Hi everyone!!!
With the exception of missing my lovely bride, I am doing very well. Although everything is upside down here, and even though French Dressing is white but tastes the same, I've been able to navigate myself through Swiss life just fine for the first week. I keep myself on the go, so as not to spend much time thinking about the people I miss. My German is serving me well, and I'm able to communicate the basics with the locals, although they have to 'switch' themselves to German, as it is rather seperate from their native 'Swiss German'. My senses have been overloaded. Every one. My ears hear the Swiss tongue backed by a chorus of cowbelles, my tongue experiments with the chocolates, breads, cheeses of the Swiss, not to mention the local beers and the carbonated water. My sense of touch has been violated by the large flies that take bites out of me in the night, as I live next to a farm in Worben currently. But all I have to do to see some neat stuff is look right outside my window:
Friday was Swiss National Day. August 1st. Its pretty much like our 4th of July and seems to be celebrated the same way. Fireworks and grill outs. I think I'll be making a seperate entry for the festivities and right now just write about Avenches and Murten. Being as it was the celebration of the beginning of Switzerland, I thought I'd check out a little relevent history. Avenches (pronounced Avanch I think) was the Roman capital of Helvetica yadda yadda, google it. It was much larger than it is now. The main part of the town is not featured, as I came to see the Roman ruins that lie in the farmlands behind the town, and neglected to photo any of the city newer than 1000 years old. It was about a 40 minute drive and they speak French here. Here is a street view, and if you look carefully in the backround you can see the Roman wall and Gate. But don't strain your eyes, I have a zoomed in photo below:
The next three photos are of the Coliseum, which according to the tourist signs had a third of the capacity of the one in Rome when it was at its largest. There are stories of seats missing. And most of the seats are reworked as there apparently is an opera that performs here:
Here I took some video of me walking around in this old Roman stuff. Sorry for the lack of clarity, I had to dumb down the video enough so that I could upload it. I'm sure you'll find the dirty cow footage with no problem....
1 comment:
Sounds like you are keeping busy - by the time we visit, you'll be quite the Swiss tourguide/historian. Bern looks pretty cool - the aerial view reminds me of a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle. Keep the posts coming - glad you found some internet!
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