Bern to Florence

This morning I woke up to the sound of Thisan having a loud conversation with Marvin. I had earplugs in, so I'm pretty sure everyone woke up to the same sound.

The whole day went by quickly, but the morning especially. I had breakfast, said goodbye to Toni and Becky, and went to the train station. It was an hour until the police office opened, so I reserved tickets for the train and sat in a tucked away corner for the remaining half hour. The police were really efficient and concerned but stoic, it was great. We finished in just enough time for me to run to the train.

The train first ran from Bern to Brig where I made a transfer. In my opinion, the scenery goes downhill once you get out of Switzerland (no pun intended). Brig to Milan was the next leg. Milan didn't make good impression on me from the train station. Milan to Florence was the last step. Upon arrival I rushed from the train station across the Arno river to a hostel I'd read about. Unfortunately, the hostel was full — this is the first time that's happened to me. But I'd rather have that happen every so often than keep track of where I'm going to be in two days, booking in advance.

It's worth mentioned how sketchy the entrance to the hostel was that I ended up staying at. At first, you just walk past it, not realizing there is a door or a number. Then, once you see it, you're certain it couldn't possibly be a hostel. In fact, the door only takes you to a narrow courtyard, offering a few more doors and hallways as possibilities. If you guess right, you have to ascend fifty long anonymous stairs up two flights before arriving in a large space with deteriorating frescoed walls.

The girl helping me with a bed said it's a church that's been renovated for use as a homeless shelter in Winter and hostel in Summer, which is perfect. So long as the homeless can find it. They didn't build anything permanent it seems, but everything is clean and well kept, and everyone who works there is friendly.

The only dorm mate I met was from Colorado. He had been biking and was traveling with a very small backpack. Later he explained this was because all his clothes had been stolen. Twice. There was someone else staying in the room but I never met them; they returned after I fell asleep and left before I awoke.

What was left of the night I just spent sitting on the bank of the river eating a sandwich and fruit I made from some supermarket supplies. It was a slightly cool evening — in retrospect, a non-representative beginning to my stay in Italy.

Bern

The internet access I bought the day before wasn't working anymore this morning. Which was disappointing — it was supposed to work for three days. The front desk called the company managing the wifi and we found out the credit card didn't go through. I think I may have mistyped some info, so note to self: if you're desperately in need of internet and have no money, as a last resort you can mistype your credit card "confirmation number" on the back of the card.

After I told Becky and Toni about Paul Klee, they decided they were interested in the seeing museum — so we planned to meet there at 1:00. In the meantime, I did my laundry and they visited the Einsteinhaus. I met two more Aussies in the laundry room. They're everywhere, and seem to travel in pairs.

The museum was pricey (I think 16 or 18 CHF) but worth it. We looked at everything in the permanent collection and temporary exhibition. I think Toni's favorites were the puppets. I love how Klee paired titles and images, and explored so many possibilities without worrying too much about the outcome. At least that's how his work feels to me. When we were done we got some food from the restaurant there and went to a stage where there was a puppeteer improvising with replicas of Klee's puppets. It was incredibly entertaining — kids and adults alike laughed at each "skit" featuring a different puppet or pair of puppets. A lot of it you didn't need to know German to understand, testifying both to the skill of the puppeteer and the composition of the audience.

Rain clouds were gathering outside, but they didn't look gloomy yet. We took the bus back to Central Bern and checked if the museum of theater was still open (Becky and Toni study theater). It wasn't — though there was a guy who told us "it's not open tomorrow either, but if you come at 9:00 am someone might be here to let you in anyway." In most big cities in America that would sound sketchy, but here it is a reasonable business practice for a museum that doesn't get much traffic.

As we walked back to the hostel the rain picked up. We were basically drenched by the time we got back. Or at least I was, Becky and Toni had rain jackets. It was warm, so I didn't mind.

