Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
there, wherever it was. The scary thing was to realize just how many countries it might have been.
I spent the rest of the day shuffling around the city, wandering through department stores, fingering the
merchandise (this drives Swiss sales clerks crazy), dining on the only affordable food in town (at
McDonald's), visiting the cathedral, exploring the old town and gazing in the windows of antique shops that
sold the sort of over-ornate objects you would expect to see in, say, a
House Beautiful
article on Barry
Manilow's Malibu hacienda - life-sized porcelain tigers, oriental vases you could put a large child in,
oversized Louis-Quatorze bureaux and sideboards with gilt gleaming from every curl and crevice.
In the evening, having scrubbed the mashed figs of Locarno out of my last clean shirt, I went for a beer
in a dive bar around the corner, where I waited weeks for service and then spent the next hour gaping
alternately at the largeness of the bill and the smallness of the beer, holding the two side by side for
purposes of comparison. Declining the advance of Geneva's only prostitute ('Thanks, but I've just been
fucked by the management'), I moved to another semi-seamy bar down the street, but found precisely the
same experience, and so returned with heavy feet to my hotel room.
I went into the bathroom to see how my shirt was drying. The purply mashed-fig stains, I noted with the
steady gaze of someone who knows his way around disappointment, were coming back, like disappearing
ink. I dropped the shirt in the wastebin then went back to the bedroom, switched on the TV and fell onto the
bed all in one movement and watched a 1954 film called
The Sands of Iwo Jima,
featuring John Wayne
killing Japanese people while talking in French using someone else's voice - an acting skill I never knew he
possessed.
It occurred to me, as I lay there watching this movie of which I could understand nary a word other than
'Bonjour', 'Merci bien' and 'Aaaaagh!' (what the Japanese said when John stuck them in the belly with his
bayonet), that this was almost boring enough to cause brain damage, and yet at the, same time - and
here's the interesting thing - I was probably having as much fun as anyone in Switzerland.
I took a morning train to Bern, two hours away to the east. Bern was a huge relief. It was dignified and
handsome, and full of lively caf￩s and young people. I picked up a city map at the station's tourist office and
with its aid found a room in the Hotel Kreuz in the centre of town. I dumped my bag and went straight back
out, not only eager to see the town but delighted at my eagerness. I had begun to fear in Geneva that my
enthusiasm for travel might be seeping away and that I would spend the rest of the trip shuffling through
museums and along cobbled streets in my Willy Loman posture. But, no, I was perky again, as if I'd just
been given a booster shot of vitamins.
Bern is built on a bluff above a broad loop of the River Aare, and the views from the bridges and
vantage points are quite splendid, especially back towards the old town - a jumble of orangeish tiled roofs
broken up with church spires and towers that look like mutant cuckoo clocks. Most of the streets are
arcaded in a way I've never seen before: the ground floors are set back and the upper floors jut out over
them, their heavy weight supported by thick arched buttresses, creating a covered walkway over the
pavements. The shops along them were infinitely more varied and interesting - even more classy - than
those in Geneva. There were antiquarian bookstores and art galleries and antique shops specializing in
everything from wind-up toys to clocks and binoculars to Etruscan pottery.
Culturally, Bern is on the dividing line between French-speaking Switzerland and German-speaking
Switzerland, and there is a mildly exotic blending of the two. Waiters greet you with 'Bitte', for instance, but
thank you with 'Merci'. Architecturally, it is stolidly Swiss-German, with severe (though not disagreeable)
sandstone buildings that look as if they were built to withstand a thousand earthquakes. Bern has the air of a
busy provincial market town. You would never guess that it is a national capital. This is partly because of the
peculiar nature of Swiss politics. So many powers are devolved to the cantons and to national referenda
that Switzerland doesn't even feel the need to have a prime minister, and the presidency is such a nominal
and ceremonial position that it changes hands every year. They wouldn't have a president at all except that
they need somebody to greet visiting heads of state at the airport. The Bundeshaus, the national parliament,
looks like a provincial town hall, and nowhere in the city - even in the bars on the nearby streets - do you
have a sense of being among bureaucrats and politicians.
I spent a day and a half wandering through the streets of the old town and across the high bridges to the
more modern, but still handsome, residential streets on the far side of the Aare. It was a wonderful city for
