Exotic Switzerland!

Title courtesy of the movie "Moulin Rouge!"

Saturday the 14th I got up bright and early at 4:30 to get ready and catch a 6:10am train. I went with Juli, who's from Chicago and is here with the same exchange program as I'm on. We had bought our tickets online to print out in the station, but for some reason the machine decided it didn't want to print them. As a result, we had to buy new tickets from Chambery-Geneva, Geneva-Berne, and back. Epic, epic fail.

So we got to Berne around 10? Dropped our stuff off at our hostel. Explored a little bit. Stopped and got coffee because we were super tired and because it was snowing and absolutely frigid. We wandered some, took pictures, and got lunch. There really isn't a lot to see in Berne. Yes, it's the capital of Switzerland and yes it's a World Heritage site and it's medieval and all, but for the most part it was just a lot of stores. They did have museums, but we didn't go to any. I did, however, have spaghetti with Bernese sauce (or something to that effect). It was red sauce with bacon/ham, mushrooms, and pork, I think? It was really really good.

From there we wandered more. Went to Lush, which is like Bath & Body Works or The Body Shop, but entirely natural/organic, totally awesome, and may or may not be more expensive; I lost track of exchange rates. I bought a weird but awesome exfoliating moisturizer thing. All the labels were in German so I kind of just picked one up and went with it. I really liked the store, though, and I'm excited because there's one in Cambridge and one in the Burlington Mall. Guess I'm going shopping when I go home. =P

The one problem I had was that everyone there spoke German and no one really spoke French. Switzerland had 4 official languages, according to Wikipedia: French, German, English, and Romansh. I feel like Italian should be in there somewhere though. Anyway, so I was thinking, "Awesome! I can still speak French!" ...except no. There are French, German, and Italian regions of Switzerland, and they speak Swiss French, Swiss German, etc. Aaaand we wound up in the German region. So it was frustrating not to be able to communicate or to have to search out people in the stores who spoke English, and frustrating not to be able to speak French. I would rather have gone to Genève or somewhere French if I had known, because I hate being the person who just goes somewhere without being able to speak the language. But what's done is done. It was still a good experience, and made me want to learn German even more now. Like I need more of a reason to learn other languages.

We went to dinner at a restaurant called Punkt, which served a mix of various Asian foods. I got shirataki, which is Japanese, but I couldn't tell you what was in it. I got a Japanese beer called Asahi to go alone with it. They didn't have sake, which was disappointing. Both were pretty good though. We wandered more, then were lame tourists and totally passed out for like ten hours.

Sunday we got french fries at the McDonald's in the train station in Berne. Because we're cool like that. Had three hours to kill in Genève, so we went to lunch. Unfortunately, Genève is in the French part of Switzerland and apparently follows all the same customs; hardly anything was open at lunchtime. We wound up at an Indian restaurant. I don't know what I got because it wasn't the same thing I ordered. It wasn't bad though.

Overall, it was a decent weekend. I thought there would be a lot more to do in Berne, so I was a bit disappointed. It was cool to see a place like that though, where things were clearly medieval and quaint and such. And now I can check off Switzerland from the list of countries I haven't visited. :) I would like to get back to Genève at some point though.

Slideshow of all 86 pictures I took can be found here: Yay pictures!