Today was our visit to Bern. We went on a self-guided walking tour that started out of the station. Walked down the main market street (pedestrian and public transport traffic only. Saw numerous fountains including one of an ogre that appeared to be devouring little children. We saw the Swiss parliament building Rathaus. Then we went on a tour of Einstein Haus, where Einstein during his yeas as a patent clerk. This is where he made some of his greatest scientific discoveries including relativity (E=mc2). After an informative visit we continued down to Barenplatz Park, where we saw bears. The bear is the mascot and the namesake of the city. A bear was brought back from a campaign in another country, and it became part of the city crest. They used to keep the bears in a bear pit, but now they have a park. There are at least 3 bears that live in the park. We then made our way back to the train station. Jennifer bought some fancy truffles at a local chocolaterie, Tschirren. Her truffles were made with butter instead of cream (sorry Buttercup, they need to be refrigerated, so they won’t make it back to Canada).
We went back to the Caveau des Vignerons for dinner to try their other specialty. As we got there, a large tourist group from Minnesota was leaving. They cleared a table for us, but the rest of the main room looked like a bomb filled with wine glasses had gone off. Our previous waiter served us again. He is a pleasant, talkative guy who is a Swiss-Irish mix. His accent was a combination of Irish and French. The restaurant had a muzak channel playing in the background that was country themed and included covers of Take It to the Limit by the Eagles and Love Hurts by Nazareth. We decided to order jointly and split our meals, Jennifer had entrecote de boeuf sur ardoise and I had entrecote de cheval sur ardoise. Sur ardoise means it starts cooking in the kitchen, but is served on a super hot piece of slate and you finish cooking it yourself on the slate, they also give you an “elegant” bib to protect your clothing from the spattering meat. For those of you that speak French, yes, cheval means horse. It was incredibly tasty (more so than the beef) and funnily enough – the horse meat comes from Canada (the beef of course is Swiss). The only downside to the dish was the slate retained heat during the entire meal, giving the bizarre sensation that we were being cooked from below. I ordered a dessert, “fondant au chocolat”, which is kind of like a chocolate lava cake. It was good.
This is our last night in Montreux. We head out tomorrow to Basel, but we'll be doing a stopover in Neuchatel. I hear they have good wine there. After one night in Basel (as opposed to one night in Bangkok..thx Murray Head), we board our boat, for the next leg of the journey.
This is called the Ogre Statue. The ogre is eating babies. No one knows the story.
Canadian horse meat (on the left) and cooking the beef on the slate.
I saw bears!
Even his statue is smarter than us...
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