Switzerland - 6 Aug 2008 - Zug and Lucern

3rd day in Switzerland...

So many people have talked about Lucern. I even know of someone whose middle name is Lucern. So we decided to see what the fuss was all about. Before we reached Lucern, we stopped by a town called Zug where we saw a beautiful clear lake with big fat swans. They must be well-fed by the people there, probably with cheese :p We stopped by a cafe for the supposedly famous cherry liquer cake, which turned out to be too strong for me.


There were many water fountains that tourists and locals could drink from that tasted better than tap water (Swiss tap water is potable like S'pore) and cold! So we saved a lot of time and money looking for clean drinking water. This one was in Zug.

The famous bridge in Lucern. It had paintings and words along the bridge roof that were supposed to mean something but we could not understand a single thing. That is the thing I dislike about Switzerland. It's just not tourist-friendly. Even in a tourist town like Lucern, nothing is in English. Some people could understand and speak English but those who couldn't, we just gestured and pointed until they understood us. I bought a German-English dictionary but never used it. I just feel that if you wanna earn my money, shouldn't you be the one making the effort? Obviously, they don't care much about tourist business.

We were lucky that there was a street market on that day and we saw some fat yummy sausages. Our first street food! And it was the cheapest meal we had for the entire stay in Swit. A serving of sausage and bun costs SF7 (about S$9). It was yummy though.

The stone fruits were sweet and juicy. This peach was courtesy of ah kin.

We were rather bored with Lucern and it was a very hot summer day, so we decided to see if we could dip our feet in the lake nearby. Ya, we are suckers for lakes. We saw some people sat near the edge of the lake and joined them but we were the only ones who took out our shoes and relish in the coolness of the lake water against our skin. Soon, a caucasian couple joined us in dipping their feet in the water. They were tourists too.

When we reached ah kin's home in the afternoon, she was so surprised to see us home so early. Well, it was supposed to be a relaxing tour, so we did not see the need to maximise every minute. We were just happy to chill and take things easy. We played cards that night or was it on the second night? We found out that ah kin and uncle tan were not gamblers. They did not even know how to shuffle cards, which is good. Gambling is bad, according to uncle tan, who sang, 'du bo zhen ke pa, po huai wo de jia...' Translation: Gambling is frightening. Breaks up my family. End up he had the biggest win... of chocolates. It was fun playing with them :)