Bern Days 1 and 2

Alright, there's free internet here at my hostel in Interlaken. I got on the train in Paris to go to Bern, which was about a 5 hour trip I think. Anyway, I had to connect in Lausanne, but my train was 40 minutes late and I only had a 30 minute layover... so if you do the math, I missed my connection. It turned out to be ok because my eurail pass made it so that I didn't have to make a reservation for that segment. That was pretty cool. Anyway, so I made it to Bern, and found my hostel. I looked at some of the restaurant prices, and none of them were under $20 per plate! I couldn't believe it. I just decided to buy some stuff at the grocery store there and eat by the river Aare, which was a very nice river. After relaxing and getting to know the city better, I decided to go to bed early. I did have to end up using my earplugs while I was there because there was a guy that was snoring really loud, but it didn't bother me too badly. Also, I woke up in the middle of the night, and my bedlamp was on. I'm not sure how it happened, and it took me a while to figure out how to turn it off, so that kind of weirded me out for a bit. Anyway, the next day, I decided to buy a Berncard, which gave me free public transport and free entrance to a bunch of museums for 24 hours. First, I saw the bears that are apparently famous in Bern because that's where the city derived its name. Then I went to the Einsteinhaus. For those of you who don't speak German, that roughly translates to Einstein's house. This was the place where Einstein formally put together his theory of special relativity! I know a lot of you probably are not as excited about that as I am, but I took a class in relativity last semester, so to see where these ideas were put in writing was pretty cool. So from there, I hiked up the Gurten, which is a trail that leads up to the top of a big hill. The elevation at the top was about 2500 feet, and I got a beautiful view of the city. I tried to take pictures but the camera really couldn't do it justice. From there, I went to the history museum, where I learned how Bern was founded, and attached to that was the Einstein Museum, which had a bunch of rooms dedicated to Einstein's life. From there I went to the Museum of Natural History, where they had an exhibit with a bunch of full skeletons of over 1000 animals including a huge whale! It was really cool, and it's amazing to see how closely the apes skeletons resemble human ones. From there I went to the Kleinmuseum which had a bunch of art, some was interesting, some was... really weird. There was one movie of just a light bulb that was shining. About 5 minutes into the movie, you saw a moth flying around in slow motion, then there was another 5 minutes of nothing but the light bulb. It was definitely the biggest waste of 10 minutes of my entire life. By that time, everything was closing (everything in Bern closes at about 6:00), so I decided to go back to the Aare River and just sit and read a book for a while. While I was walking back, I looked in at the McDonalds to see the prices... it was $12 for a stinking big mac! That's ridiculous! Anyway, today I got to Interlaken, and I am very impressed so far. The hotel receptionist guy was really cool, and he gave me all these tips on what I should do while I am here. He also gave me a free shot of vodka, and I haven't eaten lunch yet, so I'm kind of feeling the effects of that. If anything in this post doesn't make sense, then that's probably why. Anyway, I'm going to the train station to see if I can get my ticket to Rome sorted out, then I'm going to spend some time hiking through the Swiss Alps. I'm really excited about this.