A Day in Krakow

Somewhere along the line, this Europe trip morphed from a fun post-Jay’s graduation backpacking trip to an opportunity for me to fill huge gaps in my knowledge. I never liked history. I thought it was dry and a waste of space in my brain, making it exceedingly difficult for any of my history teachers to teach me anything. That plus the 8 years it’s been since I’ve taken a history class put me in a position of extreme ignorance about the world before my lifetime. As we’ve traveled along, I’ve become fascinated the historical aspect of Europe and now believe that I need to spend this time to learn a little more about the world. Particularly regarding the atrocities of the Holocaust. After visiting Dachau outside Munich, I have come to think of it as my responsibility to the victims to learn as much about the Holocaust as I can while in Europe. Naturally, Auschwitz became a non-negotiable destination.

So that’s how we ended up in Krakow for one day, on the way to Auschwitz. I braved the pouring rain to do a walking tour around the city, and then Jay and I headed out to the Wieliczka Salt Mine. I had this idea in my head that Krakow was completely destroyed by the war, but actually it is almost completely original. In a sense it is exactly the opposite of Prague: everything within the old city walls (now a nice circular esplanade) is historic and everything outside is a modern city. Krakow is more economically built than most historic European cities. Instead of importing fancy materials, all buildings not built by the king are red brick from the nearby Tatra Mountains. Some churches have a marble front face, but go around to the side and it is red brick like everything else. The other thing that is omnipresent in Krakow is Pope John Paul the Second, since he was an archbishop there. Krakow’s a nice enough city, but I didn’t feel any special affiliation with it. 

The biggest open historic square in Europe, apparently.

Marble on the front, red brick on the side

Cluster of cathedrals on Wawel Hill, former seat of Poland's monarchy

The Salt Mine was two hours of awesome followed by an hour of terrible which unfortunately nullified the awesome bit. Here I will write it in reverse chronological so that maybe the awesome can redeem itself.

The Terrible: 100 people per half hour sent down the stairs into the mine have to get back out somehow. Which meant a full hour of standing in various lines in tunnels with pushing and yelling Europeans as they sent us nine at a time up an old mine shaft lift. The only reason Jay did not have a sensory overload induced panic attack was because he was so worried about me. The only reason I did not have a sensory overload induced panic attack was because I was focusing intently on sending positive vibes to the woman next to us who was having a panic attack. We got outside (FINALLY) and I immediately started hyperventilating and burst into tears. It was awful. I would never recommend this experience to anyone if they do not figure out another way to get folks back out of the mine.

The Awesome:  The Wieliczka Salt Mine was a functioning salt mine from the 13^th century until 1996, when the potential profits from tourism exceeded the profits from salt. The mine has 245 km of tunnels and 2,400 excavated chambers. The “tourist route” covers only 2% of the mine and still takes two hours. The chambers and tunnels are supported by wood beams, which are petrified by the salt into fabulously strong supports. Also in the mine are 40 chapels, lots of salt sculptures made by the miners, a performance hall, two restaurants, a reception hall, and wifi internet. Finally, in the biggest chamber was the location of the first underground bungee jumping and hot air balloon ride! I had never been in a salt museum before and was struck by some big differences between Colorado coal mining and Poland salt mining, primary being the safety issue. Salt mining was actually considered a great job and was passed down hereditarily from father to son. The really dangerous parts (like burning the underground gases) were given to prisoners and so not too many actual employees died in the mine. Nowadays the salt saturated air is considered one of the best rehabilitations for a variety of lung problems and people come from all over the world to a rehab center in the mine!

Yup, that's a 500 year old wench. 4-8 men could move 300kg of salt.

Petrified wood supports

The last supper carved in salt

Salt chandelier

A reception hall

No luck, the terrible still outweighs the awesome. Oh well, I guess not every part of the trip can be a win.

Prague

Prague got off to a rough start. We stepped off the train, got checked into our hostel and immediately fell for a tourist scam. In the main square, they had all this delicious looking meat cooking over an open fire. I knew better than eating right in the square, but I was hungry and tired, the meat smelled delicious, and it wasn’t too over priced, only 69 CSK (about $4)! So we waited in line, ordered two, and the cash registered rang up 860 CSK (about $42). Oh dear. Only then did we notice that it was by weight, with “69 CSK” in big letters and “per 100gm” in very small letters. So I asked for less meat, since it was way too much food anyways. The guy working the register made his distain for me immediately known and responded briskly: “It’s by weight, this is normal serving.” After a little back and forth with the increasingly irritated Czech, we just ended up buying one plate and enjoying some very delicious but very overpriced “Old Prague Ham.” Later we learned that lunch should never cost more than 200 CSK per person, so 450 CSK for a filling lunch for two wasn’t terrible, though I still can’t believe I made such a rookie mistake.

