Thursday 6 June 2013

You wanna call it what?

Last night having dinner in Perpignon (a town not on tourist maps for a reason), we each had to list, of the places we have been so far, where we could live for 2 years.

Here are the lists

Zoe
  1. Florence
  2. Mürren
  3. Anacapri


Drew
  1. Wengen
  2. Anacapri
  3. Florence


Ree and Lozza
Bern
Florence
Ree - tba, Rome - Lozza


Yups, for both of us grown up types, Bern gets the nod. It's a cracker of a city. Beautiful, cultured, green, easy to get around, clean (very clean), close enough to get to other places quickly. A bit like the Vancouver of Europe?
It may say as much about us? It's not the most exciting city and nobody raves about the nightlife or the many attractions of Bern - they have the biggest clock face in Europe and a beautiful rosegarden / park overlooking the old town.


View from "The Rosegarden"



Running in the Rose Garden



A broom in the Rosegarden






The old city






We loved it (except for the bear enclosure - LD).
Bern, it turns out, is named after the first animal the guy who first settled there killed. A bear! Luckily he didn't step in cow poo or kill a hamster first or Switzerland's austere Capitol would have a whole different vibe.
To celebrate the bear killing / naming thing, there is a bear enclosure at the edge of the old city. It looks relatively new, with the old one - round, small, and awful, just behind. There are 4 bears in the enclosure who wonder around, have the odd swim and get watched by tourists.

















I have a bit of a thing for bears. They aren't really thought of as great predators (these brown bears are omnivores), but the grizzly for example, can run 40 km/hr, climb a tree, swim, smell you from miles away and slice you with sir immense claws. The colosseum Roma's gave up trying to get bears and big cats to fight as the bears would just grab the big cats and crush them.
It makes me sad to see them stuck in cages, even Eco friendly cages are cages aren't they? These bears are usually solitary creatures who roam over hundreds of kms, now there are four in a space no more than a square km
Interestingly, they don't tend to get viruses or bacterial illnesses but do get parasites. The reason that most of them die is what the sign on the enclosure called "environmentally induced arthrosis". In other words, their joints begin to seize up from lack of use in their pathetically small space.


Zoe playing chess with a German boy from Frankfurt



Bern also has some interestingly named shops











And some cool street art












Glad we visited and congrats on becoming a city we could easily live in. Did I mention a coffee costs 8 Franks at Starbucks (frank = AUD).

Enough

1 comment: