Fall Break- Lucerne

Monday morning we had to catch a train really early out of Zurich HB, the main train station. That meant catching a train from the Hostel at 7:35 am, having previously gotten up, eaten breakfast, packed lunch, checked out, and walked to our train stop. Well, apparently not everyone is so great at doing all of that quickly, since we ended up having to sprint down this giant hill to catch the train to Zurich HB. I guess it was good in the end... I felt like I was going to tumble over and start rolling with my bag, so I guess it helped to wake me up :D

So we had to run around the train station to jump the right train, but found it just in time, and were all set for getting to Lucerne. The ride was only about 45 minutes. I think it may have been the first time in all of our train use that someone walked by to check that we actually had tickets- the times we took the train into Zurich's Old Town, there was never anyone there to check. GUess buying that train pass was pretty much a waste of money, oh well.

We got off at Lucerne, and headed over to the hostel, which was really really close- it was just across the Reuss River, near the old city wall. Anyways we stayed at Tourist Hotel Lucerne, which was nice, and had the slogan "Lucerne is Fantastic!." Only slightly better than "Spain is different" and "Zurich- Downtown Switzerland." Since we were right up next to the remains of this old wall, we decided to head of there first after packing lunch.

The Musegg wall is what it sounds like- a wall with a walkway on top that connects lookout towers that are about 50 meters away from each other. From the top of the towers there's a pretty good view of the Alps, the Reuss River and Lake Luzern. We pretty much just climbed a bunch of stairs and took a bunch more pictures, because it was all so pretty. One thing that was sort of interesting about that wall was that there was a high school right next to it. We were actually walking on the track strip of the high school, which ran right next to the wall. There were kids outside for gym class- wouldn't it be weird to go to school and see that every day?

At the end of the wall, headed over to this big lion sculpture that is carved into a mountain, the Löwendenkmal. Zoe was in charge of Lucerne, so when she told us about the lion, I googled it to see what it looked at. Well my understanding was that it would be bigger than a normal lion, but not that big, judging from the pictures. Haha, I was very wrong. The thing is gigantic- take a look at my pictures. There's at least one with a person in the shot, so you can see just how big it is.

It's this big crying lion that had a spear sticking out of its side, and is lying over a French shield. The lion is a symbol of Switzerland, so the monument was to Swiss soldiers. So I thought- it's actually a monument to fallen Swiss mercenaries. Now I know mercenaries are still soldiers, but somehow knowing that they were mercenaries killed during the French revolution makes the whole thing less sad somehow. I mean, mercenaries?

Afterwards we went over to Hofkirche, built for the patron saint, St. Leodegar in the 1600s. It was pretty, with a giant wooden pulpit that was wound around one of the columns near the front. One thing kind of cool about this church was that you could see the old painted name placards in some pews, showing where certain people used to sit, or had given money to the church to "buy" their seat, like at a baseball stadium or something like that.

We walked over to Lake Luzern, and crossed the Reuss River over the Kappellbruke, the oldest covered bridge in Europe. Or rather, the rebuilt oldest covered bridge in Europe. Apparently about 15 years ago there was this giant fire at night that destroyed most of the wooden parts, but they reconstructed it. During the summer it must be gorgeous- it's covered with flowers, and had mountains in the background. Unfortunately it was cloudy most of the time that we were there. It was still pretty though.

On the other side of the river, we went into the Jesuitenkirche, another old church that looks sort of like the two bell towers are topped with giant things of garlic. I'm not sure when this one was built, but since the inside looks Baraque, it's got to be younger than the other church. Anyways the inside is all pink and white, since they used this pink marble for a lot of the inside details. This includes this giant marble and gold encrusted pulpit that's just sort of stuck onto the wall. It looks so heavy- I wish I knew how they got it to stay up there.

We crossed over another covered bridge, the Spreuerbrucke, to walk back to the hostel to rest, since it had already been a long day. The plan was to do a little more hiking afterwards. So We went back to the hostel and attempted to take a half an hour nap. This is when I learned that my watch alarm does not wake me up. Nor does it wake up Margaret, Zoe and Lindsey. Conveniently, no one else had set any sort of an alarm, so everyone woke up maybe two hours later. It was already dark, so going hiking some more was not really an option. We headed into town to eat, and just walked around, window shopping and everything.

It started to rain later on that night, so we headed pack to make sure we had all of our stuff together for the 7 hour train trip to Florence. The rain didn't go away until a couple days after we got back to Barcelona...yay. Anyways, I liked Lucerne. It's supposedly a really big tourist town, but it actually didn't feel touristy at all. Maybe it's because we were there sort of off-season, but I would suggest visiting there if you want something quiet.