Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Lucerne

This past weekend I travelled with my friend Maika to Lucerne. We decided perhaps 3 or 4 days before the weekend to go and booked a hostel. It's really amazing how easy it is to travel here. If I were in the states taking a trip about three hours away by train and only spending approximately $36 on both travel and the hotel (train was free because we went after 7pm there and back) it would be impossible. Anyway, off we went on my first official Swiss adventure.

Maika and I arrived in Lucerne around 10pm and decided to find our hostel. It turned out to be a really nice hostel because it was clean and secure. We shared a room with two girls from Taiwan. Just in my first week here I've met people from literally all around the globe from Australia to Iceland. We decided it would be good to go out and find a place to grab a drink and perhaps experience a bit of the nightlife in Lucerne. After asking a local for directions to a local drinking establishment off we went to find the place that he said we "Had to go to".

We came to a very small and smoky bar filled with locals. Everyone in Lucerne speaks Swiss-German (which is in fact very different from normal German). I found it strange that only 2 hours away from Geneva the language switches from French to German. We ordered a couple drinks and "people watched" for a while. There was one girl who seemed to be a combination of far past drunk or really high. She kept bobbing around talking to everyone and then singing or dancing to herself in the middle of the room. She continued to give us a bit of a laugh the whole night.

Eventually we ended up talking to a couple of guys. One was about 38 and claimed to have been an ex-football player who had to stop when he hurt his knee. He was in pretty good shape so I'd probably believe him. The other was also a football player but 27 years old. They were pretty fun to talk to even if most of it was in German. They told me that they think most Americans have no idea about European geography (probably true) and think Hilter is still alive and that WW2 only happened 10 years ago. Not really sure how that stereotype came about but it was funny to hear about. We ended up going to another bar right next door but decided to leave soon after because there were a lot of creepers.

The next day we decided to take pictures of where we had gone.


This is Maika in front of the second bar we went to
This is the first one.

Here are some more pictures from the rest of our trip!
We also went to the Picasso museum and got to see quite a few paintings by Picasso and other artists. Then we walked around and looked in some shops. We also hung out in Starbucks many times during the day to use the Wi-Fi and take naps. Yes, I took a nap in a Starbucks in Lucerne. Although after only 5 hours of sleep can you blame me? There really wasn't much else to do. We were going to go look at the KKL which is a museum of sorts but by the time we got up from our cozy chairs at Starbucks it was closed. Then we went to the train station to hang out until we could ride for free after 7pm. We saw a set up for Miss Switzerland and the opening act warming up. We weren't sure if he was famous but he was pretty cute and a good singer so we took a picture just in case. We also had a lovely chat with some older guy who smelled like beer and cigarettes.

All in all a good trip! Definitely wouldn't advise going for more than a day but it was a nice town. Next up Interlaken!

- B

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like there are more drunkards in Lucerne, than Delaware. ;)

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  2. Maybe but they're drunk after 5 instead of before it... :-)

    ReplyDelete