Berne - city of fountains, chocolate and bears! Had an awesome time here the last 4 days, there's been loads to do and see and we've never been bored yet. Tuesday, we went to the Einstein musuem, great place, loads of information and exhibits about him. He lived in Berne for a few years and was here when he discovered E=mc2, hence why theres a musuem about him here. After that we wandered round the city for a while. There's loads of markets on, some are just general flea markets, but there's quite a few food markets as well, just stalls and stalls of fruit, meat, cheese and chocolate! We ended up in Parliament Square, where they were doing an information market and raising money for breast cancer, but they were pretty much closing up as we got there so didn't see much. In Parliament Square, one end of the square is covered in water jets that shoot up from the ground. It's absolutley amazing, and people try and run through the middle of them without getting soaked! Tuesday night, we got talking to some of the others in the common room of the hostel, a couple of Isreali girls, a Brit, couple of Canadians and some Brazillians. Had a good night, chattting and drinking and trying to beat Adriano on fussball(he says he's only played 3 times before, we didn't believe him!) We ended up going downstairs to a club thats below the hostel called Quasimodos. it's advertised in all the guides as a "techno club", but we walked in to the sound of the YMCA playing. Think we must have picked "retro night" or something. Anyway, we still had a really good night, some of us went to bed relatively early, but Liam stayed up til 6 drinking with the Aussies! On Wednesday we had booked to go round the Swiss House of Parliament. We had to go through 2 different security checks, and we both set of the detectors cos we still had our belts on as we went through. Seems like a really nice building, didn't get to see all of it because they are doing work on it before the next parliament goes into session. Plus, a lot of the people in our group were French, so the tour was pretty much in French, with general English translations of the main bits. It's still an amazing building, so much artwork in there, it's really beautiful. After that we wandered round a bit more, which we've spent a lot of time doing in Berne. But there's always something to find. We've found that we've never been bored yet, which too say it's only really a small city, and we've been here for 4 days, is quite good really. On Thursday we hired some bikes cos they we're free. Had a cycle round and decided we'd go and find the bear pits. They keep bears in berne because of the history of the city is that some guy killed a bear here, and then decided to name the place Berne, which is German for bear. So off we went, thinking it would be a 10 minute ride. An hour later, we found ourselves back at the train station (where we had picked the bikes up from) and still hadn't found anything reslembling a bear pit. After checking out the map again, we set off again, only to find the pit exactly where we'd stopped an hour earlier. We'd spent 5 minutes looking at the map and decided to go left, whe the pits were to our right, and right behind us the whole time. Still, we had a nice ride round. There's normally 3-5 bears in the pit, but as there doing construction work to build them a new park (lucky bears) there's only one there at the moment. He's called Pedro, and will sit and beg for food of you. He doesn't like carrots though! It's quite nice that they want to keep the history of the town alive but it's also a bit sad seeing a great big brown bear sat begging for food off tourists as well. After that, we took a ride through Parliament Square on our way to dropping the bikes back. We rode through the fountains, i completly mistimed it and got pretty soaked by 2 huge jets of water, Liam got off pretty lightly though. Back to the hostel, via the supermarket to pick up something for tea. We had horse.! They sell it packed up like steaks back home, so we thought we might as well give it a try, it's really cheap as well. As it turns out,it was really nice, definetley something we'd both eat again i think. Just chilled out on the night, you can get films from reception to watch in the common room, so got a couple of those, and watched them, and chatted to some more Aussies who'd arrived. Up early on Friday to get our tickets and the train to Munich, which will take us 5 and half hours travelling time. Still should be worth it cos they have the largest beer house in the world apparantly!!