Cass had a day off on Friday of this past weekend, so we made plans to go up into the mountains somewhere and do some hiking. At first we thought we would go spend the entire weekend in Grindelwald, but the weather looked iffy on Saturday, so we decided to break it up and spend a night in Bern on the way down.

Bern is the capital of Switzerland, and it is located in the Canton of Bern. It’s located on the Aare River, so that’s the body of water that’s in a lot of the photos. We got checked into our hotel and went out to walk around the city. Cass was trying to use the augmented reality feature on Google Maps which must have made us look like we were completely lost, so a guy who looked like an old retired surfer dude wearing a pink tank top and shorts with long gray hair stopped and gave us some very detailed directions to find the Einstein House. We passed by the Zytglogge tower with the astronomical clock. Einstein House was closed, so we walked on and took a bus up to the top of a hill where we found the Rose Garden. Took a few photos of the city from up there, and I found a maroon rose that looks more red in the photo I took.

We also found the Bern Bears. Bears are a symbol of Bern, and they have a bear pit (Bärengraben) right along the river that is home to several bears. They even have a bear bath area where they can get in the river. Then we went down to the edge of the river, and Cass had to put his feet in the water. The last thing we did before heading back to the hotel was walk across Kirchenfeldbrücke (a bridge) and I took a photo of the Federal Palace (parliament) from there.

Saturday morning we headed out to go see the Einstein House, and on the way we walked through a farmer’s market. It was out in front of the Federal Palace, so we got a few photos there too. The back side of the palace had all of the shields of Switzerland’s cantons across the top. I was going to buy a buff (see: Survivor) for hiking at one of the booths in the farmer’s market, but when we walked up to look at them the guy was doing something that involved having his pants down around his ankles, so we GTFO of there!

Finally we got to go in the Einstein House. This is where he (Albert Einstein) lived while he was working at the patent office in Bern and when he wrote 4 papers that were published in the Annals of Physics are a big deal or something. It’s located on the top 2 floors of the building, which is just a regular building, and it looks like people still live in the other apartments. They have original furnishings in that one living/dining room, and the upstairs. rooms (which must have been the bedrooms) was more of a display/museum area. They had copies of the 4 published papers, and they were all written in German - which makes sense, of course, but something I never really thought about.

So those were the highlights of Bern. Very neat place. But now we were ready to head to the mountains, so we got the train to Grindelwald. More about that in Part 2.