1st week

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:

I was on the phone with my dad when a few of these guys 'dropped in':
I was only here to two days before my first little trip, I drove to Bern, the Swiss capital.  It was about a 30 minute drive from my apt., taking the backroads to catch some scenery.  I took alot of pictures of Bern, the first time using my camera.  Afterwards I discovered accidentally how to format my camera's memory, and lost everything.  Oh well... with it being so close and grand, I'll be making many trips to Bern.  I did capture a few shots at dusk from the hill:

In a nutshell, its the capital, and Einstein did his most important work while employed at the patent office.  Other that that, its just maybe one of the coolest places I'll ever see.  It has a very distinct look and feel to it, especially from the street view.  Google it, its cool.

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:

The tower was a medieval addition, with narrow windows as it served as more of a defense structure:

In the backround you see a glimpse of the 'downtown' area which I neglected to photo.
Heres that gate:
A column, the only one left from a big ol' temple:

And the more exciting of the Ruins:  A big part of this structure was for a theatre.  Like all Roman ruins, It had been quarried for many centuries, leaving very little behind from what it once was:

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....