I have been avoiding punny titles for these posts, but… come on.
At any rate, we did indeed start our first full day away from Geneva in Bern, the “de facto” capital of Switzerland. (Switzerland has no officially designated capital, but since Bern is where the parliament is located, that’s what we’ll go with.)
And since there’s a big concentration of historic buildings, museums, and other cool stuff in the city center, we immediately boarded a bus out of town. We’re nothing if not contrarian. To be fair, we didn’t go very FAR out of town, but we really wanted to go here:
This is the Zentrum Paul Klee, a museum dedicated to the iconoclastic artist who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The building itself is pretty interesting, and was designed by the same architect who did two other buildings I encountered on this trip, the Centre Georges Pompideau in Paris and the modern art museum in Istanbul.
Klee was a fascinating character. The primary gallery shows some of his early drawings from as young as 11 years old. And in his youth, he was perfectly capable of doing both highly realistic work and impressionism. But then he decided that wasn’t really his thing.
Klee’s work is fun, and it’s the sort of thing you can stare at for hours. Leigh and I tend to divide works we see in galleries into two categories: “I’d have that on the wall” and “Nah.” Klee has a lot more of the former.
One interesting feature of the exhibit is that they have an entire room full of textbooks that have used Klee on the cover, including in some cases, over a dozen books with the same artwork.
And in many cases, the actual artwork is hung on the wall just a few feet away. Very cool.
After our morning at the museum, we headed back into town to check out two smaller museums before continuing our travels. The first was the apartment where Einstein lived during his annus mirabilis of 1905, when he wrote five papers that would each have been a career-defining masterpiece for any other scientist.
The papers were a lot more miraculous than the apartment, which was basically just an apartment. Still, it was cool to be in the room where it happened. Also, there were some exhibits about how Einstein was a jerk to his first wife.
We almost noped out of the second museum, but it turns out that would have been a mistake. The museum in question was the wind instrument museum, and it’s a basement room that you walk into and think – “Oh, there’s not that much here, and it’s quite expensive.”
BUT – your admission gets you the use of a tablet and a pair of headphones, and there’s a LOT of extremely well executed video to go with the exhibits on display. This is pretty cool when you’re listening to it at the same time.
Also, there’s this bicycle.
Why is there a bicycle in a wind instrument museum?
We also wandered over to the Bern Cathedral which is impressive, although we opted NOT to climb to the top of two cathedrals in three days.
And it’s cool for another reason in that we had just watched a whole video at the instrument museum about the building and playing of an experimental modern organ, which we could then go gawp at in person.
And at this point, it was time to bring our time in Bern to a close and head to our next destination, the Interlaken region.
The Interlaken area is one of the places you go to get your Alp on – hikes, views, gondolas, all that fun stuff. We had chosen to stay in the small town of Wilderswill, outside of the relatively touristy Interlaken city proper. And we did not regret this choice, at all.
Our evening walk made clear that we had made an excellent choice for our home base for the next two nights.
Yowza.