Love & Light and everything bright...

FROM FLORENCE, ITALY

(click on thumbnail images to enlarge)

Touring Switzerland

GENEVA, Switzerland, Sep 13 - After picking up our car last night, we set off first thing in the morning on a tour of northern Switzerland, heading east to west.  You can follow our tour on the above map...

Baden

Our first stop was Baden, a small town about half an hour by car northwest of Zurich.  That's where I lived and worked as a summer student in an engineering bureau during my junior and senior years in college.  Elizabeth took pictures of me in front of the building where that company - Columbus AG - was once based.  Now another name graces the entrance to the building.

As we walked around this charming old town on a Sunday morning, I reminisced a little bit and told Elizabeth stories of the two summers I spent there.

That included paradoxes of new vs. old (left), the tai-chi group practicing in the city park (middle left), as well as some interesting old buildings in the heart of town.

Lucerne

Our next destination was Lucerne, another city on a lake (two left shots below).

But first, we made a brief pit stop at Sursee, another small lake on our way to Lucerne.

As it was a pretty dreary day by the time we made it to Lucerne, it was refreshing to see the bright colors of the beautiful flower arrangements in the parks along the lake.

Lucerne was another place that gave rise to some reminiscing.  To my great surprise, I was able to spy the Guetsch Castle hotel where my family and I spent a March break in 1987.  It is shown in all of the above shots.  I highlighted it in the left two. 

We were also surprised to find in Lucerne the ornamental bamboos (with the yellow bark), much like the ones we have on our property in Maui.  Except that these ones were quite tiny, maybe one 20th of the size in diameter (right).

Bern

Our next stop was Bern, the capital of Switzerland.

You can see the Swiss parliament building in the first three photos from left to right.

Bern is a charming old town perched high up above the river that winds its way around it, like a mote.  The middle right shot is that of an art museum, while the rightmost picture is a casino.  After seeing a casino in every city we've been to, Elizabeth wondered why there were so many casinos in Switzerland.  Guess where there's a lot of money, there are also many ways to squander it...

One of its attractions is that ancient clock in the middle photos.  Since it was close to 2PM, we waited for it to perform a "dance," much like the one in Prague.  Alas, what happened was a disappointment.  Elizabeth and I both captured in on our videos.  Check it out...

  Swiss Bern Clock, recorded by Bob Djurdjevic (Sep 13, 2009) (3:28 mins)

It was also interesting to find the house in which Einstein lived in the early years of the 20th century with his Serbian-born wife Mileva, also a physicist (top right).  There has been some debate whether or not she should have received the credit for some of Einstein's early inventions.  But that's a moot point now, more than a century later.

Vevey & Lausanne

Then we were off in the southwesterly direction toward Lake Geneva.

We first stopped at a little town of Vevey, where the above pictures were taken.  Elizabeth was surprised by the (large) size of the lake.  "It looks like a sea," she remarked.  "See" is what the Germans actually call a lake, I explained, jokingly.  Anyway, that's where she took a picture of me (middle right) taking the two left pictures of the lake, as I did of her, taking the picture of me (right).

As you can see, the place where we stopped was a lovely old home, surrounded by vineyards covered with blue netting, as it is now close to harvest time (the nets keep the birds away).  This also reminded me of the grape harvest season around my former home in Western Australia. That's where the vineyards were covered with white nets, making them look rather ghostly in March, when the grapes are harvested down there.

Geneva

Our next destination and the final stop of the day was Geneva. The second largest city in Switzerland, located in the French part of the country, welcomed us with warm sunshine and spectacular scenery.

The gigantic "geyser," a fountain shooting up hundreds of fee in the air from the lake, seems to be visible in most of the pictures, sometimes unwittingly.  But I did want to capture a rainbow it produced in the rightmost shot.  So even 10,000 or so miles away from the Rainbow Shower, we manage to come across rainbows... :-)

All of the above lake scenes were taken in late afternoon.  Toward sunset, we headed into the old town Geneva.

Along the way, we saw this "Casanova" restaurant and laughed about its namesake counterpart in Makawao, Maui.  As we crossed the bridge into the old town, we caught some more glimpses of that giant fountain which seems unavoidable in all pictures.

The sun was setting when we took pictures of St. Pierre, an ancient cathedral that dominates the Geneva skyline as it lies on top of the highest hill in the city.

From there, we could also see the rooftops of the city below.

We decided to stay and have dinner in the old town at a restaurant near the carousel where a bunch of kids were celebrating someone's birthday.  When the waitress brought out the menus, she gave me the English one and Elizabeth the French one.  We both laughed.  Since she had been called Be-be by her family as a baby, and Be-be was also the nickname of Brigitte Bardot, the famous French sex symbol of the 1950s and 1960s, I started to call Elizabeth "Brigitte" from then on.  She seemed pleased to be considered French and a "Be-be" no less.  :-)

And that's all she wrote from our third day in Switzerland.

Back to Europe 2009 Table of Contents

Back to Home