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If you live in München, what do you do for a vacation? Our German friends go further afield to places like Crete...

Hiking tour in Switzerland [1]

Dave Hood
2004-02-22 18:10:16

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Well, SBB clearly stands for Schweizer Bundesbahn; CFF means Chemins-de-fer fédérales, and FFS presumably means the same thing in Italian. Dark green or blue, sometimes red. Nice enough trains, but the washroom doors are hard enough to open that you really have to be motivated!

I had a chance to watch the guard at a couple of the train stops. After checking that everyone was safely on board, he watched the second hand of the station clock. As the hand reached vertical, he blew his whistle, waved his signal to the driver, and climbed aboard as the train began to move. Swiss precision (same in Germany, of course).

First impressions of Switzerland: green, neat, tidy – like Germany. But not the same: pick a random church, for example, and it will be smaller and plainer, protestant, no onion dome. Pick a random car: it’s less likely German made, more likely a Renault, a Citroën, a Fiat. Pick a random house: it will be masonry with a stucco finish, but the stucco will be pastel instead of white; it probably won’t have a mural. It will have a tile roof, but the tile will tend more toward brown than red. Or it will have deep, dark, weathered wooden eaves. But, as in Germany, it will probably have window boxes full of bright red geraniums. Switzerland is only disappointing in the amount of graffiti you see, on urban buildings and civil works. More than in Germany, and it seems out of character with the rest of the country.

Signs in this part of Switzerland are always in German, usually in a second language, which is English as often as French. Sometimes in all four languages. And no mountains! (Maybe we just can’t see them on a cloudy day?)

The weather cleared up as we left Zürich, and we began to see mountains as we got further toward Bern. Arrived in Bern in early afternoon, a busy, bustling, beautiful bear city. Tried to get some money from the Geldautomat in the Bahnhof, but it ...