We had allowed ourselves two days in Interlaken to slow down a bit and enjoy the Alps, so the second day we took another cogwheel train.  This one left from immediately next to our hotel, and took us up to the lower region called Schynige Platte.

This train is very slow, but that’s because of the incredibly steep grades it hauls itself up.

Because of the old-fashioned wooden seatsness of it all, I was put slightly in mind of the romantic train ride we did in Kyoto, but this was was actually a bit better than that – you didn’t have an announcer shouting at you the whole time, and no one attempted to sell us photos of ourselves.  I still wouldn’t necessarily call this “romantic”, per se, but the views were pretty great.

The point of coming up here was to go for a hike.  There’s an alpine garden and a trail along a fairly narrow ridgeline.  There’s also a picture frame, so you can take a properly framed photo of the Alps.

We tried to do a Magritte, but I don’t think we quite got it right.

At any rate, the hike was very pretty, and especially once you got up to the ridgeline, very narrow.

Normally I don’t just throw in a bunch of pictures without saying something between each one, but – come on.

The one difficulty, as can be seen in these pictures compared to the one from the day before, is that it was threatening to rain.  And shortly after we took this one, it went from “threatening” to “raining pretty damn hard.”  Of course at the maximum distance from the train station on the out-and-back loop we were on.

So was slogged our way back in the rain, skipped the alpine garden, and squished on to the train for the ride back down.  At which point, of course, the weather turned gorgeous.

I mentioned that we had mostly skipped the town of Interlaken, the center of which feels very much like the Virginia Beach of Switzerland.  However, we HAD signed up for a chocolate making class that afternoon.

The shop where we did the class was promising.  Lots of interesting decor, funky hipster vibe.  The class itself was… fine.  Really.  We got to make chocolate, and we got to eat chocolate.  But you could tell it was geared towards the 12 and under crowd who made up most of the rest of the attendees.

We ended up with six chocolate bars, which we then carried around with us for the remainder of the trip in a little white paper bag, which had to be maneuvered on top of our other luggage the whole time.  Keep Chekhov’s bag of chocolate in mind.

While we waited for the chocolate to set, we had some time to walk around and see some of the less touristy bits of town along the river, which were really quite nice.

And then it was zoom zoom again off to our next city – Lucerne!  We arrived in time to have a nice evening walk along the lake there, and then off to bed.

This post title is a touch misleading, as the one place we didn’t go was the city of Interlaken.  Instead, we explored (spoiler) both of the two valleys above Wilderswil – Grindlewald and Lauterbrunen.

Honestly, it would have been a spoiler for us too, at the start of the day – there’s no way we would have SET OUT to travel quite as far as we actually did.

We started the day by catching the train up to Grindlewald, an impossibly picturesque town located, well… here.

But this view CLEARLY wasn’t scenic enough, so we boarded a gondola to the summit of First, (pronounced “feerst”) a peak just north of town.

Getting there.  But how scenic would it be if we got those two knuckleheads out of the picture?

Pretty goddamn scenic, that’s what.  The whole day was basically like this – the weather was perfect, the views were stunning.  Easily my favorite day in a trip full of amazing ones.

One of the reasons you go up First in particular is that there are a lot of super fun ways to get back DOWN, the only one of which I managed to take a picture of is the one we didn’t use.

Instead, we first took a zipline from the summit down to the FIRST gondola stop below the summit, Schreckfeld.  Then at Schreckfeld we boarded a mountain tricycle.  This is an amazing experience where you barrel down a narrow mountain track while trying to keep your eyes on the road and off of, you know, the Alps.

It would have been slightly MORE amazing, however, had we not ended up behind an exceptionally timid rider who moved at an incredibly slow pace, and frequently came to a complete stop.  And since the track is way too narrow for passing, that meant that she managed to collect over a dozen riders all poking along behind her trying to to lose all of their momentum on a flat stretch.

The cycle ride takes you to Bort, where we sadly did NOT stop to buy a souvenir license plate,  but happily boarded our THIRD means of transport down the mountain, a trottibike!  I almost got a picture of this one.

I mean, you can see the handlebars.  A trottibike is basically a scooter with souped up brakes.  And the brakes were needed.  I kind of can’t believe they let us do this.

From Bort back down to Grindlewald is quite a ways, and they just handed us scooters and helmets and said “Have fun, see you at the bottom!” (And by “just handed” I mean “in exchange for quite a lot of money.”)  But still – it’s a fun ride! Nearly two and a half miles, and easily the best of the three.

Arriving in Grindlewald, it was time for a nice hearty lunch.  (And “hearty” is definitely the watchword with the Swiss cuisine we tried.)
And with that, it was time for more gratuitous theme park rights on the side of the Alps.  We headed up a gondola on the opposite side of the valley to Pfingstegg, which boasted both a mountain toboggan ride and a “fly-line”, which is kind of a slower zip line that curves around through the forest.

The fly line was fun!  The mountain coaster would probably have been MORE fun if I hadn’t gotten stuck behind a Spanish grandmother who kept bringing her sled to a full stop.  It was kind of our day for that, sadly.  We also photographed an extremely patient cow.

All the cows really do wear the stereotypical Heidi-ass cowbells, by the way.

Having fly-lined, mountain-coastered, trotti-biked, zip-lined, and tricycled, we realized it was only about three o’clock, and what should we do next?  Well, why not take a gondola up to the high point that separates the Grindlewald valley from the next one over?

Absolutely no reason, that’s why.

And once again, the Swiss rail app proved invaluable.  Drop the pin on top of a goddamn mountain, press go, and you have your bus ticket and your gondola pass all set in your phone.

This peak is called “Mannlichen,” and has a very nice 90 minute hike leading deeper into the mountains.  Why not?  Let’s do that!

Dear lord.  Also, don’t forget you can click on these pictures to make them bigger.

The end of the hike was a spot called Kleine Scheidegg which had a quaint little train station and a historic cogwheel railway down the far side of the mountain into the Lauterbrunen valley. And since the last train was fairly early, we opted to hop onto that rather than having dinner at the top of the mountain.

So – now we were in Lauterbrunen.  There was still one cheese-related dish I wanted to try, and that was raclette, which is basically the cheese of the same name poured over potatoes, and often pickles.

And it was everything I hoped for.  We also got a nice light Caprese salad just to have some (checks notes) cheese with our cheese.

AND we had a view of this amazing waterfall right from our table.

(The view was actually substantially BETTER than this from our table – I took this from the train station later.)

One train back to Wilderswill and we had a chance to think about what we had actually done that day.  Google isn’t great for plotting maps of routes where you use multiple modes of transport, but here’s approximately what we did:

We started at the upper left, took a train to Grindlewald, a gondola to First, zip-line to mountain cycle to trottibike back down to Grindlewald, gondola up to Phingstegg and back down, bus to Grindlewald terminus, then a gondola up to Mannlichen, hiked to Kleine Scheidegg, cogwheel railway down to Lauterbrunen, and then convenional train back to where we started.

Google wont let me plot a route all the way down from Kleine Scheidegg to Lauterbrunnen no matter WHAT I do, because apparently it thinks the last bit just isn’t possible to do at all on foot.

But more to the point – this is an objectively nuts itinerary.  We would have been crazy to plot it intentionally.  When would we have time to even look at the scenery?

Friends – we looked at a lot of scenery.  Maybe it was a bit accidental, but my goodness – it was great.

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?

Why indeed.

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.

I cannot believe I got to use that post title.

At any rate yes – conference over, there was one more Large thing we wanted to visit in Geneva – CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider.  As an accelerator physicist, this place is pretty much sacred ground, even if I didn’t get to see any more than the normal public tour.

Still, the public tour is pretty good.  You get to see the original synchrocyclotron built at CERN in the 1957, and used continuously up until 1990.

If you want to learn more about what a synchro-cyclotron is, and more about cyclotrons generally, you can check out the Wikipedia page on cyclotrons, which I wrote a fairly large chunk of.  Incidentally, you probably DON’T want to be the luckless tour guide with me on your tour asking annoying technical questions.

The tour then progresses to the control center for ATLAS, which is one of the primary detectors on the LHC beamline.  The detector itself, as well as the rest of the accelerator, is located deep underground, but we got to at least gawp at the folks in the control room.

ATLAS, incidentally, stands for “A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS”.  Yeah.

In addition to the tour of the synchrocyclotron and detector buildings, there’s a small art museum located in a big wooden sphere, and a large science museum built directly over the road.  The science museum was very well done, and did a solid job of trying to conceptualize what the LHC is for and accelerator physics more generally.

But with this final bit of entertainment extracted from Geneva, it was time to move on and see the rest of Switzerland!  And I cannot say enough nice things about how easy it is to get around using the Swiss rail app.  Imagine all the mapping and directions functionality Google maps, but it also lets you buy the tickets for pretty much every means of travel, including gondola.

Our first stop was the city of Bern, which immediately charmed us by feeling much less sterile than Geneva. No less f*ing expensive, though.

There was also a giraffe, for some reason.

We had dinner at the Kornhauskeller, a restaurant in a 200 year old corn cellar.  The ambiance was really something.

As was the food, which was very… hearty.  We had definitely moved into the more… Germanic part of the country, culinarily.