You know you want some...

“Ham Scam” not included, Prague lived up to the glowing reviews it received from several of my well-traveled friends. The architecture is beautiful and crosses many different styles, including some that are supposedly unique to Prague (“Cubism,” for example). A technique I don’t think I had seen before is something called “Scraffiti,” where they layer a light plaster over a dark plaster and then scratch a pattern into the walls. From far away it looks like a painted façade, but it requires a lot less maintenance. More generally, I loved the way that old and new mixed in Prague. In most other cities, it has felt like there was a historic center and then a modern city around that. But in Prague, it’s all just kind of mixed up, with buildings built in the 1990’s right next to buildings built 200 years prior.

Cubist architecture

Scraffiti

New on the right, old on the left

Tyn Chuch and the Jan Hus Memorial

Jewish Synagogue

Across the river, the famous Prague “Castle” dominates the landscape. I think it’s a bit deceptive that it’s called a castle, because though it did house the royal palace, its more just a bunch of historic government buildings, some towers, courtyards, and a huge gothic church that are together referred to as a castle.

The Prague Castle across the river

Gothic cathedral

President's residence

Another famous part of Prague is the Jewish District, which has a quite interesting and ironic story: Hitler really liked Prague. He didn’t want it to be bombed because he planned to retire there, and he wanted the Jewish part of town left untouched and all the relics saved so that after the war he could have a “museum of a extinct race.” Even though the Jewish community in Prague is really tiny now (about 1,600 compared to 90,000 pre-Holocaust) it is one of the best preserved Jewish districts in the world. Of note are the Jewish cemetery, full to brim with bodies and head stones, up to 15 bodies in layers under one spot, and the incredible Pinkas Synagogue museum, which has the names, dates, and birth places of all Bohemia/Moravia victims of the Holocaust inscribed on the walls. The original inscriptions were done in the late 50s, but it was destroyed by the Communists after the Prague Spring and redone from 1992-6—it took four years to write all 80,000 names out.

Jewish District

Jewish District

I also took two day trips when I was in Prague, one to the Terezín Concentration Camp and one to Kutná Hora. Terezín is actually a ghetto, rather than a labor or extermination camp, and the visit surpassed all my expectations. I think it must be described in combination with the other two types of camps, and so I will save that for another day. Kutná Hora is a small silver mining town about one hour outside Prague. It’s a nifty little city, though its claim to fame is definitely the coolest part: the bone chapel, decorated entirely with human bones! The bone chapel came to be in three phases:

Way back in the day, the monks living there did a pilgrimage to some famous religious place and brought back a bunch of dirt to put in their cemetery. From then on, the cemetery was considered a holy place and folks from all over the region wanted to be buried there. So instead of selling grave sites, the monks leased them and after a certain amount of time the old bodies would be dug up and placed in the ossuary to make way for the new bodies. After a while the ossuary became quite full and disorganized, so a half-blind monk was tasked with organizing the bones and making sure all the parts for one body were together. Somehow I guess the monk got confused, because he just ended up making six huge pills of bones—four of which are still standing. Soon after, the building needed some renovation and the architect hired for the project thought the bone piles were pretty cool, so he renovated around them and made his own contribution: candelabras made from skulls. Finally, a bit later after the monks had left, a noble family purchased the chapel and liked the candelabras so much that they hired an artist to continue decorating with the contents of the ossuary. The entire interior is covered with bone. It is awesome. 

Walking in...

Original bone pile

A wall fixture

Family crest (check out the bird in the lower right)

Chandelier with every human bone, surrounded by the architect's candelabras (with the strange babies on top)

After my first day in Prague, I was very excited about the Czech Republic history I learned, but most of it has already seeped out of my brain. So today I will leave you with only one fun fact: the Czech national anthem is called “Where is My Home?” because elderly Czechs living in the same small town their whole lives have had eight different passports!!! That’s crazy.

Homecoming

Last week, the MIT class of 2012 graduated. The graduation speaker advised the new grads to imagine they had reached the end of their lives and had been given the opportunity to go back and do it over. It got me thinking about how different my life is now from how I thought it would be sitting in Killan Court on June 5, 2009 and how lucky I am that those changes have come without much regret.

My first post-college year had some good moments (first job, first apartment, getting out of Boston, etc) but was dominated by near-devastating losses. First came my knee injury/surgery, which permanently altered my faith in my own body. Shortly after came the end of a three-and-a-half-year-long relationship around which I had built my sense of self, and in one fell swoop, I lost my partner, my dog, my house, an extended family, a handful of friends, and any sense of certainty about the future.

By the time I hit twenty-three, I had recovered enough to consciously embrace that ambiguity by vowing to act my age. I gave myself a “Hall Pass” for the year to do exactly what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it and generally try to better embody the cultural stereotypes of twenty-three-year-olds.

About seven months into my Hall Pass year, once the novelty of acting my age wore off, I started thinking about what it would look like to just act like me. I realized two things, nearly simultaneously: (1) I wanted to go back to school; (2) I wanted to travel first, since I might never again find myself so without ties and responsibilities. Within three weeks, I had a plane ticket and the Gap Year was born.

Before leaving for Nepal, I had lunch with a colleague who told me she thought I would never come back. Quite the opposite has happened. After 10 months of Gap Year, including 202 days abroad, all I want to do is be in Colorado. I spent the last two years intentionally trying to avoid roots, but they have snuck up on me. My childhood best friend moved in across the street (again) and reclaimed her title. My high school best friend started a life in Golden. I grew closer to both my parents. I began to develop adult relationships with my extended family, (nearly) all of whom live in Colorado. I rediscovered my love for the city of Denver and the mountains around it. And somewhere along the line, I fell for a cute Colorado transplant with a bike and a frisbee.

I am moving to Claremont to start school in the fall, that hasn’t changed. But I am also done trying to deny that my heart strings are firmly planted in the Rockies. And so it seems most appropriate that starting June 21^st, I spend the final two months of my Gap Year with the people and places I love, back home in Colorado.

Austria

Since Jay and I had little in mind as “must sees” for our Europe trip, much of the trip planning was based on the “familiarity principle”: “I’ve heard of that city, it must have something to see, let’s go there!” Austria certainly fell into that category; there was nothing specific that drew us to the country, just a vague sense that people sometimes go to Austria, so there is probably something there.

We spent one day in Salzburg and two days in Vienna and in the end Austria exceeded my expectations. We easily could have spent more time there but I’ve long since come to terms with the fact that there are just too many things to see in the world to squeeze everything into one trip.

Salzburg

Salzburg is tourism machine. From what I can tell, it is famous because of Mozart and the publicity gained from the Sound of Music and not much else. But the city takes these stereotypes and milks them to the end. According to our hostel’s front desk, the Sound of Music has nothing to do with Austria (though it was really filmed there), yet it is everywhere. The film is in pictures on every map and billboard, in all the shops, on special tours (there is a full-day tour that takes you around to all the filming locations while playing the soundtrack) and playing every night at our hostel (it used to be on loop—the employees eventually put their feet down). And then there is Mozart—his two houses (birthplace and family home) are major tourist draws in the center of the city and Mozart has his own truffle, available everywhere. I have no idea what Mozart has to do with truffles and neither did the shop keepers nor the internet. I guess a chocolate company just dedicated a line of truffles to famous Austrians and Mozart was the most popular, so then all the other chocolate companies started copying it.

Mozart wants you to buy a truffle.

Even with all that crazy tourist pandering, Salzburg must be one of the prettiest cities in the world. The setting is beautiful, again with green hills, jagged mountains and clear rivers. The city itself is hard not to love: compact, well-maintained and full of delightful old architecture that was not destroyed during the war. Salzburg looks as if it was designed in anticipation of postcard pictures. No mater where you are, one click of the camera will capture more than one beautiful historic site.

Mountain view from the top of the fortress

Old town view from the hike to the fortress

From front to back: Mirabell Gardens, Franzikanerkirche, Peterskirche, Hohansalzburg Fortress

Walking around Salzburg was the best part of the visit (in addition to watching Sound of Music in the hostel) and the background music provided by the many talented street performers made it even better. The Mozart museum and fortress tour were unmemorable.

Vienna

I had absolutely no idea Vienna was so important to European history! This blog post is already too long without including a history lesson, so just trust me on this one: Vienna=Big Deal in Europe, seat of the Holy Roman Empire, Hapsburgs, seat of the First German Reich, homeland of Hitler, cross-road between East and West Europe, etc, etc. Walking around the city, I was struck by how many different cultures were represented within Vienna and perhaps it is that amalgamation of many European cultures that makes Vienna so unique and appealing.