We walked into the room somewhere around 6:00 pm. My laptop was no longer sitting where I left it charging. I looked around the room a bit, went upstairs to the internet area to see if someone borrowed it, and finally just sat down to fold my laundry from earlier. I was in disbelief, so I hadn't said anything yet. When I finished my laundry I went to the reception desk. No help, really. I knew I couldn't do anything but try and narrow the time down by asking people when they where around and last saw it. The worst part is that when you've been robbed, everyone looks like a thief. Even after playing cards the day before.

Becky, Toni and I went out for dinner, settling on a Chinese place. I had a Thai dish, which was strangely authentic for a Chinese place in Switzerland. I asked Becky and Toni more about their school and the people they study with. This lead to a conversation involving me contributing some thoughts from Sartre, and them giving examples of how people act in groups, and why leaders are necessary. It was a good existential yet practical conversation.

Back at the hostel we talked a bit more, some other people came and went, but it wasn't long before we crashed. Which is good, considering my attention was pretty well diverted.

Bern

Monday is generally a bad to museum-hop in Europe: most galleries and museums are closed, and plenty of other places have reduced hours. Lasse, Tanja and I decided to visit one of the few open spots: the house Einstein stayed at while developing relativity theory (listed on one map only as "Einsteinhaus"). I could just imagine him staring at this one clock on the wall, imagining it slowing down as it sped by. The lady who gives out the tickets was great &mash; she admitted to not understanding his math and science, but loving his humanistic philosophy. I think she might have had a crush on him too.

I forget the context, but they had a great Schopenhauer quote I hadn't seen before: "We can do what we want, but can't will what we will." A wonderful one-liner for discussing determinism.

From Einstein's house we walked down the street and over a bridge to the botanical gardens, which had far too many plants trees and mosses to even begin exploring. In the distance there was some sort of Swiss folk band playing, with plenty of accordion and funny German melodies. We imagined they were wearing leiderhosen.

Lasse and Tanja were on their way back to Denmark, and had to leave that afternoon for Luzern, so I walked with them to the train station and said goodbye.

For lunch I grabbed the cheapest meal I could find, an 8CHF kebab that turned out to be pretty decent. To make up for the day before in Lyon I got some blackberries from the market. With the whole day ahead, I was still trying to think of something to do. The night before, at the hostel, someone told me that the rose gardens to the East weren't worth the hike, which meant there was probably a great view from the top they missed.

About halfway up I was about to agree with the guy from the hostel, but it turned out to be pretty decent. There's a Japanese restaurant at the top for some reason, and I smaller rose gardens near the exit of the path up the hill. I have a feeling the guy at the hostel just saw this small garden. If you go further you get to the main area, where at least 50 varieties of roses are arranged in concentric rectangles.

I smelled most of them — I had no idea how much variety there was in rose aromas. A lot of questions came to mind: do flowers smell like they look, just as lions growl and birds chirp, sounding like they act? And would it be how they look to us, or to the bees in ultraviolet? Maybe only we can smell flowers "correctly" and only bees can see them "correctly"?

I took notes on a few as well:

• "Nella Martinetti" was my favorite, with a hint of citrus, berry, and reminders of the forest and beach simnultaneously
• "Papa meilland" smells like lysol
• "Charlie chaplin" has a hint of chai or earl grey
• "Magicienne 78" was the most citrusy

On the way back from the rose garden I happened upon the bear pits, which are just depressing. Two Bernese bears wandering aimlessly about a concrete hole in the ground with a few trees and rocks is not my idea of a humane tourist attraction.

