Bern and bears

On Saturday I took the train to Bern, the Swiss capital about an hour and a half ride northeast of Geneva. The ride itself was beautiful, providing a great view of Lake Geneva, the countryside -- where patches of farmland line the hills -- and the ever-present mountains in the background. Like the city bus system, the rail is clean and efficient. My only fear was that I’d board the wrong car and end up in Italy or somewhere equally far.
Bern is a really great city. It’s a peninsula surrounded by a river, which restrains it to quite a small area and makes it really easy to navigate on foot. The buildings are beautiful with storefronts on the bottom and living spaces on the top. Every block or so down the main streets are ornate water fountains. Bern is in the German-speaking part of the country and seems to be influenced a lot by that. There’s a giant cuckoo clock in the middle of the town, and brown gingerbread-looking houses with smoke pluming from their chimneys are scattered about. There also were lots of street vendors selling the biggest pretzels I’ve ever seen. It amazes me how such a small country can have such vastly different regions.
I stopped by the Einstein Haus, a museum made of the flat he once lived in while working at the patent office in Bern. I guess I can’t get away from physics! The museum itself, which is filled with lots of old belongings of Einstein, wasn’t really worth the 6 francs admission, but it was still interesting.
From the train station, Bern expands downhill. At the end of the peninsula and across a bridge are the bear pits. The bear is Bern’s mascot, so they keep four or five of them in these pits kind of like a zoo. Visitors can buy bags of fruit to toss down to them and I guess they sometimes do tricks for the food. They didn’t do any tricks when I was there; they just looked really sad. Their living space is pretty small and I felt kind of guilty for staring at them.
The city also has lots of shopping and a huge market with fresh food and various trinkets was set up in the main square. I also took a walk around the Parliament building. Although I’ve never been to the White House, I can imagine that the atmosphere there is much different from the Swiss capital. I didn’t see one security guard.