Day in Lucerne

On Friday, Stace and I spent part of the day in Lucerne ("Luzern" to the Swiss). It's about a twenty-minute train ride from here, and it's one of the more popular cities to visit in Switzerland. We've driven through as we've gone to church and visited people there, but we hadn't ever taken the time to just look around the "old city" (Altstadt in German). (Explanation: Most Swiss cities consist of a modern city surrounding the old "town square" section. Zug has a small old town, but Lucerne's is much bigger.)

We had a very good lunch. I have yet to experience a bad Swiss restaurant. (I also have yet to experience an inexpensive Swiss restaurant, which may explain why they're all so good.) I had a spicy pork sausage with Swiss hash browns, which the Swiss call Rösti. That, of course, was my version of heaven. Stace had a really good salad, which the Swiss call, unremarkably, Salat.

We also went to see a famous giant lion sculpture that was carved into the side of a rock in memory of Swiss soldiers who fell in some battle. Unfortunately, the lion was covered in scaffolding while they were cleaning it, so we didn't bother to grab any pictures. We'll be back, I'm sure.

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I'll attach a couple of other pictures from Lucerne's "old city." There's an unfortunate story about the bridge you'll see in one of the pictures. It's about seven hundred years old, and it was decorated with a bunch of paintings a few hundred years ago. In 1993, a boat was tied up to the bridge. It started on fire and burned most of the bridge. The Swiss were heartbroken. They rebuilt the bridge. Both ends are from the original bridge, but the part in the middle is reconstructed. The tower you can see in the picture was used variously as a dungeon and record storage place. As far as I can tell now, it serves as a storage area for the gift shop in the middle of the bridge.

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