Category: Switzerland

Switzerland, Travel, Vienna Road Trip

Lucerne: unfinished business

Lucerne: walk on the lakeside
Lucerne: walk on the lakeside

Having soaked in an extended culture bath in Bern for most of the morning we finally set off just before lunchtime in bright sunshine.

The clouds have lifted and you can actually see the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau very clearly in the distance.

Our destination for today is Feldkirch, our first Austrian stopover, just on the other side of the border from Liechtenstein. It’s only 270km away but we want to stop in Lucerne, which Dr K says has “some good art collections”.   Continue reading “Lucerne: unfinished business”

Jean-Yves Gilg1 Comment
Switzerland, Travel, Vienna Road Trip

Bern: going green

Green card: passport to brilliant Swiss painting exhibition at Bern's beaux arts museum
Green card: passport to brilliant Swiss painting exhibition at Bern’s beaux arts museum

 

Dr K can be utterly shameless. And Godfather P is no better. No sooner have I bought our tickets for the permanent collection at Bern’s national museum that they’re off. Off to the special exhibition, that is, which is not covered by said tickets and which requires a green badge rather than the blue badges we were given.
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Jean-Yves Gilg3 Comments
Switzerland, Travel, Vienna Road Trip

Fribourg: it’s oh so quiet, but quite charming

Fribourg: stunning view from the cliff top
Fribourg: all quiet on Monday, but charming too

Nothing can be quieter than a Sunday in Lausanne, we thought. Except a Monday, which in most parts of Western Europe can be just as quiet. Office workers and local authority staff are back at their desks but most shops are shut. And so it was in Fribourg, where we made a brief pit-stop to look at a few “good buildings”, to use Dr K’s parlance and have a bit of lunch on our way to Bern.

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Jean-Yves Gilg2 Comments
Switzerland, Travel, Vienna Road Trip

Lausanne: no cheese for dinner

Grinning gargoyle on Lausanne townhall
Grinning gargoyle on Lausanne town hall

We have just finished our main course at Lausanne’s railway station restaurant and are pondering whether to have cheese or go straight to pudding. These are important questions for carefree travellers. I ask our sprightly waitress if we can see the dessert menu, or perhaps have some cheese first. “We don’t have cheese at the end of a meal in Switzerland, but I can arrange for a selection of cheeses for you if you would like,” she replies. Behind her polite smile I reckon she secretly wants us to be sent straight to a Swiss rehab dairy and be reformed in the proper cheese ways. For a split second we feel culturally inadequate but we get over it soon enough thanks to a crème brûlée.

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Jean-Yves Gilg3 Comments