Bern

So I didn't go to the museum I mentioned in my last post, because apparently everything here is Lausanne is closed Mondays. Instead I went to Bern, so I'll check out that museum tomorrow before spending Wednesday hiking in the Swiss Alps.

Anyway Bern is a really interesting city, with light rail lines running all over the place to the point where trolleys, cars and pedestrians all seem to share the same roads. So you can conceivably be hit by three different modes of transportation all at once. It's like a fun game.

The other fun game I played was sitting in on a Parliament session and seeing if I could decipher anything at all as the people all spoke in German. In the 45 minutes I spent there, I understood a total of two things: "Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science;" And that's because the dude said them in English. I also thought I caught the word 'communist' in there somewhere, but I'm not sure.

Despite my complete lack of understanding of what was going on, it was still interesting to be in there. The room itself is actually very small (but so's Switzerland), and it has sculptures on the higher parts of the wall near the ceiling. It occurred to me that it'd be fun to see Congress in session (not on CSPAN), and I also decided the U.S. government should follow Switzerland's lead and conduct business surrounded by sculptures with boobs and major nippelage. Give Teddy Kennedy a little something to look at.

But I digress.

I mostly just wanted to see the place anyway. I actually thought I was in line for the tour, but all the signs were in German and French and by the time I figured out it wasn't a tour the Parliament was already in session.

The rest of Bern was really pretty (although it's got nothin on Geneva). It's got a fountain of an ogre eating small children too, which I thought was good stuff.

Now here's the bad stuff:
Bern was founded in the 12th century by a dude named Berchtold, and was named after the first bear that Berchtold hunted there. So the bear has become a sort of mascot there, and to commemorate it they have a place called the Barengraben. These "Bear Pits" are just a cement hole in the ground that houses brown bears, who have been reduced to literally begging the tourists above for scraps of food. They literally drop to a sitting position and press their paws together to beg. The cement hole has a few shrubby plants and a horribly dirty smaller cement hole with dark brown water. It's completely wrong to keep them there like that. And the other tourists were oohing and ahhing and taking pictures and teasing them with scraps of food. They ddn't get it.

On that note I'll wrap up, because I want to hit nytimes.com before I go to sleep so I can read up on the Bush administration's latest missteps, as I've been completely detached from American politics.

But bare in ,ind the next posting will have to be less depressing -- I mean, I'm spending tomorrow looking at the artwork of schizophrenics. It'll be great.