Bern
Around 2 pm I got on the train to Geneva. I was only in Geneva for 15 minutes, which was just enough time to buy a postcard in the train station and catch a commuter train that goes to Zurich and makes a lot of stops on the way. There was never a great view from the train, I could only catch glimpses of Lake Geneva and the mountains through the trees and houses along side the train tracks. By the time we got out of the built up urban areas of Geneva and Lausanne it was too dark to see anything. I got off the train in Bern; it’s the capital of Switzerland and right in the middle of country. I was back in German-speaking Europe and had to find an ATM to get some Swiss francs. The bills are really brightly colored and full of images. They look more like glossy magazine ads than paper money. The coins are all silver and plain looking. Pictures of the bills didn’t turn out well, but they looked weird. The first night in Bern I went to bed early.
The next day was a busy and interesting day. Bern is a small city -- only 180,000 people and the old part of the town is crammed onto a narrow strip of land where the Aare River wraps around a mountain. A lot of the town is expensive shops and cafés, but the buildings are beautiful and old. There are colorful little fountain-statues everywhere and old government buildings. It’s in the middle of the Alps, but it was too foggy to see more than a couple city blocks away so I didn’t really see the mountains. I walked by the University and train station early in the morning. A huge group of little kids were getting on a train with their sleds and there were a number of skiers and snowboarders heading to the mountains. I walked across a really high bridge to the south bank to go to the Historical Museum, but I got there before it opened. So I decided to walk to the Bärengraben (the bear pits). The founder of the town, Berchtold V, named the city Bern in the early sixteenth century because he killed a bear in the area (bern means bear in German). So the symbol of Bern is obviously a bear and they have kept a few bears in the bear pits ever since. The bear pits are just a little zoo with some plaques explaining the history of Bern’s bears.
I expected the bears to be hibernating or just sitting around doing nothing. That was clearly not the case. What I saw there I will never forget… there were two massive brown bears having sex. The male was behind and on top of the female, digging his claws into her shoulders and humping away. It was quite a sight. You can buy bags of fruit to feed the bears, and there was a little girl there with her mom and grandmother. The little girl had a bag of the bear food but she didn’t really know what was going on, she just kept throwing berries at the bears while they were having sex. Meanwhile, I was trying really hard to keep my composure, take a few pictures and not laugh out loud. The bears didn’t seem to care that they had an audience, they just kept going at it. Wow – I had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. The bears had sex three times in a row, collapsing in a heap in between each session. Nothing will ever top that. Everyone who was there definitely noticed what was going on and just stared at the bears. No one showed any reaction, except for me, I just couldn’t control myself. It was too damn funny. In the other bear pit was a lone male bear that was just batting around a toy ball – not quite as exciting as the bear sex in the other pit.
I went to the post office to mail a postcard to my family in Sevilla, and then went to the house where Albert Einstein lived when he worked at the Swiss patent office around the turn of the century. After graduating from the Polytechnic University in Zurich he moved to Bern and he wrote and published his most important works, including a paper on the Specific Theory of Relativity, which made him famous years later, and a paper on the electromagnetic effect for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. The place was pretty small but it had some of Einstein’s clothing, letters and books on display, along with a lot of information about his personal life and his work in Bern.
There’s a modern art museum in Bern so I went there. It was really cheap and had lots of different stuff, some by Picasso, Mondrian, Matisse, and Braque, a lot of impressionism, and some weird 3D art. After that I bought some milk and cereal, which I never eat in Spain, and took a short break at the hostel. From there I went back to the Historical Museum. It was more expensive, but well worth it – I spent almost four hours there. The museum was really ambitious, it covered everything from the earliest human beings who lived in the Alps, through the Bronze Age and Stone Age and the Roman empire.
The most interesting was an exhibit on Switzerland during the Middle Ages when it was a patchwork of warring city-states. There was a long history of mercenary armies and military empires fighting each other. In the 19th century the city-states formed a confederation and wrote a very progressive constitution and became the neutral nation that they are today.
There was also art and jewelry on display from Europe, ancient Egypt, the Middle East and Asia. The top two floors of the museum had a temporary exhibit on Albert Einstein to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the year (1905) when he published five groundbreaking physics papers in Bern. The Einstein exhibit was really ambitious too, there was a lot of general history of the Jewish people since Einstein was a non-observant Jew who was actively involved in helping Jews get out of Europe before WWII. He also helped to establish the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and supported the creation of the state of Israel. And then there was a whole exhibit on Germany in WWI and WWII and the two decades in between. Einstein lived in Berlin until the early 1930s when he fled for his life and moved to Princeton, New Jersey. There was stuff on Einstein’s personal life (he had an interesting love life), but most of that was a repeat of what was in the Einstein house. There was also a big exhibit on the development and use of the atomic bomb and on Einstein’s legacy after his death.
Finally, the top floor was dedicated to his theories and how they have shaped modern physics. There was a whole exhibit explaining the history of how humans kept time and made calendars because the theory of relativity radically changed our concept of time. There were videos that broke down his theories step-by-step and explained them with simple examples. There were replicas of the experiments that were used to prove his theory on the electromagnetic effect (that light has characteristics of both waves and particles) and the Brownian effect (that the energy of atoms causes molecules to move around in a liquid). One room had a giant screen in front of a stationary bike. You pedal the bike and steer it through the streets of a virtual 3D Bern. It was an ordinary virtual reality simulator with one difference – you could pedal the bike up to the speed of light so that you could see what it is like to travel around Bern at 99% the speed of light. There was also a lot of information on the universe and recent discoveries and theories in physics and astronomy. It was the kind of stuff that blows your mind; one fact I learned is that there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and there are 100 billion galaxies like the Milky Way in the universe. That’s a lot of stars. It was physics heaven and a museum that Charlie has to visit. There was an unbelievable amount of information and interactive exhibits, the museum was enormous.
