Luzern or Lucerne. Take Your Pick.

After leaving Julie in Basel, we hopped on a train to Luzern. In our hastily planned couple of days in Switzerland, we picked it for it's location and our outdated guidebook's indications that there might be something nice to see there.


Wow, what a great looking town. It has this "wow-factor" with the towers and wooden bridges and stuff that makes me think that Luzern was very reluctant about leaving the middle ages.


As I mentioned earlier, in what I thought was a very amusing way (but apparently not, because of the complete lack of comments about it) we spent the night in the old city jail, which had been converted into a hotel. The rooms were small and barren, but served their purpose - a warm, dry place to sleep.

One interesting thing about Luzern is that I heard more English spoken there than anywhere else in contenental Europe. It was actually pretty strange. But I tried to ignore most of it, since the majority of things I heard were stupid things that oblivious American tourists say. Take this, for example:

American Tourist Woman: Oooh, look. They buy their fruits and vegetables outside.
Tour Guide: Yes, some people prefer to shop at the markets, but are only here every Monday and Thursday.
American Tourist Man: What if I get hungry on Wednesday?

I had to force myself to pretend that I didn't understand them. Taking pictures at the market helped.


There were some nice, shaggy cows in Luzern

And some buildings with character.

And one of the old wodden bridges has a series of paintings called "The Death Dance".
Here are a couple samples:





It was a fun trip. Luzern would have been nicer if the weather wasn't cold and cloudy, and it was even worse because the sun came out about 15 minutes after the train left Luzern. It seems like there is a lot of stuff to do in Swizerland, so perhaps we'll be back. Heck, we might just get hungry and have to get down there for the market on Monday.