Travel Reference
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random walking. There were no freeways, no industry, no sterile office parks, just endless avenues of fine
homes and small parks.
I attempted just two touristy diversions and failed at both. I crossed the high, arched Nydegg Bridge to
see the famous bear pits - the city name derives from the German word for bear, so they like to keep
several bears as mascots - but the pits were empty. There was no sign to explain why and locals who
arrived with their children were clearly as surprised and perplexed as I was.
I tried also to go to the Albert Einstein museum, housed in his old flat on Kramgasse, one of the main
arcaded streets. I walked up and down the street half a dozen times before I found the modest entrance to
the building, tucked away between a restaurant and a boutique. The door was locked - it was dusty and
looked as if it hadn't been opened for weeks, perhaps years - and no one answered the bell, though
according to the tourist brochure it should have been open. It struck me as odd that nowhere in the town had
I encountered any indication that Einstein had ever lived there: no statue in a park or square, no street
named in his honour, not even his kindly face on postcards. There wasn't so much as a plaque on the wall to
tell the world that in one year, 1905, while working as an obscure clerk in the Swiss patent office and living
above this door, Einstein produced four papers that changed for ever the face of physics - on the theory of
Brownian motion, on the theory of relativity, on the photon theory of light and on the establishment of the
mass-energy equivalence. I have no idea what any of that means, of course - my grasp of science is such
that I don't actually understand why electricity doesn't leak out of sockets - but I would have liked to see
where he lived.
In the evening I had a hearty meal, which is about as much as the visitor can aspire to in Switzerland,
and went for another long walk down darkened streets and through empty squares. As I returned to the city
centre along Marktgasse, one of the main pedestrian venues, I discovered that all the bars were shutting.
Waiters were taking chairs and tables inside and lights were going out. It was nine-twenty in the evening.
This gives you some idea of what a heady night-life Bern offers.
Quietly distraught, I wandered around and with relief found another bar still open a couple of blocks
away on Kochegasse. It was crowded, but had an amiable, smoky air, and I was just settling in with a tall
glass of golden Edelweiss and the closing chapters of
The Black Death,
when I heard a familiar voice
behind me saying, 'D'ya remember that time Blane Brockhouse got the shits and went crazy with the Uzi in
the West Gollagong Working Men's Club?'
I turned around to find my two friends from the Geneva train sitting on booster seats behind frothy
beers. 'Hey, how you guys doing?' I said before I could stop myself.
They looked at me as if I were potentially insane. 'Do we know you, mate?' said one of them.
I didn't know what to say. These guys had never seen me before in their lives. 'You're Australian, huh?' I
burbled stupidly.
'Yeah. So?'
'I'm an American.' I was quiet for a bit. 'But I live in England.'
There was a long pause. 'Well, that's great,' said one of the Australians with a measured hint of
sarcasm, then turned to his friend and said, 'D'ya remember the time Dung-Breath O'Leary hacked that
waitress's forearms off with a machete because there was a fly in his beer?'
I felt like an asshole, which of course is a pretty fair description of my condition. Something about their
diminutive size and warped little minds heightened the sense of quiet humiliation. I turned back to my beer
and my book, the tips of my ears warm to the touch, and took succour in the plight of the poor people of
Bristol, where in 1349 the plague so raged through the city that 'the living were scarce able to bury the dead'
and the grass grew calf-high in the city streets.
Before long, with the aid of two more beers and 120,000 agonized deaths in the west country of
England, my embarrassment was past and I was feeling much better. As they say, time heals all wounds.
Still, if you wake up with a bubo on your groin, better see a doctor all the same.