First, Vienna has a famous Spanish Riding School. Why is there a Spanish riding school in Austria? Because more than 400 years ago, a Spanish king ascended to the crown of the Holy Roman Empire and brought the Lipizzaner horses with him as a prized possession for his new court. Soon it became clear that importing horses from Spain was not a practical financial plan and two breeding grounds for the horses were established. Though time has moved past the Holy Roman Empire and the Austrian monarchy, and neither of the original breeding grounds is still on Austrian land, the Spanish Riding School is still going strong as a private company, and is a huge part of Austrian culture. The main school, of which we took a tour, is in the center of the city within the Hofburg Palace complex and there is a training center and breeding ground in the countryside. At any given time, there are about 110 stallions in the program that are carefully bred from six different blood lines (descending directly from the original royal horses). The horses rotate between training in the country (“vacation”), performing in the city, and touring around the world. Each horse specializes in only one trick of the special tricks that the riding school performs. All the tricks are based off natural male horse behavior, but these horses perform them perfectly. Three involve the horse doing things on just its back legs, like hopping, and three involved the horse doing jumps and things with the riders directing from the ground. 

I can't get it to rotate right, but turn your head to see the horse tricks!

Seeing the school was so cool. My favorite things were (a) the “horse walk” they have in the summer ring, like a giant revolving door they can program to walk horses in a circle at different speeds and changing directions. (b) Getting to sit in the VIP seats of the performance ring. And (c) seeing the horses up close in the stables. The horses are so beautiful, small and round and white—almost the opposite of the aesthetic ideal for a horse in the American West.  The horses are born black or brown then turn white after the age of four, but the few that don’t turn white are thought to be good luck and are always kept around.

Performance ring from the VIP seats

No pictures allowed in the stable, but I caught the horses en route to the performance

The second place you really see the blending of cultures is in the buildings on the Ringstrasse, the road circling the city center along the old city walls. These buildings were all built in the mid-1800s, but each was built in the style that reflects the time period famous for the function the building serves. So for example, the city hall is built to promote self-determination and thus is designed in the Neo-Gothic style of the 1400s. The parliament is built to promote intelligent discourse and thus is designed like a building in ancient Greece. Pretty cool idea, and architecturally a lot more interesting than a whole bunch of 19^th century buildings together.

City Hall

Parliament

Some other highlights of Vienna were the St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the Schönbrunn Palace, and the music museum (Haus der Musik). The St. Stephen’s Cathedral is both an impressive building and an impressive story. Parts of the cathedral look just like the cathedrals we’ve seen in every other city. But then the roof is completely unique. It is made of 200,000 clay tiles laid mosaic style into patterns and pictures. Apparently the roof is very steep to shed the massive amounts of snow Vienna gets and if the roof was tiled in one color it would make the cathedral feel oppressive, so they made pretty patterns.

The story of St. Stephen’s during WW2, however, is not a happy one. The cathedral escaped Allied bombing unscathed, because the Allies at that point were not carpet bombing but strategically targeting things like bridges and other infrastructure. At the very end of the war, the Austrians were sure the Russians were coming to destroy and loot the city, so one night, the Austrians looted their own city, including the shops surrounding St. Stephen’s and then set them on fire. The ash and fire blew over to the Cathedral, destroying the roof, and the windows, and a good portion of the structure. But the Russians never came and the war ended. Immediately after the war, St. Stephen’s Cathedral became a symbol of Austrian guilt, both of their greed in looting their fellow countrymen and also of falling in line behind the Third Reich so easily. The city rallied around the reconstruction of the Cathedral and the process was a key factor in revitalizing the culture and infrastructure of the city. But the guilt of that time is still felt whenever an Austrian passes St. Steven’s.

The Schönbrunn Palace was the summer palace of the Hapsburg family who ruled most of Europe for most of history. It contains 1,441 rooms and 500 acres of gardens. We took the “Grand Tour” through 40 of the rooms, each of which has a different character. I loved that the Palace was not fixed in time (in contrast to the Neushwanstein castle) and you could see how it changed according to the style of the times and the preferences of the monarchs.