Walking back to the hostel it started seriously raining. Back in my room I met two Northern Irish guys playing cards, Jim (the talkative one) and his friend (whose name I can't remember, the quiet one). The rest of the evening was spent eating Toblerone, meeting dorm mates and playing cards. At the height of it we had everyone involved: myself, the two Northern Irish guys, two Londoners named Alasdair (Al) and Matt, two Australian girls, two English girls named Toni and Becky, a Swiss'Indian named Thisan, his omniglot Swiss friend Marvin, and two slightly punk girls I'm pretty sure were from another dorm. Some games we played:

• Egyptian Ratscrew Taught to me by my sister Kiera and her boyfriend Baron, involves super fast pattern matching and deck slapping.
• Jack-change-it A "get rid of your cards" game where you must match the suit or number of the card, complicated by special cards.
• Murder in the Dark Not really a card game, but dealt using cards. Using who was killed as hints, everyone has to figure out who the two murderers are and send them to prison by a vote. Involves lots of counter accusations. I was dealt as murderer and managed to have my co-murderer Toni sent to jail, kill the doctor, and win the game. Best when you have an Irish guy as the storyteller &mdash. "Last night, a dark and sto-ormy night, t'ere was a mu-urder..."
• Cheat Also called "BS", you put cards of a kind on the table face down, moving up or down from the last card, while telling everyone they are. If you lie and someone calls you on it, you take the deck. If you're telling the truth, they take it.
• Spoons A fast game where you keep four cards in hand and pass the deck around the table card by card. First to collect four of a kind grabs a "spoon" (random object in the center of the table). There is always one less spoon than there are players, so there are no winners, just one loser.

There was also plenty of discussion earlier in the evening about politics and discrimination. Thisan is incredibly emotional and argumentative, which was compounded by his poor understanding of English, resulting in lots of cursing in German and some in Tamil. Realizing he didn't want to argue, just accuse, I listened for about an hour to his problems with America — domestic and international, with plenty of additions from other dorm mates. When he finished I told him that not all of America agrees with the government's decisions, most Americans aren't racist and some are actively trying to undo lasting effects of discrimination (whether this is a good idea is another discussion), and that you shouldn't say anything about America if you haven't been there and the first place you want to visit is Las Vegas. Though I didn't say the last part quite like that.

Thisan seemed to have made enemies of most of the people by the end of the night, if not for arguing with them just for being loud, but he gave me his number and said to call if I was ever back in Switzerland.

In the end, the Londoners drank quite a bit, Thisan started losing his voice, and a good time was had by all. It never did stop raining though.

Bern

I woke up expecting to buy some berries from the market and hop on a train to Bern via Geneva, but I met a Danish couple named Lasse and Tanja in the subway. I'd seen them at the hostel, and it turned out they were going to Bern as well so we decided to go together.

Most of our initial conversation was standard fareç where we've been, where we're going, what we've been studying, and language. I learned to pronounce some Danish vowels, which took a lot of concentration. There was even a short episode of frantically trying to find food in Geneva before our next train left.

You can tell you're in Switzerland when everything outside gets beautiful.. Villages on hills overlooking lakes, mountains looming on the horizon, fluffy clouds in the sky, etc. Bern is more of that, but a lot more beuildings and a river instead of a lake.

There's a lot of construction going on in central Bern right now, so we had to double check our path to the hostel, but we made it all the way down a long hill and booked three spots in a 20 bed room. Evening was just beginning, so we walked from the hostel to the south side of the river (it sort of envelopes the city, bending around the east side), and over to the "main" street.

The prices, all in CHF — Swiss francs — were initially disorienting (by the way, if a hundredth of a euro is a eurocent, is a hundredth of a franc a frankencent? are two of them frankincense?). But instead of being really expensive, we slowly realized everything was just fairly expensive. We settled on drinks at Starbucks and sandwiches at a nice bar/cafe down the street. Lasse and Tanja are the only people my age I've met who admit to feeling childish for not liking coffee. I felt the same way, and then my sister Kiera instroduced me to breves and lattes with fair amounts of sugar, cinnamon, and everything else. Now I don't mind esperesso-based drinks, but I still don't like coffee. Anyway — I had some tea.

The conversation quickly turned more serious, and we started talking about stereotypes and cultural difficulties. I found out a bunch about the practically socialist system in Denmark that does everything it can to distribute wealth evenly and not provide any motivation for high acheivers. I told them about what feels to me like the cultural homogenity and isolation of the United States. It was great.

We walked almost directly back to the hostel and went to bed — rest after lots of travel and intense conversation.