Bern

see all photos »

The Swiss capital is a charming riverside city with a relaxed atmosphere. The main streets of the old town are lined with medieval covered arcades or Lauben. Below these, each shop has a basement level which is accessed via an inclined trapdoor on the street. A lot of these basements have also been converted into shops, making a shopping trip here a unique experience. The whole city centre has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There are dozens of decorative fountains, one is particularly gruesome in that it depicts an ogre devouring small children. We also wandered around the 15^th century cathedral and checked out the medieval clock tower with its moving puppets.

World famous German born physicist Albert Einstein worked on his Theory of Relativity from a small house on the main street here, now a museum which we spent an hour looking around.

a charming riverside city with a relaxed atmosphere

Across the high bridge at the northern end of the town are the circular concrete pits containing the bears which gave the city its name. Nearby, construction has already started on a new riverside park which will give the bears a much bigger and more natural enclosure.