Schonbrunn Palace

The Haus der Musik was our last stop in Vienna. After the incredibly dry Mozart museum I went to in Salzburg, I was a bit skeptical about the Haus der Musik but I wanted to give appreciation of Viennese musical history a second shot. Luckily, the museum was much better than the Mozart one, though the exhibits were still pretty hit or miss. The first part of the museum is dedicated to the Vienna Philharmonic, where we watched some videos of old performances (including the Star Wars theme song!) and I learned that conductors actually do more than just make funny hand movements—they control the speed and volume of the different sections, mostly through improvisation. The largest part of the museum was dedicated to the science of sound. It was very strange. Lots of fun interactive things to do, but not all that educational and at times downright confusing. The only thing I really learned will not be a shock to anyone—Jay does have much better hearing than the rest of us: he could hear up to 15,139 Hz to my 13,123 Hz. The last section was the best, going through the great Viennese composers (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Strauss and Mahler). I didn’t realize that before the Viennese Classical period of Haydn/Mozart/Beethoven, all music was composed for God or King. 1780 was the first time music was composed for mass enjoyment instead of reinforcing social structures. That’s my new cool fun fact from Austria.

Crash Course on Germany

Munich was not technically our first stop in Germany—we also had “train layovers” in Hamburg and Köln during which Jay and I did some quick “steeple chasing” to see the main highlights of the towns—but it was the first place we spent any real time. The most immediately striking thing to me about Germany is how much World War Two is still omnipresent. In Amsterdam, the war had clear long-term effects on the city, obviously in the complete rebuild of the bombed out neighborhoods but also more subtly in that the trees are exactly the same height because the old trees were all cut down for firewood during the war. But in Munich (and the surrounding area) the fallout from the war is more obvious and will always be a major part of the fabric of the city/country: many of the buildings were never really rebuilt from the war and instead have a façade painted on them to appear as if they had been rebuilt; Dachau will always be synonymous with the atrocities of concentration camps, no mater how hard the local tourism board tries to highlight other town features. 

I guess you can call this "reconstructed"...

Right in the main square, some nice facade painting

Upon arrival in Munich, Jay and I quickly hopped on another New Europe Free City Tour. The tour was not quite as good as our last one, I think because the guide hadn’t quite figured out how to spin the WW1 and WW2 history with the sunnier side of Bavaria into a coherent story about the city, but it was still a great quick intro. My favorite thing was seeing the subtle Holocaust tributes around the city. Our guide said that Munich’s approach to Holocaust remembrance is unique: rather than have a big showy display with lots of signs and information, the city has many small subtle memorials, which you then go home, google it, get curious about what you find, and end up learning more about WW2 than you had set out to. An interesting approach I think, and here are two examples that stuck with me:

• Early in Nazi rule, the clergy of the Frauenkirche cathedral decided to hide items of monetary and spiritual value for the nearby synagogue in their basement. The cathedral was bombed, though the towers (and thus the basement below them) were spared because the Allies used the towers to mark the city center of Munich. After the war, as a thank you, the Jewish clergy helped fund the rebuild of the cathedral. To this day, there is menorah painted in the ceiling of the cathedral to pay tribute to this unusual partnership.

• In another part of the city, there is an alley with a path of bronze stones set into the cobble stone. Apparently, the alley was where objectors would dodge the nearby Hitler memorial for to avoid saluting the SS. If you were caught taking the alley too many times, you were arrested (and likely killed), yet this threat did not deter many people and their bravery is thus memorialized.

The next day we took the train out to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp and a model for all the others. Like the Anne Frank House, I haven’t processed the experience enough to write coherently about it. All I’ll say for now is that I have no idea how folks still live in that area. I can’t imagine facing those atrocities everyday—there are prominent remembrance signs throughout the area, the town bike path is the old rail line to the camp, and many of the roads and buildings in the area were built with prisoner labor.

To try to get my mind off the camp a bit, I spent the afternoon at the Deutsches Science and Technology Museum. This museum was an interesting example of much the guide book you purchase can shape your trip. Our Frommer’s has a half-page rave of the museum:

“The world’s largest and oldest technological museum of its kind, the Deutches Museum contains a huge collection of artifacts and historic originals…For one of the most popular exhibits, you can descend into the bowels of a coal and salt mine…What makes the museum fascinating for adults and children alike is that there are buttons to push, gears to crank, and levers to pull. In any case, you could easily spend a half-day here.”

And Rough Guides has a small, skeptical paragraph:

“Munich’s most overwhelming museum—the Deutches Museum—occupies a mid-stream island in the Isar. Covering every conceivable aspect of technical endeavor…this is the most compendious collection of its type in Germany.”

I think if I had only purchased the Rough Guide book I would have skipped the museum, but Frommer’s made it sound so awesome! In the end, I think both summaries are true. The exhibits are sweet, especially the mining exhibit, and it’s more of a history of science and technology museum than I was expecting, with technologies for any given endeavor from its earliest days up to the 1980s so you can see the development of the field. On the other hand, there are about 65 different topics covered and the only way to really appreciate the museum would be to get an annual membership and tackle one or two sections per week (and speak German, because most signs are not translated).

I don't know what year this represents of what they are mining, but how cool!

Lastly, we ventured into the Bavarian countryside to check out the Neushwanstein castle. I think of castles as an artifact of the middle ages, but this one was built by King Ludwig II starting in 1869! It was never finished because he died mysteriously in 1886, but the rooms that are finished are insane. The castle was designed as a tribute to the operatic works of Wager, and each room is themed according to one of his operas. The strangest room is the cave room—truly, a room designed to look like a cave, right of the king’s private quarters—honoring one of Wagner's operas set in a cave, I think. Most of the rest of the rooms are just way over the top ornate. Jay and I decided that room decorations increase to a point where you are like, “Ok, come on, too much,” and then if you keep decorating they come back around to “That’s so awesome!” I wish I could have taken pictures, because it’s hard to describe—every inch of the room, floors, ceilings, walls, was covered in mural and mosaic work; the kings bedroom was full of intricate woodwork that took 14 carvers four and a half years to complete; the gold and bejeweled chandeliers each had 64 candles and weighted 2,000 pounds.

Oh yeah, and then there is the fun fact that Neushwanstein inspired the castle in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. The location is stunning, surrounded by wooded hills and alpine lakes with snow capped mountains towering the background. And the castle really does look like it belongs in a fairy tale:

Princess Castle!!

The castle as it would look without the scaffolding on the big tower

Note: It’s interesting as I go back and reread this—I expected the Bavarian culture (beer gardens and the tasty food) to feature more prominently in my memory of Munich. Somehow against the background of everything else we saw, that part just seems, frankly, irrelevant.

Swiss Cities

While in Switzerland, Jay and I also spent a few days in Bern and Zürich. Both cities had a great feel, just not a lot of things we actually wanted to do and I am happy to now be on a train to Munich.

I think of America as a pretty national-pride heavy country, but cities in Switzerland take it to another level—everywhere you look there are Swiss flags, flags for the region and flags for the locality. On top of that, Jay pointed out the nationalist (anti-EU) advertisements all over the place. A good one had a circle of hats with the EU star floating in the water, one man completely drowned (presumably Greece), and the whole ring trying to pull the last man in the water down (presumably Switzerland). Another good and incredibly common one was of a boulder labeled “AUNS initiative” that had knocked over a statue a demolished a shield of the Swiss flag.

 

Zürich

I was pretty skeptical of Zürich when we first arrived; luckily, it grew on me, in spite of the rain. The two things I quickly noticed was that, first, most people probably live outside Zürich and commute in for work, because the city was deserted mid-day Sunday. And second, Zürich really is a very well-off city, and you could feel the cost of living more than in Oslo. I’m pretty sure we saw more luxury vehicles than people. We spent a nice mellow day walking around the old cobble stone streets then went on a boat around Lake Zürich.

Flags on every building in Bern and Zurich: overkill.

Largest clock in Europe

Zurich from the water

Bern

Following the trend of narrow stairs and great views, a highlight of Bern was climbing up the 270 stairs of the St. Vincent belfry to see the Bernese Alps.

Another highlight was the Bear Pits, which has housed brown bears (the city mascot) since the early sixteen century. When reading about Bern, I had a hard time believing that they actually had a 6,000 square meter park for some bears in the middle of the city, but in fact, yes, the city has four brown bear mascots living in an enclosed (but free to the public) park next to the river.

Bear Park

Bern city mascot: hard life!

Lastly, we visited the Einstein Museum, an incredibly in depth exhibit on the physicist’s life and contemporary historical events that shaped his life. It was beautifully done and very interesting, though the theory of relativity presentations gave me some serious MIT flashbacks. I can pinpoint the exact moment physics got too theoretical for me—gyroscopes, the last lesson in first semester mechanics. After that, I could strong arm the math enough to do well on exams (thanks in no small part to Andy Brown) but it never really made sense to me. Somehow my brain just can’t conceptualize beyond a certain level of abstractness (or I guess microscopic-ness in the case of E&M) and physics was one of the courses that made me feel really stupid during college. Luckily, working at the Health Foundation and finding the wonderful (applied and tangible!) field of evaluation knocked the MIT-induced intellectual insecurity right out of me. It will be a continuing goal in my life to surround myself with people and organizations that appreciate and foster many different forms of intelligence.