Bern

Bern:

July 13th-Day 13- City 9
The train ride to Bern was about 3 hours long and I didn't sleep any and it all went out the window when these cute kids got on and were singing and talking the entire ride.

We got to our hostel, turns out everything in Switzerland is really expensive, and make our way to our first 20 person dorm which cost more than any of our private dorms or Taylor and my final hotel room. But besides the price the room was fine we all ended up sleeping fine so no hostel horror stories there. We found sharma, in honor of Cam and the Avengers, at a Lebanese place for lunch. Then we walked around the town looking for Souvenirs when we found this awesome candy shop that was under ground. There was a slide to get into the shop it doesn't get any better than that for bringing out your inner child. I went against my intuition that Taylor would find a flag for cheaper if we kept looking so i didn't stop him from buying the one he found. Sure enough it was ten franks cheaper at the next store. I went back and tried to return the one he bought but they wouldn't let me. Not all stores are not like American ones.  Now i know a woman's intuition is always right!

Loaded down with candy we did our own city tour as always but this time we actually had information on what the buildings were this time. We sat by the river in the rain and soaked our tired feet. The river was freezing! Easily 10 degrees colder than the lake we swam in last summer and the current was insane yet we still saw 5 people swimming in it happily. It wasn't even warm outside. Had we still been in Italy all four of us would have been in the river without a question. We headed back to the hostel before the rain got too bad and played some cards and took some naps. When the rain died down we ventured to the train station for some bread to eat with Reyes' tuna and of course lots of chocolate. We played a bunch more cards and went to bed.

July 14th- Day 14-City 9

We woke up and had some breakfast at the hostel and then went to investigate what an important looking castle like building was. It turned out to be the Einstein museum! We contemplated going in but Bern was also having a big music festival at the top of the mountain so we decided to hike up and see what all the buzz was about instead. Museums are everywhere how often can you say you hiked in the alps?  Unfortunately tickets were like 90 franks to get into the festival so we just hiked up and rode the tram down. We didn't find the right path at first and ended up hiking a super steep mountain bike path till we found the right one. We made it up probably farther than we should have without tickets to the festival we even saw one band which was lower on the mountain. We went down for some lunch at McDonald's, it cost 11.50 franks! Then we did some more shopping at the market and made another stop the the candy shop and the chocolate shop to get rid of all of our franks. Then we went to the train station to get on our way to Paris.