, and sat down to a cup of tea. Someone turned on the tv in the common area, put it on a French channel, and turned up the volume. We’re looking forward to heading up to our nice quiet room on the 5th floor once our laundry is done, and going through the pictures of the day. Our hostel room has a lovely view of the city:
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