Day 12 started our 3 days’ stay at Interlaken. The first day was spent at Interlaken and Brienz. We had breakfast at Cafe de Paris where we had two plain omelets. Since that was rather filling for us, we skipped lunch. There was really nothing at Interlaken (it was also raining that day) so we did some random pics and moved onto Brienz in the afternoon. I think the focus of the Brienz was the village and around the lake.The lighting was not right around the lake so we ended up taking more pictures of the houses instead. We had dinner at a Chinese restaurant and I ordered three dishes- half a Cantonese style roasted duck, prawns and mushrooms plus vegetables. The roasted duck was too dry and the mushrooms were so salty to be almost inedible (I’ve actually experienced this before when I joined a Eastern Europe tour in Shanghai but I forgot since that was a few years back). And true to Switzerland being high in living costs, the bill came up to 111 Swiss Franc!
The second day was our big day visiting villages near Lauterbrunnen and for that I bought two Daily Saver Pass but somehow selected the digital ticket option that nearly got us into trouble (more on this later). We basically visited Lauterbrunnen in the morning and did Staubbach Falls. Originally we planned to go up to Murren via the Grutschalp cable car but it was apparently down for maintenance until June so we caught a bus up to Stechelberg instead. We had to change cable cars at Gimmelwald and I was originally apprehensive about the cable car but in reality it was a huge cable car jam packed with people so I could always choose not to look outside much. I was also prepared for it being really cold since Murren was at a high altitude but in reality it felt all right. Our down jackets and two layers of turtlenecks were more than enough for it. We didn’t shoot much photos of the Alps because we were very reluctant to get outside the set pathway and it was raining on and off that day so that lighting was not too good either. We had lunch at Murren where we shared a prawn spaghetti. I originally had visiting Wengen as the next day’s activity but we wrapped up Murren early so we had a bit of rest at the hotel and then after discussion we decided to do Wengen too. And then we had the fright of our life when the ticket inspector would not accept photos of the Saver Day Pass (the morning ticket inspector did accept it since he could still scan the QR code from the photos) because he was sticking to the rule books and apparently we could have taken a pic of someone else’s tickets even though each ticket had our full name and date of birth on it. Luckily, an Asian girl sitting right across from us was kind enough to share her wifi with me so that I could show the original email, phew! But I was determined to never get a digital ticket again if I could help it, it was just always such a challenge for me who came very late to switching to a smart phone and never learnt to use anything besides the basic function of web browsing on it (I didn’t get a local SIM card because this trip involved us being partly in Switzerland which was not part of the EU and I didn’t want to switch between 3 SIM cards and hold onto such tiny things at the same time and the experience with data roaming at Italy made me even forget that I could open data roaming on my phone. Plus, the ticket inspector was just being pushy and totally unhelpful.) We were going the flexible approach with dinner for this day because my extensive research could not find which place was best suited to our tastes. In the end, we opted for a supermarket food dinner costing 6 Swiss Franc in total.
We had an open day for the next day and because I was worried about the train transfer at Bern and I googled to learn that Bern was very close, we visited Bern on the last day of our stay at Interlaken. Because the main goal was to check out the Bern train station, even though we got a free map from the tourist’s center, we basically only visited a church at Alstadit and the signature clocktower and then called it a day. Mum found the capital city very old and dilapidated and I pointed out to her that it was because it was the Alstadt that we mainly visited. We had MacDonalds for lunch for short of anything else that appealed. For dinner, we had seafood pizza at the restaurant just below our hotel (it was not owned by the hotel though). The topping was not quite full but passable. And given Mum and my small appetite, I finished my half and ate a small piece for Mum while she threw away about ⅓ of hers, clearly sick of our alternating diet between pizza and pasta/spaghetti.
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