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Home (6/15)

I awoke before the alarm and got ready to go. After the standard hostel breakfast, I made my way to the airport. Things moved along in an orderly fashion, as is the case in Germany, and the plane left on time. It was a 3 ½ hour trip to Reykjavik. This time, we arrived in daylight, so I could see a bit of the terrain from the plane window. What I saw was flat and more brown than green – sort of like moonscape, with pools of water in various places. In the airport, there was very little time between planes for everyone on my flight. We had to go through passport control, and someone had arranged a crazy path of lines through the airport to contain the number of people all trying to get their passports stamped at the same time. One person tried to jump the line, and the “authorities” (who looked like teenage boys) set him straight. People were trying to catch flights to cities all over the U.S. and one or two other places, and WOW Air had delivered more than my plane...
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Bern to Frankfurt (6/14)

Gumperson’s Law is alive and well in Switzerland! Today dawned bright and sunny – and I had to leave! Oh, well . . . guess I’ll just have to come back! My host was enroute to a commitment of his own, and was able to drop me off at the train station this morning.   I took an 11:00 AM train to Mannheim, and changed trains for the last hour into Frankfurt.   Once again, and with nostalgia, I passed through the Freiburg station. What a wonderful time I had there! The train ride was uneventful, which is, I guess, a good thing.   Once I arrived in the main station, it took a few minutes of getting myself re-oriented before I could get myself on the right underground train to get to the youth hostel where I had stayed at the beginning of my trip and where I had made a reservation – 7 weeks ago – for tonight. There is a big conference or trade show or something on in Frankfurt, so I have a bed in a four-person room. (A single room here would have been quite ...
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Paul Klee and Bern (6/13)

It rained again today! I guess I’ll just have to come back to Bern – and Interlaken – and perhaps a few other places. The good news is I had yet another museum to go to – the Zentrum Paul Klee. Klee was born here, in a town just outside Bern, and he came back to Bern when the Nazis including his work among the “Degenerate Art” they criticized in the 1930s. So, Bern claims him as one of their own. Someone build a big museum or “center” to house a collection of his works and to serve as place to promote and discuss art. The building itself is worth seeing, even without the art inside! The area around here is hilly, and the center mimics that hilliness. It is three buildings in the shape of hills, and made from steel and glass. Because of the curved shape of the frame, the building comes out of the landscape in a graceful way. It is a modern building, without points and sharp edges. One of the “hills” is where the collection of Klee’s work is displayed; one is a conf...
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Bern and Einstein (6/12)

I had coffee in my PJs and read the “paper” this morning – heaven! My host had a flight to Hamburg and back this morning, so I was alone in the apartment when I woke up. What a delight!   By the time I was showered and dressed, he was back from his flight. The weather looked crummy enough that I carried a raincoat, and went straight to Bern’s history museum, which also has a floor devoted to Albert Einstein, so I could be inside and away from the rain. I decided to start with the Einstein exhibit/museum, which was fascinating! A lot had been donated to the Bern exhibit by Israel – not clear whether it was the government or another museum. The exhibit detailed his life from his birth in Ulm, Germany, to his death in Princeton, New Jersey. The reason it’s in Bern is that Einstein came to Bern to live with another family when his parents moved to Milan after his father’s Munich business failed. He lived here, and did much of his “high school” and higher ed. here ...
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Bern, via Interlaken and Thun (6/11)

Well . . . Interlaken was a bust! It started raining about the time I left the hotel this morning. (Great breakfast on a terrace overlooking majestic, snow-covered mountains!) I went straight to the train station, stored my stuff in a locker, and hoped the rain would pass quickly.   There were two “attractions” I was interested in, other than the general sense of Interlaken: a funicular with great views, and a Tourist Museum (i.e. a museum about tourism in the area since tourism there began). I thought I’d start with the museum, since the rain needed to pass before the funicular would be any good.   Then I realized that today is Monday, when museums are typically closed.   I checked and sure enough, the tourism museum is open from Tuesday through Sunday. So, I wandered around the shops near the train station – quite a few tourist places – and met a lot of other tourists waiting out the rain by doing the same thing. The rain kept on and on – very unli...
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Ballenberg (6/10)

Off I went to Ballenberg this morning, after reluctantly checking out of my lovely little room with the great view. I caught a bus at the train station, which took me through a neighborhood – almost a “subdivision” – of chalets (I don’t think of chalets as being in subdivisions, but that’s what this looked like.) on its way to Ballenberg. This is billed as a “living history museum” – and that’s an accurate description.   It is a huge plot of land – I don’t have a way to describe how big it is, but it’s big – maybe Disneyland size. But don’t get the idea of neon and rides and selling things – not at all.   This is a natural environment where great care has been taken to maintain the trees and do farming and plant “typical” vegetables and fruits in gardens on the property. Houses and other buildings from all over Switzerland have been moved to Ballenberg and re-constructed. They are arranged in regions to represent the regions of Switzerland. A great effort...
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Another Beautiful Place! (6/9)

Here I am on another balcony overlooking yet another beautiful lake!   This time, it’s Lake Brienz, and the balcony is on the 2 nd floor, not the 5 th . (Actually, in U.S. terms, I’m on the 3 rd floor, because the ground floor is zero, not one. And I was on the 6 th floor in Brünnen – but in Switzerland – and Germany – I’m now on the second floor.) It’s a spectacular view – not quite the same as the other because I don’t have the dramatic sweep of the lake, but it’s pretty nice.   The lake is teal – not blue, not green, teal! It’s the most beautiful shade.   I’ve only seen a color like this in a lake in southern Chile – nowhere else that I can think of. Directly across the lake from me are mountains that still have some snow on them, as well as other mountains that have heavy pine forests. So, how I got here: I left Lucerne by train at about 11:00 AM. Actually, I got to the train station right at 11, and the person at the information desk, when I asked how to ge...
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