August 16, 2015

August 16, 2015

Last night we meet up with Becky, the daughter of one of Aimee’s cousins. She lives here with her German husband. Both are physicists with scientific jobs, living only a few minutes east of the lively and cute Old Town Freiburg. They also have the most adorable four year-old daughter. I don’t envy her finances though. Multiple tax returns. She is an American citizen (dollars), living in Germany (spending Euros), working for a Swiss company getting paid in Swiss Francs. Yikes!

This morning we hopped back on board the train and crossed the border into Switzerland at Basel and continued on to the capital Bern.  When Aimee needed $2 to use the bathroom, I knew the price of tourism just doubled.  After checking into our accommodations we give ourselves a walking tour of the Old Town.  We start off in a drizzling rain, but after an hour, the weather clears and we enjoy our first cool weather.  Finally!  

Old Town Bern, a UNESCO World Heritage site, sits on a tight U-bend of the very swift Aare River, an easy to defend spot in Medieval times. It is a cobblestoned city similar to Freiburg, just upscale.  Instead of rowdy university beer halls, there are lots of expensive classy restaurants and pricey shopping.  Luckily most are closed on Sunday. Bern derives from the German word for bear, so this animal adorns everything, including the dozen or so fountains filling the city. They even keep a few live bears in a city park. All the Bern streets are lined with medieval looking arcades, apparently to protect residents from the frequent rain showers.  

The favorite adopted son of Bern is Albert Einstein who moved to Switzerland from Germany and got a job as patent clerk here. This not-so-demanding government job gave him to time to think about the universe and in 1905 he published five groundbreaking papers in Theoretical Physics.  The most famous was his Special Theory of Relativity.  We tour the little museum that is contained in his old apartment.

My feet are tired after three days of walking, so we finish by riding the trams around town getting to know the city and stopping at nice vantage points.