Lucerne... Luzern...

So that it doesn't feel like I'm rotting at home all day in my pajamas while Waverly is at school, I'm forcing Waverly to take small day trips with me on the weekend. Today, we went to Lucerne, a quint little city that's a 2 hour train ride away in central Switzerland.

Being a day trip, we wanted to maximize our time there so we decided to wake up at 7 am to catch the 8:02 am train outta here. So after a reading up on the city on the Internet and in the guidebook the night before and pumping ourselves up; Waverly, Yu-Wen (one of her classmates) and I arrived in Lucerne at 10:15 am. We thought to ourselves, "great, we have the entire day ahead of us to explore!"

The first thing we did was head over to the tourist information center and one helpful lady told us about the city and circled on a map all the attractions we should check out. She then ended with, "It should take you about 2 hours to see everything."

We both immediately looked at our watches to check the time, "Yup, still not 10:30 yet." And on top of losing valuable sleep in order to get here early, we also needed to stay in Lucerne till 7pm because I had bought a pass that allowed me to travel for free on trains after 7pm.

So we decided to walk really slow through the city, and were able to see some great sites. First was the lake, appropriately named Lake Lucerne, and the "Chapel Bridge," a wooden bridge built in the 14th century that stretches across it:



We walked through the old town which, like most other old towns in Europe is all commercialized with shops and restaurants. Because it was Sunday, nothing was opened except for tourist souvenir shops (how smart) where Waverly got a t-shirt and a free tea spoon because she showed an advertisement in a booklet from the tourist center. Needless to say, that was the highlight of her trip.

Other interesting things were...

the Lion Monument:


the token cathedral ('cuz every European city's gotta have one right?):


the old city fortification (or long wall with towers):


and a bike submerged in Lake Lucerne (not guaranteed to be there if you visit):