Here you can browse through my blog posts prior to February 2022. Currently I'm sharing my travel experiences, candid opinions, and what's on my mind solely on my Facebook page. — Rick
I’m traveling across Switzerland this week, updating my guidebook, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the great Swiss cities.
Wherever I travel, my favorite restaurants are always the family-run places that offer caring, hands-on service — and Switzerland is no different. In Lausanne, I had a delightful meal (even though I was dining alone) at Café du Grütli. The owner, Willi Prutsch, was in great form, and I just had to capture his passion for the food he and his family have served here, day in and day out, for over 30 years.
A ritual for travelers around Europe is to gather at noon and see old medieval clock towers shift into action for a show that — centuries ago — was impressive. It’s generally pretty anticlimactic by modern standards: A rooster crows, a statue of Jesus stiffly offers a blessing as a carousel of Apostles jolts into motion, the Grim Reaper tips his annoying hourglass, and a jester dings his dong.
In an attempt to give the show a little more razzle-dazzle, here’s a look at the actual gears behind the scenes. Imagine the wow factor of this mechanical spectacle if you were a pilgrim passing through Bern in 1530.
Buskers (street musicians and entertainers) are a fun part of travel. You spend a lot of time walking as a traveler, and it’s nice to experience a little audio color as you stroll.
I’m traveling through Switzerland right now, and I really lucked out: My itinerary aligned perfectly with the capital city of Bern’s annual three-day busker blowout. The city was inundated with festival-goers (which made my restaurant research a bit less productive — everyone was eating on the streets), and the entire Old Town was a joyful celebration. (Including herbal joy, which I just noticed in this clip at 0:07.)
My favorite band from the festival, an English group called Tankus the Henge, was an extremely physical explosion of musical fun. Check them out!
Here in Switzerland, I’ve been noticing sterile, pharmacy-type shops that advertise themselves with marijuana leaves. Popping into several of them, I’ve learned about the Swiss approach to pot. In Switzerland, you can legally use marijuana with less than 1% THC to get relaxed…but not high. (To me, this notion is kind of like, “OK, you can sit in the boat…but you can’t pull up the anchor.”) In this video, join me on a visit to a Swiss “Hanftheke.”
I’m in Luzern, at one of Switzerland’s many modern train stations. Traveling here, it occurs to me that a big part of the fun of being in Europe is just enjoying the everyday mechanisms of life over here: using ticket machines, jumping on trams, pushing buttons…just doing stuff. I’m generally pretty slow when it comes to getting things from machines, but lately, I’ve been impressed by how easy it is, across Europe, to get a ticket without waiting in line. (They’ve thought of everything — language barriers, different currencies, American credit cards — and it all works beautifully.) As you can see in this fun clip, ticket machines and train stations are getting really slick.