And here I’m stuck, sitting again in the ICE writing articles for my blog. Why? Because I’ve been on “vacation” for one week and there is so much to tell.
This is a series of articles. The first one is already out, but I wrote it in German. The second one is this one and there is a bunch to come yet. I will divide the series up by city, because I think that this makes the most sense so here we go: Wabern.
The entire thing started already several months ago with us (my entire class) selling jogging pants, buying and selling giant amounts of food and lots of other crazy stuff just to make it this week cheaper for us. And “the entire thing” is a study trip to Italy (more precisely to Florence) while passing by Wabern close to Bern in Switzerland and Milan.
Just to make sure I don’t miss the departure of the bus at 4 am, I didn’t sleep the entire night. And this was tough because I just travelled from Munich to Strasbourg the same day and the journey was quite hard. I was the first one to arrive at the departure point but that at the price of being really devastated. I slept the entire trip to Wabern (which is about 3 hours away from Strasbourg). Not only that 3 hours isn’t that much time to sleep, but on top of that my mates decided to wake me up in a quite abrupt way which didn’t make things easier.
The reason why we stopped in Wabern was called “Swisstopo”, the swiss land surveying office. We arrived there at 9 am to first see a presentation followed by a trip through all the interesting parts of the building. The presentation wasn’t bad, but I was so tired that I almost fell asleep. The tour through the building was actually quite interesting, mostly because they have their own printing machines. Unfortunately, I don’t have any images of it, but I hope that my class mates do, so stay tuned to see them 🙂 . Just like most newspapers they use offset print to print their maps, but, unlike the usual way, they use pre-cut paper instead of paper rolls. Offset printers as such are already huge machines but together with the mechanisms to lift the pre-cut paper, they get even bigger. The printing machines were obviously not the only thing they’ve shown to us but other than that, well, it’s just another land surveying office.
After getting out of Swisstopo, there was still the lunch break. As nobody had an idea of where to go to eat and Bern is in the German part of Switzerland and I am the only German in my class it was my task to ask someone on the street to find us a place to eat. It wasn’t the first time that I’ve been talking to a Swiss but still the accent surprises me every time again when I meet one. It depends on how much accent they have but sometimes I really have to struggle not to start laughing. I asked some of my class mates that were standing around me then how they perceived it and obviously both accents, mine and the one of the Swiss were like Chinese to them.
Anyway, the people we met on the street told us about a campsite nearby and it was really nice there. Again, I didn’t take any pictures but as soon as someone sends me any, I will post them here.
And that was it for Wabern. Not a very spectacular place to visit but still nice. The same day, we arrived in Annecy, back in France, but (cough, cough) that’s the story of the next post which I will publish tomorrow.