A bit more of a walk around town, including an amazing sunset view, and it was time to crash.

For our last full day in Geneva, Leigh was available in the earlier morning and afternoon, but in the middle of the day she had to do (ugh) her actual JOB. So we started by going for a short walk from our hotel to the confluence of the two rivers that meet at Geneva – the Rhone and the Arve.

On the way, we met a few foreshadowing friends.

According to a number of sites, the junction of the two rivers is very striking because of the way their two colors are very different, and there’s a distinct line where they come together. For example, in this file photo here.

Unfortunately, WE weren’t standing where that photo was taken, so the effect visible from where we were was a bit less striking.

Still pretty cool, though.  The nearby graffiti covered building was also pretty awesome.

But after this I had return Leigh to her conference for a bit.

While she was there, I went to check out a small museum of historical scientific instruments. These kind of museums always make me appreciate just how much more dangerous being a physicist potentially was when we had no fricking clue what electricity actually was or how to handle it safely.

Not like today, when only sober, competent people are in charge of science and science policy.  (sobs)

At any rate, speaking of policy, let’s go look at the U.N., the other thing Geneva is known for!

Yeah, that’s pretty cool.  There’s also a giant chair statue out front designed to first garner support for the international land mine treaty, and then to remind people it exists.  People such as the United States, who still haven’t signed it.  Sigh.

There’s a lot of very imposing brutalist architecture in this neighborhood, including the headquarters of things like UNICEF, the ITU, the WTO, UNATCO… wait, hang on – that last one is from Deus Ex.

The International Committee of the Red Cross took over an old hotel, so their headquarters is much less brutalist.

After a LOT of walking around in the sun (these buildings are BIG, and are commensurately spaced well apart from one another), I took the tram back to down and ended up buying some train station empanadas for lunch.  Sure, why not?

In the afternoon, once Leigh had been returned to me, we went to the museum of the watch maker Patek Philippe.  It made an interesting comparison to the Seiko Museum I had visited in Tokyo.

For one, it was MUCH larger, and included a huge array of historical timepieces.  For another, it just felt more like an old school art museum than one about the science of telling time accurately.  There were some really amazing pieces, and the museum was definitely worth the price of admission.

One of my personal favorites was this watch. The hands change length as they proceed around the face.

Definitely NOT designed by Dr. Seuss, or so they claim.

Finally it was time to join the rest of the conference attendees for the official conference dinner of.. fondue!  Yes, we were in Switzerland, it was time to dip bread into cheese!

Which, of course, I forgot to take a picture of.  But it was bread dipped into cheese, what’s not to like?

The next day the conference was over, so we had morning plans in Geneva, and then off to see the rest of the country!

Leigh had already finished most of her conference related duties at this point, so in the afternoon she played hooky and we went to look at a bit more of Geneva together.

We had been told that Geneva was not the most interesting city in Switzerland, and (spoilers) it’s not, really.  But there’s a few really good things worth seeing, and one of those is the archaeological museum under the cathedral.

The cathedral, viewed from the outside, is a proper European pile of stone – towers, arches, all that fun stuff.

But directly underneath is a huge excavation site – an area substantially larger than the church itself has been opened up to show construction going all the way back to the Roman era.  It’s remarkable how MUCH empty space there is, given the fact that there is still an entire CATHEDRAL sitting on top of it.

And there’s some really impressive stuff – the monks apparently had heated floors in their cells at one point.  WE don’t have that, and we live in the future!

This mosaic was the floor of the bishop’s reception chamber.  You can see spots where it was incompetently repaired much later than its original construction.  Good to know Ecce Homo wasn’t purely a recent phenomenon.

Having explored the depths below, it was time for the sky above, in the form of climbing the church tower for a view of the city.  Unfortunately, this was the one day of our visit where the weather was grey and rainy.

And just for completeness, here’s a view of the church from the inside.

Swiss cathedrals are interesting, because they were generally built before the Reformation, meaning they were highly decorated and ornate, but then stripped down to the extent possible afterwards.  So it’s obvious that there used to be a lot more stuff here.

Except for this chapel – this one’s still bonkers.

After this, we visited a small gallery we had seen an ad for on a bus.  It’s dedicated to artwork that revolves around clockwork and time.  Some really amazing pieces, NONE of which we remembered to photograph, although Leigh at least got a video of a marble clock.

They had a “build your own Swiss mechanical clock” kit that I really wanted, if it hadn’t been somewhere north of $10,000.

After that we just bonked around the city a bit more, had some more chocolate, and then went back to our hotel to hide from the rain.

Leigh’s conference started on Monday, so I went geocaching.  As a reminder, geocaching is a silly hobby where people hide stuff and other people go and find it and then mark that they’ve done so on a website.

