My adventuring gets off to a muggy start.

Because I’m basically living with a family I’m not really getting the tourist view of Switzerland. Don’t get me wrong, my cousin is trying to get me out there and look around the country, but what with my language course and the fact I have to be back here for five to get my charge from crèche I haven’t really had much of a chance to hop on a train and go somewhere.

However, while browsing through some train timetables on Tuesday evening I discovered that Bern – Switzerland’s capital – is only twenty minutes away on the train. I have already mentioned that I want to go to Basel and Zürich, and to get to both of these places I need to change train at Bern. So I hopped on a train to scope the station out. While I was there I had a look around the town, but not for as long as I had planned to.
For a start it was really muggy and I was sweating buckets (sorry, that's not a nice image), I had forgotten to pick up the Lonely Planet Guide to Switzerland and I hadn’t brought my camera either; it was sitting on top of the Lonely Planet book. I left after a little more than two hours there promising myself that I would be back.
From what I saw of the place it was really nice, a nice park with a big old statue/water feature, an odd statue that looked like something out of The Crystal Maze and a large square in front of a building with jets of water that shoot out of the ground.

I was thinking of going to Zürich next Tuesday, but I’ve gone off that idea a bit because I don’t want to visit all the places that I want to go in one big lump, so I made head back to Bern, this time with my camera and a map! I want to visit the Waterfalls that are somewhere outside the town.

During July my charge is off to stay with her Dad for two weeks, so my plan is to go to adventuring then. I should have a better grasp of French by then so it should be pretty good fun to do it. With nothing tying me to Belfaux for a while it would be great to head off into a country which is relatively unknown to me.

Another thing I've noticed while traveling by train is that you can really tell when you get into the German speaking parts of Switzerland. The names stop being things like Counterpin and start become things like Wankdorf. That is a genuine place name, incidentally.