Bern

Bern is famous for two things; the bear pits & the ogre statue
We had a day and a half in Bern which was enough time to see everything. We were lucky enough to be there on a Saturday for a full day so got to spend some time exploring the local Saturday market. We shared a delicious lemon & sugar crepe and admired jewelry and toys and various other market-ey things. at the end of the market stalls was a police exhibition i suppose. they had police and ambulance cars and trucks open for kids to crawl through and a police band was playing.
We found the Ogre statue and were surprised to find no one else taking photos of it because we thought it was hilarious. There are over 100 fountains in the city of Bern and 11 have statues on them but the Ogre one is the best by far. It depicts a sitting ogre feeding a naked child into its mouth while other children are strapped to his sides apparently waiting for their turn to be eaten. I looked the fountain up on Wikipedia and its says that the fountain is actually called Kindlifresserbrunnen which translates to Child Eater Fountain but is often translated as Ogre Fountain. there are a few interpretations of the meaning behind the statue, my favourite is that it was built to scare disobedient children... this seems a little extreme to me!
The other thing Bern is famous for is the bear pits, the bears no longer live in pits more of a zoo like enclosure with lots of trees and grass and rocks and a stream running right through the front of the enclosure. There were 4 bears, one secluded from the others (this was the male bear) and then a female bear and two baby bears in the larger area. we spent over an hour watching the bears frolic around eating their lunch. i took over 200 photos of the bears most of which i then had to delete but i saved the best ones :-)
our second day in Bern we went for a walk around the town but as it was Sunday everything was closed. We spent over 40 minutes searching for something to eat for breakfast/lunch which was really annoying, i hate traveling on Sundays! We spent the rest of the day sitting on a park bench that overlooked the town reading our books before getting picked up by the busabout bus and going to Lauterbrunnen.

Ewen enjoying one of Bern's many fountains

The clock tower

The greatest lolly shop on earth, you can enter by going down a slide!

Not too sure what this is but i liked it

Einstein lived in this apartment for 2 years. apparently this is where he came up with E=MC2 (not sure how to do the squared symbol in this program but you know what i mean)

The bear enclosure, you can see the fence that separates the male bears enclosure from the other one

Papa bear

Baby bear just after a swim

Mama bear eating a tomato

Baby bear up a tree

Baby bears fighting and Mama bear on her way to break it up

Baby bear army crawling down the hill

Bridge into town

Papa bear having a nap

Some of many strange things they have found in the bear pits over the years. in some of the other cases were cameras, medicine bottles, books, sunglasses, playing cards, spray paint, a bra and false teeth...

Just normal people waiting for a bus in Bern

A street in Bern

The famed Ogre statue

The view we had from our seat over looking the town