Sometimes it takes me to some interesting places, though.  My goal for the day was a very difficult puzzle cache in a park area northwest of downtown.  So I decided to go for a long walk from our hotel, pick up some caches on the way, and see what else I happened to see en route.

And in a suburban park, what I spotted was a tall security fence with a gate in it marked  “Zoo.”  Now, this was just a random gate in a fence. It had to be an employee entrance, or an emergency gate or something, right?

Nope.  Unlocked, come-right-in, help yourself, self service zoo.  No employees in sight, just come on in and wander around.

To be fair, it’s not the San Diego zoo – there’s not a panda in sight.  Rather, it focuses on largely native animals.

Also peacocks, for some reason.

So I just wandered around and looked at the animals.  It was fun.  There were goats.

Leaving the zoo behind, I continued my hike through the woods.  Found some caches, didn’t find some caches, bought an espresso at the random café near the zoo, and finally DID make the grab on the destination cache I had in mind.

Returning to the city, I was getting hungry, but had not yet acclimated myself to the staggering food prices in Switzerland.  As such, although I sat down in what looked like a tasty Afghan restaurant, the prices startled me so much I ordered something called a “Kabul Wrap.”

I figured that might be a nice kebab kind of thing.

No.  It was easily the worst thing I ate on the entire trip – hot dogs and egg salad wrapped in a flatbread.  I have no idea what was in any way Afghan about it.  Yeesh.

But at least it was calories.  You don’t want to know what it cost.

After lunch I went and saw some more Geneva sights, like this statue of Rousseau.

Or this clock, measuring to the tenth of the second the time until the sun is going to explode:

If I ever need to explain to someone the difference between accuracy and precision, I’m showing them this.

As an afternoon snack, I stopped into a nice indoor courtyard for a chocolate apricot patisserie.

And finally ran across Frankenstein’s monster.  As you do.

Finally, Leigh was done with her conference and we had dinner at a nice Turkish place near the monster.  All in all, a perfectly nice day of wandering around.

My one day in Paris accomplished, it was time to leave for Geneva.  As a reminder, we had planned two weeks in Switzerland long before the Belgium / Turkey portion of this trip was requested by my job, so I would actually be meeting Leigh there.  She’d have a conference for the first few days, but I’d still get to SEE her for the first time in three weeks.

But first, I had to get out of Paris.  I had deliberately picked a hotel close to the train station, and as an added bonus, it had a piano, so I could actually PLAY a bit for the first time in a while.  After waiting out a teenager playing the legally required “The Piano” noodle-fest, I played a bit of Debussy, and then went to wait for my TGV to Switzerland.

It was crowded, but the architecture sure was nice.

The TGV is fast and reliable, and I was soon in Geneva, where I checked into our hotel and waited for Leigh to arrive.  Once she did, I managed to walk halfway back to the train station and then board the tram she was on, since I didn’t want to wait the extra 5 minutes to see her again.

It was now early afternoon, so we decided to bonk around the city and see what we could see while Leigh attempted to remain awake to catch up with her jet lag.

First, we walked through a big open air market with a million food stalls of different types.  Geneva is the home of the UN, after all.  I had some cow hearts on a stick. (Less glibly, “Antichucos,” a classic Peruvian food item.)

Next, we found a SERIOUSLY imposing monument to the Swiss founders of the Protestant Reformation.  (Not the German ones, don’t be silly.  Martin who?)

Do not even THINK of buying an indulgence.  These gentlemen will know.

But the absolute BEST thing to happen today was when we turned around from Calvinballists and realized that just across the street was a museum that not only had an exhibit of sculptures by Jean Tinguely, but was even free admission!

And before you ask – does this fountain also move and light up?  Of COURSE it does.

Seriously, it’s awesome.  As is this.

The museum has all the kinetic pieces set to only operate for a relatively small duty cycle, in order to preserve them, but oh man – when this thing gets going it is AMAZING. Here’s a video.

Unfortunately, we got there somewhat late in the day, so they did make us leave before too long.  Despite the threatening skies, we did some more walking around the older part of Geneva.  There’s a famous flower clock:

It’s fine. The womens’ Euro Cup was going on while we were in Switzerland and it was pretty much omnipresent in every town we went to.

We saw the main cathedral, which we would return to later in the week, but it had this cheery fellow in the courtyard.

I never understood a single word he said, but I helped him drink his wine.

Finally we went and had dinner and encountered the first of many sticker shocks associated with eating in Switzerland.  It is SERIOUSLY expensive – you pretty much just have to accept that you will be blowing a tremendous amount of money just to put calories in your system when you come here.

And that was day 1 in Switzerland!