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 unlike the rain we’ve had in the last week, where it rains in the late afternoon, for an hour at most, and then stops, and the sun comes out again, but things have cooled down.  This was constant rain over a period of hours. I finally decided to have some lunch and then I wandered over to the train station to see what was available to get to Bern.

The chatty and helpful receptionist at the hotel this morning suggested that one option might be to take the boat to Thun, and then the train the rest of the way to Bern. Given the dispiriting morning, that sounded like a good option.  At least I could see Lake Thun, and get a bit of a sense of the town by changing from the boat to the train. As I bought my ticket, the sky began to clear up, and by the time I had rounded up my suitcase and gotten on the boat, it was a glorious day! (This was 3:00 PM!) Interlaken has canals – or small rivers – that lead out to the lakes on the respective sides. We took one of these canals from where it ended – right at the train station – out into Lake Thun. There were smallish chalets built along the canal, and big ones at various places around the lake. The ride was about two hours long, stopping at 5 or 6 places around the lake before landing in Thun, which also has a canal that leads up to the train station. The lake is beautiful – hills and mountains all around.  I think I like Lake Brienz better due to the higher mountains and the teal color, but Lake Thun is gorgeous! I’m really glad I took the boat – a beautiful ride, and it made me feel as if I was SEEing something today. It was interesting to me that about 2/3s of the people on the boat ride were Chinese.  I’m not clear whether they were from China, or from Hong Kong or somewhere else, but ethnically, they were Chinese.

Once we docked in Thun, I went right over to the train station, along with a lot of others from the boat ride, and got on a train for Bern. I was hardly on the train more than 10 or 15 minutes, at most, before we arrived in Bern.  Then began another adventure! First of all, I get a really good feeling about Bern. I don’t know what it is, but I like it so far. I had made reservations through Booking.com, which I have used for almost all of the trip. What I didn’t realize, until the “landlord” contacted me a couple of days ago, is that I had made a reservation to stay in a room in a private home. Hmmm . . . interesting. I’d tried to come to Bern near the beginning of the trip, but there were very few hotel rooms available, and the ones that were free were super expensive.  I decided there must be a conference or something going on, so I’d wait until the other end of the trip, since Bern is sort of on the way to Basel, which is definitely on the way to Frankfurt.  The same thing happened this time – few rooms, high prices – unless I wanted a bed in a dormitory, and even those were scarce. I was about to reserve the dormitory when I found this listing and booked it.

It turns out the landlord is named Raul González, and he is from Spain.  He is a flight attendant who has a nice, big apartment in what is a sort of suburb of Bern, but right on the bus line. When there are big fairs, conferences, or whatever, he rents out his two bedrooms and sleeps on the couch. (It turns out there is another fair or conference going on now, but there’s been nothing since the LAST time, earlier in the trip, that I tried to come to Bern.) I was confused when he initially contacted me; no hotel has wanted to get in touch before I arrived.  But then I realized the situation and, though I was a little nervous about it, I thought I’d follow through. We ended up communicating on What’s App, and because of his name and the difficulty we were having in finding a way for him to get me the key, I told him (in English) that I speak Spanish, thinking he might want to leave the key with someone who speaks Spanish. That wasn’t the case, but long story short, I ended up having dinner in town before taking the bus to the apartment, and he completed a needed task before meeting me there.

So, here I am in a suburb of Bern, in a very nice room of a lovely apartment, speaking Spanish with a flight attendant from Málaga, who also speaks German and English. Another guest will arrive tomorrow. I spoke a fair amount of Spanish in Munich, while I was at Prix Jeunesse, because there were a number of people there from South America, Mexico and Cuba. But this is the first time it’s happened in Switzerland. There was a wonderful article in the NY Times today about both having national pride and being a global citizen. (No, it WASN’T about Trump – hardly! It was about the World Cup.) That seems appropriate for today, given where I’m staying!