October 21st, 2021
Day 20: Burning Through Bern In Half A Day’s Time
With one almost-full day to explore Bern, we started off the day with brunch at Becanto Kaffee and Bar. The cafe was not very close to where we were staying so it took a while to get there by bus and then on foot but we eventually made it. At first, we weren’t sure what we were getting into because the cafe was randomly located in a faraway neighborhood. However, after ordering from the menu and getting our food, we confirmed that this cafe was definitely the right choice for brunch. For brunch we thoroughly enjoyed their waffles with berries and whipped cream and toast with avocado, bacon, fried egg, sprouts, and hollandaise sauce. So good and totally worth the trip! Once we were done with brunch, we were off and running! With so little time to see Bern, we had a lot of ground to cover. And even though I’d already been to Bern once, way back in 2013, it was a blur of a visit and Cynthia wasn’t around then either. So, there was much to see today in the capital of Switzerland!
From our brunch location, we took the city tram and then bus to the Bern Rosengarten, one of the city’s famous and most beautiful parks, located on the top of a hill overlooking old town Bern. Because the Rosengarten was the farthest location we planned to visit, we wanted to start there first and slowly make our way back into the city.
And it ended up being a perfect starting point. The park was beautiful. Not only did it have wonderful views of the city below, it also had trees covered with leaves that had been taken over by the fall. We walked around the park until we reached the side of the park with the views of the city. There, while enduring the morning’s strong winds, we stood and enjoyed the panoramic view of old town Bern and its autumn landscape as the scattered clouds floated through the sky above. This is what fall should look like! Not like what we see in Los Angeles…
After enjoying the fall colors, we walked down to our next location, the Bear Pit, where we spotted two big brown bears hanging out in their enclosed park space next to the river. It took a while before the bears came out of hiding but they eventually did. And for Cynthia, the Bear Pit was heaven! Her love for animals made this a perfect next stop. We stayed and watched the bears doing their thing for a while. It was fun to just stand there and observe these curious animals doing their normal, everyday things. For example, we observed the big male bear walking in circles around his park area. Over and over again. We weren’t sure whether it was his exercise routine for the day or something else but we had a fun time watching him and commenting on his actions.
It took a while but we eventually peeled ourselves away from the Bear Pit and continued on into Old Town as we slowly worked our way back toward home via Gerechtigkeitsgasse, the main street through town. Some highlights we saw on our walk included tons of unique and colorful fountains (something that Bern is known for), the Zytglogge, Bundesplatz, The Berner Munster, and Munsterplattform Park. Once we were back in midtown, we took a short break at an outside table in front of Coffee Fellows to enjoy our apple pie we had purchased earlier at the brunch cafe and a matcha latte. It was nice to find an opportunity to slow down and take it easy.
It wasn’t long before we got going again and wandered over to see the last park of the day at Kleine Schanze. Funny enough, as we walked over, some of my memories of Bern came back to me and I recognized the park as one I similarly walked to and through way back when! No wonder it felt and looked so familiar! We walked along the back side of the park and briefly enjoyed the view of the fall colors and orange rooftops below before we turned back and strolled through the park to see the Universal Post Monument, our last Bern stop. It was mid-afternoon by this point and because we had to get to Zurich at a reasonable time, we returned to the AirBnB to clean up and grab our stuff before heading back to the train station to grab the next train to Zurich.
The train ride was pretty short so we arrived in Zurich about an hour later with plenty of time to spare. Because the train station in Zurich was huge, it took some time to figure out where we were going but we eventually found our way to our nearby hotel, Hotel Josef, where we checked in for the last few nights of our trip.
The rest of the evening was pretty quiet and laid back. Since it was dark and cold and we had two full days to see Zurich, we thought it’d be smart to just take it easy tonight. We hung out and rested in our hotel before wandering over to Restaurant Khujug, a Chinese restaurant in a trendy neighborhood close to our hotel, for dinner. There, we ordered the beef with black pepper sauce with rice and the fried egg noodles with tofu. It was pretty good, and it definitely helped satiate our Asian food cravings we’d been having more frequently these last few days.
With nothing planned for the evening, we headed back to the hotel and called it a day. Wow,
we’re finally in Zurich, our last leg of the trip! Crazy to think how much we’ve seen and done to get to this point. And how smoothly things have been going for us this trip! How fortunate we’ve been so far. Can’t wait to explore the culture-rich Zurich over the next and last two days of our travels!
5 Things I Learned/Observed Today:
The bear plays an important role in the history of Bern. It all started with the legend that the city was named after a bear with the bear serving as Bern’s emblem after it was the first animal to be hunted in the surrounding woods of the city by the city founder, the Duke of Zahringen. As a result, the bear is very important to Bern and that is why there are bears kept in town at the Bear Pit generation after generation.
Supposedly, as winter nears, bears can feast on some 200,000 berries a day in preparation for the long winter hibernation. Wow!
Munsterplattform is Bocce Ball Plaza, the place where people congregate to get in a friend game of bocce ball against other random people or bocce ball friends.
The Zytglogge in Bern was built around 1218-1220 to serve as the gate tower of Bern’s western fortifications. Since its construction, it has served as a guard tower, a prison, a clock tower, and a civil memorial. At the top of every hour, there is a little show by the clock’s mechanizations that is actually a lot less interesting than I thought it’d be…
In Switzerland, I’ve noticed that old Swiss people prefer using hiking poles as their walking aides instead of the more commonly-used canes or walkers. That’s so very like and representative of them! And probably says a lot about their preferred activities now and when they were young and sprightly.
