My last day in Switzerland. I had booked a super-excellent train trip from Bern straight through to Rome with no stops, which I was thrilled about, but that meant getting to Bern from Wil. As everyone says Bern is excellent, Maria and I decided to head up there after lunch and do some touristing. So we did.
Our first stop was the Paul Klee museum, devoted to Switzerland's most famous artist and an architectural marvel in its own right. Which I don't have a photo of. Sorry. (Excuse me, the Zentrum Paul Klee, for christ's sake do you expect me to have learned German during this trip, fluent high German, I can tell you all about snot in German and that is about it.)
To my Asianophile delight, the museum's current exhibits focused on Klee's time in and travels through the Near East. Klee fell in love with the colors and images of Tunisia and Egypt and incorporated many of their aspects into his work - drawing on rugs and Islamic art for his own visual motifs, and developing a unique "picture architecture" from Moorish left-behinds. I have to admit that I am not wild about Klee's work, but I did like some of his watercolors and his profoundly bizarre, possibly haunted, hand puppets. The best part of the exhibits was the stuff by other people if you ask me - particularly enjoyed the turn of the century photographs of Egypt and Tunisia, which are windows into an entirely different world (that lasted longer then we think it did, these harem-ish fantasies of repressed Victorian gentleman types). There is also a collection of mildly porny photographs accumulated by contemporaries of Klee - young nubile Tunisian girls draped over fabrics and looking with self-aware intent towards the camera. There's also excellent art deco posters advertising Asian travel to turn of the century bon vivants, yellowing travel brochures, and art by Klee's traveling companions - August Macke and Louis Moilliet. August Macke's forceful and excellent watercolors are particularly poignant because the young artist was very close to the end of the road indeed - he would die in the First World War a few months later.
The downstairs hosted an exhibition of modern art from the "near east" with a particular emphasis on video. Great amospheric videos of sites in Egypt simply portray the ambient noise and sounds of a day going by - a woman wanders into the desert landscape and begins vacuming. Other videos feature recitations of the Koran in Egyptian, animated and bizarre drawings by Amal Kenaway, and eerie cut-out and thick carpets in the shape of airplanes. We particularly enjoyed the plastic chairs: an artist had compiled photos of the jury-rigged plastic chairs that populate the streets of Cairo (for a plastic chair is a valuable thing and must not be thrown away but endlessly fixed) - the artist implores the viewer to sit in the plastic chair so that it too must warrant repair in the environs of Bern.
After the exhibit, we headed to downtown Bern for a looksee. The entire city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because it so perfectly preserves medieval modes of architecture in a distinctively Swiss style.
Dancing fountains in front of the Swiss parliament.
Begun in 1191 and allegedly named after a bear the ruling Duke had killed, the city joined the Swiss Confederation in 1353 and quickly rose in prominence. Switzerland's federal parliament meets here to have extremely neutral meetings, or at least that's what they say.
Bern's most popular landmark is the Zytglogge, a moving clock tower complete with puppets. We waited for the clock to ring and were pretty profoundly unimpressed with the show. Guess medieval era special effects just don't cut it anymore.
Bern used to feature 16th century bear pits, which were a source of great fun for everyone because goddamn son a pit full of bears. Unfortunately the last bear passed on just this year, and there are no plans for replacements.
Bern also features the big pile of a cathedral that every European city by mandate must contain. But it's actually quite attractive, although it was under construction (as all foreign things must be) and I could not actually go inside.
Maria had to head on back to Wil, so we parted ways in the super modern train station. I decided to entertain myself by eating Thai food. The Swiss seem to absolutely adore Thai food, and a Thai or Lao restaurant can be found pretty much everywhere. I suppose it's the antithesis of cheesey stuff and thereby alluring.
I wandered out to the bridge and took some photos. Bern is not un-attractive.
I waited for my train to arrive in Bern's humongous train station. There's a nice cafe inside the station with a vegetarian buffet, fancy coffee drinks, and a good wine list, so I logged onto the internet and messed around. My train would arrive at 11:00. I paced around (for waiting on trains makes me nervous for no particular reason) and was happy when my chariot did (finally) arrive. It was a six berth to a compartment sleeper and exceedingly hot inside, but I knew I would endure. Everyone else in the sleeper was from California. Go figure. I'd wake up in Rome.
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