Memories and hints of a travelling IT professional.
High above Bern the Rosengarten is a beautiful place to relax. Some people might come for the four hundred types of roses planted there, others to sit in the sun or to play. The best of course is the amazing view on the old city center and the slope of the river Aare.
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The Wankdorfstadion at Bern, Switzerland is a modern soccer stadium and home to the club BSC Young Boys. It is located in the city quarter Wankdorf, was built in 2005 and today it is known under the name Stade de Suisse. 32,000 spectators can watch soccer matches there. But to be honest, the new stadium is not the reason to visit this place – it is rather the old stadium once standing there between 1925 and 2001.
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If you’re interested in art, you’ve probably already seen some works of Paul Klee who was born in 1879 in the region of Bern. His work spans different styles from expressionism via cubism to surrealism. In 2005 the Zentrum Paul Klee was opened which has gathered 40 % of his artworks and is therefore the most comprehensive exhibition about him.
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It’s well known that the heraldic animal of Bern is the bear. That’s hard to miss because it can be found everywhere on stuff relating to the city. Why is that? The legend says that the city was named by its founder Berthold V., the duke of Zähringen, after the first animal he has slain in the area. Still today a small number of bears are held in the city, and you can visit them east of the old city center at the river Aare.
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When visiting Bern there is no way around having a look at the Berner Münster, the beautiful Gothic-style cathedral in the heart of the city. It was built starting in 1421 on the grounds of a former smaller church in this location. Most impressive detail is the portal depicting the Last Judgment with 234 figures carved out of sandstone.
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Walking through the beautiful Kramgasse at Bern is liking walking through history. The street is 330 meters long and begins at the famous Zytglogge tower. It was created in 1191 and was the most important axis of the old city. Today it is a protected UNESCO world heritage site and mostly filled with shops, restaurants, and coffee bars.
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The Zytglogge is a famous clock tower in the old town of Bern, Switzerland. When you decode the local German dialect its name consists of the two words ‘Zeit’ and ‘Glocke’, ‘time’ and ‘bell’. It was built between 1218 and 1220 and was once part of the protection system of the city. As the city could only grow to the west because of the geographic situation it is now at the heart of the city.
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Switzerland is an extremely expensive country. You can pay a fortune for a vacation there and hotel rates are remarkably high as well. If you don’t need an extraordinary, beautiful hotel because you’re just on a city trip you might decide to have a look at the hotel ‘City am Bahnhof‘. It has one particularly important advantage: it is located just across the road when leaving the main railway station of Bern.
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Throughout Germany you can find a lot of old railway tracks that have been given up. Few of them get reactivated later, most of them get removed and are in best case converted to bicycle paths – a good option, as the low inclination makes cycling easy. In my region you can already find four of them: the Gartetalbahn once connecting Göttingen with Duderstadt could not be run economically; the Söhretalbahn east of Kassel wasn’t needed anymore when there was no brown coal left to be transported.
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Amazing views await those, who are willing to hike a while through the Göttingen forest. The Hünstollen is a 423 meters high mountain in the northeast of the city, officially belonging to Bovenden. Because of high cliffs this place was easily made a fortification in earlier days. Since 1882 there was a protective hut and a restaurant at this place and later a wooden tower was created from which you can see the Harz mountains but also the Gaußturm on the Hoher Hagen mountain.
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