So it was a really good day in Bern. I can say that I learned a lot that day, about history, art, physics, astronomy, and every little detail about Albert Einstein’s life. And on top of all that, I witnessed two bears having sex.
The next day was a busy and interesting day. Bern is a small city -- only 180,000 people and the old part of the town is crammed onto a narrow strip of land where the Aare River wraps around a mountain. A lot of the town is expensive shops and cafés, but the buildings are beautiful and old. There are colorful little fountain-statues everywhere and old government buildings. It’s in the middle of the Alps, but it was too foggy to see more than a couple city blocks away so I didn’t really see the mountains. I walked by the University and train station early in the morning. A huge group of little kids were getting on a train with their sleds and there were a number of skiers and snowboarders heading to the mountains. I walked across a really high bridge to the south bank to go to the Historical Museum, but I got there before it opened. So I decided to walk to the Bärengraben (the bear pits). The founder of the town, Berchtold V, named the city Bern in the early sixteenth century because he killed a bear in the area (bern means bear in German). So the symbol of Bern is obviously a bear and they have kept a few bears in the bear pits ever since. The bear pits are just a little zoo with some plaques explaining the history of Bern’s bears.
I expected the bears to be hibernating or just sitting around doing nothing. That was clearly not the case. What I saw there I will never forget… there were two massive brown bears having sex. The male was behind and on top of the female, digging his claws into her shoulders and humping away. It was quite a sight. You can buy bags of fruit to feed the bears, and there was a little girl there with her mom and grandmother. The little girl had a bag of the bear food but she didn’t really know what was going on, she just kept throwing berries at the bears while they were having sex. Meanwhile, I was trying really hard to keep my composure, take a few pictures and not laugh out loud. The bears didn’t seem to care that they had an audience, they just kept going at it. Wow – I had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. The bears had sex three times in a row, collapsing in a heap in between each session. Nothing will ever top that. Everyone who was there definitely noticed what was going on and just stared at the bears. No one showed any reaction, except for me, I just couldn’t control myself. It was too damn funny. In the other bear pit was a lone male bear that was just batting around a toy ball – not quite as exciting as the bear sex in the other pit.
I went to the post office to mail a postcard to my family in Sevilla, and then went to the house where Albert Einstein lived when he worked at the Swiss patent office around the turn of the century. After graduating from the Polytechnic University in Zurich he moved to Bern and he wrote and published his most important works, including a paper on the Specific Theory of Relativity, which made him famous years later, and a paper on the electromagnetic effect for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. The place was pretty small but it had some of Einstein’s clothing, letters and books on display, along with a lot of information about his personal life and his work in Bern.
There’s a modern art museum in Bern so I went there. It was really cheap and had lots of different stuff, some by Picasso, Mondrian, Matisse, and Braque, a lot of impressionism, and some weird 3D art. After that I bought some milk and cereal, which I never eat in Spain, and took a short break at the hostel. From there I went back to the Historical Museum. It was more expensive, but well worth it – I spent almost four hours there. The museum was really ambitious, it covered everything from the earliest human beings who lived in the Alps, through the Bronze Age and Stone Age and the Roman empire.
The most interesting was an exhibit on Switzerland during the Middle Ages when it was a patchwork of warring city-states. There was a long history of mercenary armies and military empires fighting each other. In the 19th century the city-states formed a confederation and wrote a very progressive constitution and became the neutral nation that they are today.
There was also art and jewelry on display from Europe, ancient Egypt, the Middle East and Asia. The top two floors of the museum had a temporary exhibit on Albert Einstein to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the year (1905) when he published five groundbreaking physics papers in Bern. The Einstein exhibit was really ambitious too, there was a lot of general history of the Jewish people since Einstein was a non-observant Jew who was actively involved in helping Jews get out of Europe before WWII. He also helped to establish the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and supported the creation of the state of Israel. And then there was a whole exhibit on Germany in WWI and WWII and the two decades in between. Einstein lived in Berlin until the early 1930s when he fled for his life and moved to Princeton, New Jersey. There was stuff on Einstein’s personal life (he had an interesting love life), but most of that was a repeat of what was in the Einstein house. There was also a big exhibit on the development and use of the atomic bomb and on Einstein’s legacy after his death.
Finally, the top floor was dedicated to his theories and how they have shaped modern physics. There was a whole exhibit explaining the history of how humans kept time and made calendars because the theory of relativity radically changed our concept of time. There were videos that broke down his theories step-by-step and explained them with simple examples. There were replicas of the experiments that were used to prove his theory on the electromagnetic effect (that light has characteristics of both waves and particles) and the Brownian effect (that the energy of atoms causes molecules to move around in a liquid). One room had a giant screen in front of a stationary bike. You pedal the bike and steer it through the streets of a virtual 3D Bern. It was an ordinary virtual reality simulator with one difference – you could pedal the bike up to the speed of light so that you could see what it is like to travel around Bern at 99% the speed of light. There was also a lot of information on the universe and recent discoveries and theories in physics and astronomy. It was the kind of stuff that blows your mind; one fact I learned is that there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and there are 100 billion galaxies like the Milky Way in the universe. That’s a lot of stars. It was physics heaven and a museum that Charlie has to visit. There was an unbelievable amount of information and interactive exhibits, the museum was enormous.
So it was a really good day in Bern. I can say that I learned a lot that day, about history, art, physics, astronomy, and every little detail about Albert Einstein’s life. And on top of all that, I witnessed two bears having sex.
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