Melissa's Parents Come to Town

Last weekend, we were lucky enough to host Melissa's parents for a few days.  While they were here, we visited a few of the local sights we had been meaning to see and we even got to go to Bern (the capital).

In Lucerne, there aren't many famous sights, but one of the few is the Lion Monument.

The monument honors the Swiss mercenaries that died defending the French king during the French revolution.  The Latin inscription above reads "To the bravery and loyalty of the Swiss".  It is kind of sad, but mostly, it was much bigger than I thought it would be.  We also saw the town's Jesuit Church that's 'only' 350 years old.  Given the fairly young age, I was surprised at how cool it turned out to be.  The picture below is of the church's ceiling.

The next day we went to Bern.  Bern is known for a few things:
1. They like their bears.  Yes, I said 'bears'.  The animal was adopted as the towns logo/mascot a long time ago, so the image of a bear appears on flags, monuments, whatever.  The town has even gone so far as to keep a couple of bears in captivity at all times.  (While we were there, the bears even had cubs!)
2.  Einstein did all of his best work while working at the patent offfice in Bern.
3.  Having lots of money.

I have evidence of all three below.  The first picture is outside the Einstein museum. 

The museum was actually kind of a let down for us two engineering geeks.  A lot of the displays dealt with what life was like for Jews in southern Germany when Einstein was born or all of the cool modern inventions that made Swiss life easier in the early 1900's.  The museum was cool in that it did have some of his writings.  the most impressive to me was his letter to President Roosevelt urging more research to be put into the development of the atomic bomb!

Granted, Einstein believed that the Germans were close to getting their own version of the bomb, but it's still strange to think him as a catalyst for nukes.

As I said, the Bernese like their bears.  Well, here they are:

And finally, as I said, the people of the town have some cash to burn (pun intended), and given that the Swiss like their watches, why not drop a few bucks on a nice watch?

Finally, I leave this post with a fun and quirky picture of me playing Melissa's mom in a game of giant chess.  I won't say who won, but I will say that Melissa's mom needed to ask "How does this piece move?" :)