Eurotrip Day 12: Exploring Lucerne in the rain (9/26/13)

Woke up early as I had a lot of exploring to do, however there was a slight drizzle. This makes sense cause the umbrella I bought in AS was accidentally left in M since there was no rain while we were there and now I didnt have the umbrella the rain returns. Since it was just a slight drizzle, I decided to move on with the plans and just go until it opens up. First went and saw the lion in the stone for which the city is famous (one of the reasons I should say), and then the glacier museum which had a house of mirrors that was small but I enjoyed being in it. 

Beautiful castle on the side of the hill. I say castle, its probably just someone's home. :)

Fountain in the middle of the old town.

Front of the train station.  

Front of the post office. Wish Post offices back home looked like this. 

The famous Lucerne bridge with watch tower. Tis pretty.

Bridge grows flowers on its side. Nice little addition if you ask me. 

Castle from before. Without all the other things distracting your attention.

Another pedestrian bridge. Such a pretty city.

The underside of the bridge has stories from within the catholic church.

Looking back along the coast of the lake.

Lucerne Lake. Not too shabby of a view. 

Yet another beautiful church in another European city. Sounds sarcastic, but I do enjoy seeing these old buildings (incl. churches).

Interesting building. I am pretty sure this was a hotel of sorts.

The famous Lion of Lucerne. Started raining so had to find shelter.

Glacier museum it is. These rock faces were apparently smoothed by glacier moving over them.

Times like this, I wish I was traveling with someone. :)

Little model of the city. 

Got a nice view from the museum. Just one city sight to appreciate.

How many Tre's do you need in your life? I think we all agree, that many is too many. :)

Realizing glaciers arent reason enough to visit a museum, HALL OF MIRRORS!

Fountain created using mirrors (only one wedge is physical.

After that I went to the panorama museum which was really impressive and had a little bit of history with it, which is always nice. After this museum, I was museumed out and decided to go explore old town and its many bridges/old buildings. After grabbing a quick sandwich, I was back walking around the town towards the museggmauer, a wall with towers you can walk up into.

Went in to the panorama museum. It was cool. Not sure if it was worth the time, but still cool to learn the story/history and see how it was laid out.

Found a statue! I win!

Post card or picture I took? Good question.

Many of the buildings had cool designs painted into them (this one with vines and people).

More of the cool painted buildings.

Flowers are the main theme it seems.

Hotel with some awesome Greek art.

Another massive and impressive church in the central area.

Walking up to the wall with towers. Starting to see some signs of nature :)

Fun little road to walk up to get to the tower (its trying to poke out from the trees).

Thar she blows! The Towers!

Climb a hill and some stairs and you get this view? yes please!

View down the wall of the different towers.

View from the other end of the wall. Do you recognize that castle on the hill? Yeah me neither.

Tower map showing which towers you can still go up. 

Walkway on the wall.

BEAUTIFUL!!!!!! (view of the city from the wall)

Bell in the clock tower.

Clock of Clock tower. That bell in the top looks familiar! Pretty face of the building.

Had my typical heights-induced panic attack climbing down one of the stairwells that was exceptionally rickety (I find it kinda counterintuitive that for as much as I dislike heights, a lot of my traveling around cities is me climbing up buildings on old staircases to get good views of cities/areas). That being said, the towers were pretty cool to see (they had exhibits about how some of the clocks work and what not) and they did offer some great views of the surrounding area so a little bit of uncomfortableness is worth getting to see great views and experiences. As with all life altering experiences (by life altering I mean I did something :) ), I determined I earned a beer after finishing the climb, so I went to Stadtkeller and had a delicious dunkel. After that I continued on a miniature beer tasting crawl and next wound up at Rathaus and got their special bier, which wound up being a typical weiss bier (good but I dont know why it was called special bier instead of weiss bier). After that I made my way out of the old city and stopped at a cafe on Hapburgerstrasse to have a Luzerner bier (I believe this was the historically local type of beer).

Stopped here for a beer. Believe they had a comedy show happening so I had to sit at bar (didnt buy admission).

Then went and got another expensive beer near by. Turned out to be a nice reward of walking around all day. 

Gotta try the local beer right? When in rome!

Got back to the place and set stuff down before heading to the nearby grocery store to grab food supplies for my climb of Mt. Pilatus the next day. Put the bags back in the room and was about to go explore the park across the street when the drizzle became a full on deluge. So I chilled with some bunkmates (J and K from Singapore and Taiwan resp.) and once the storm let up, we went over to Treibhaus which had an interesting decor/feeling to the place.

Grabbed some beers with some other solo travelers from the hostel at a lil dive place a walk away from the hostel.

Had heard they had decent food but when we got there, only lunch was being offered (was still good but was hoping for some of the dinner selections), so we got some paninis and explored the beer options while talking about our travels and getting to know each other; was kinda cool having an in depth conversation with people you just met instead of the usual “hey what's your name where you from” interaction. After finishing up there, we headed back to the place as I had to get some rest for the day of hiking tomorrow.