Between Thun, Interlaken, and Brienz, Brienz is the littlest of the three siblings. Thun is a major city in the Bernese Oberland Region and Interlaken a traditional resort town, so the hotel proces in nearby Brienz can be a steal if you know where to find the right deals. Small Read more…
Singen (Hohentwiel) has the name of a nearby extinct volcano appended to the town’s full title. This name appears on official documents, train system information, and road signs. Frankfurt (Main) can get confused with Frankfurt (Oder), but Singen shares its name with zero other places at the municipality level so Read more…
After the Château de Chillon, Schloss Lenzburg is the second best castle in Switzerland. Lenzburg is another one if those cities that is named after its castle. The Schloss Lenzburg is just over 500 meters above sea level and looks over the surrounding plains. The oldest parts of the structure Read more…
Surrounded on three sides by Germany, Schaffhausen is just a 20 minute drive away from the German exclave of Weil am Rhein. Perhaps the only time a foreigner has heard of the place would be on an IWC watch, where its headquarters are. If you get there by train, you’ll Read more…
It’s no secret that I miss Germany and with so many German-speaking communes in Switzerland Basel is hard to miss. It has everything I expected from a typical mid-sized German city and more. German cities can often be boring, with roughly the same street names, churches with familiar names, and Read more…
Altdorf translates as “old village” and it is the capital city of the canton of Uri, it is the canton with the shortest name and the meanest flag featuring a black bull with a nose ring. Along with Schwyz and Nidwalden, Uri is one of the founding cantons of the Read more…
If you really want to visit the “Plymouth Rock” of Switzerland then you have to visit Schwyz. Schwyz is the capital of the canton of Schwyz and as you can guess the name of the entire country comes from this one small canton. Nobody really knows the true etymology of Read more…
At 2,126 meters above sea level, Juf is nown to be the highest inhabited place in Europe. In the Avers valley of Graubünden, Juf has just a handful of residents and fewer than a dozen houses, but the village has been continuously inhabited since the 13th century. Down the mountain, Read more…
As a former papal city the town’s pride over its history can be seen in the three papal keys on its coat of arms. The old castle thing listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, the broken bridge thing, and indoor markets stocked with colourful fruits are all icons of Read more…
I’ve wanted to come to Interlaken for three years before finally landing a chance when I moved to Switzerland. The German ICE runs a daily round trip between Interlaken Ost and Berlin Ostbahnhof and when I lived in the east of Berlin I always wondered where this eastern station of Read more…