Lucern: Part 2

Now, after the glaciers, the bear museum. (If you don't like teddy bears, you can skip to the middle of the post, where we go back to town)

Man leading a bear. Why on earth?!

Aww...a cute warrior bear from the middle-ages

some impressive bear origami

Paddington Bear! It's even holding a marmalade sandwich!

a huge bear! (the mammoth is painted, in case you're having doubts)

a stuffed fox (real stuffed or fake stuffed, I dunno...)

a model of Lucern (I'm sure you can spot its landmark ;) )

a model of Matterhorn

some more bear stuff

I've forgotten which ones, but some of them move when we approach the glass case

isn't this bear supposed to be in Bern? (okay, this one didn't move. lol)

Look at the little old lady!

a bear conference

a bear playroom

I love the chessboard!

The dollhouse museum I visited in Basel had a section like this too, with teddy bears. That's why I liked it so much :P Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take photos in that one. (and we definitely had to pay to enter!)

a fossil (I can't remember of what *sigh*)
Come to think of it, this was probably something we missed in the glacier museum (I told you they were in the same building), and we saw it as we were going out.

two plump rabbits in the garden

that's the museum (pretty building, isn't it?); we didn't actually see what the building looked like when we went in through the glacier garden

Back to town, we walked around a bit more.

Some weird stuff on the streets:

garden furniture?

I'm not too sure whether these are for sale :P

Some buildings:

the town hall (the square was too tiny for me to get a complete photo with my own camera :/ )

the Jesuit Church, across the river Reuss

a bread man! :P

the Needle Dam Facility with the Spreuer Bridge behind it
The level of Lake Lucern is regulated by hand through the removal and replacement of the wooden posts ("needles")

and this is taken from the Spreuer Bridge

the Franciscan Church

the Ritterscher Palace (it doesn't look like a palace at all!)
I'm sure the building with the flags is part of it, but I'm not so sure about the building on the right...

the Chapel Bridge and Water Tower from another angle (the other end of the bridge, actually)
You can see Hof Church in the background.

That afternoon we left for Geneva, where we were to take the train back to Lyon. So that was the end of our Switzerland trip.

Lucern: Part 1

The bridge, the lion and the glacier garden. Sounds like Narnia, doesn't it? (I mean "the witch, the lion and the wardrobe"; not that I know much about the story itself, I only know the title)

When we returned from visiting Zurich and Bern on Sunday, it was still light enough to sightsee. So we decided to visit what we could that day (just in case it rained heavily the next day).

an arch in front of the train station (this photo was taken the day we arrived, when it was raining more heavily)

a ship on the lakeside

lake Lucern
On the other bank is Hof Church (the two pointed towers). We didn't go to see it up close; it was a bit out of the way.

Seebrücke (the bridge closest to the lake) with the train station beyond it (this was taken from the end of the Chapel Bridge). The two previous photos were taken from the bank in front of the train station.

the Chapel Bridge (landmark of Lucern) with its Water Tower (octagonal and more than 34 metres high, it was used as archives, treasury, prison and torture chamber. Though I wonder where exactly is the chamber...)

the side of the bridge, all the way to the other end

view from the bridge
The two green domes belong to the Jesuit Church, the first large sacral Baroque building in Switzerland (not that I really know what a Baroque building is :P )

on the bridge

another view from the bridge (the building on the hills looks like a palace, but I'm not sure what it is)

We met a poor shepherd standing in the rain, so my father shared his umbrella while we took a photo :P

Mount Pilatus in the distance (this is on the way to our hotel)

The next day (our final day in Switzerland), we set out early to complete our visit of Lucern.

Lowenplatz; we were on our way to see the lion of Lucern!
(we took the bus from the train station to Lowenplatz, because we had the Swiss Pass. We could easily have walked too)

a Swiss cow-bell...well, not exactly, but it's a bell with a cow on it, so what do you call it?
In the little streets between Lowenplatz and the lion, there were several souveir shops, and this kinda caught my eye :P

this is the dying lion of Lucern (see the arrow piercing it?) We can't approach the statue because of the lake (probably man-made). I just like the flowers that way :P

the Glacier Garden is just beside the lion statue

Some photos of what the glaciers left behind:

That was the glacier garden; the hut is the entrance. Entry was free, probably thanks to the Swiss Pass as well.
Look at the left of the photo, they even included a bear in the exhibit (stuffed, perhaps), I wonder why. This isn't Bern, after all :P

ooh...and I saw some cute and fluffy things :P
I didn't mention it, but there was a teddy bear museum as well, attached to the glacier garden (more pics of that later)

The glacier garden probably ended there, but there was also a glacier museum. (I don't know whether the museum was considered the "garden")

fossils!

starfish tracks (never thought I'd see such a thing)

more fossils

bird tracks this time

There was also a mammoth skeleton and a dead mammoth (the skeleton was real but not the mammoth, if my memory serves me correctly), but they're rather ugly so I don't think I shall post the photos here.

we could try being cavemen and/or ride a mammoth

I rode a mammoth! lol

Next we went into the bear museum (which was in the same building, there wasn't really much separation between the two museums), but I will leave that for another post, since this one is already rather long!