Bern Switzerland

Bern, the capital of Switzerland, is hands-down our favorite Swiss city so far. It’s about an hour drive from Basel and is located in a U-shaped area surrounded by the Aare River. It was a nice, sunny day, so we decided to take the city walking tour suggested in the tour book we have. We were greeted with stunning overlooks of far away mountains and the river as well as beautiful old buildings, bridges, squares, clocks, and churches. The bear pit – Bern’s most visited attraction - contains two, live brown bears which are the symbol on the Bern coat of arms – it’s not in a zoo, just a deep pit across a bridge where people gather to see the bears. The buildings on the main shopping street are somewhat unique – the sidewalk is fully covered to create a long, arched passageway. Outside the passageway are what look like cellar doors and when open, have stairs leading down to more stores located beneath the sidewalk. Because you can’t see these stores from the passageway, they have glass display cases in the passageway showing you their name and wares (neat-o!). In one of the squares there was a lively game of chess going on, but instead of a regular game board the players were standing up and moving knee-high pieces on an oversized board that they had to stand on. Spectators were either shouting out advise to each player, or cheering and groaning about the last move. We walked up 240 steps of the highest church steeple in Switzerland (100 m) that had a fantastic view of the city. Finally, we visited Albert Einstein’s apartment where he came up with the formula E=mc2. See our pictures of Bern here.