Lucerne, SwitzerlandAm I the only person who
hasn’t heard of Lucerne before this? Somehow, it doesn’t seem possible – yet Lucerne was everything I was looking for in a Swiss city: scenic, architecturally pretty, and heartbreakingly expensive. If my only complaint about
Zurich was that it just wasn’t very Alp-sy, that solved itself in Lucerne – I woke up to a backdrop of the Alps somewhere in the distance outside my window. It also presented a very uniquely first world problem I never thought I’d encounter: the hostel I stayed in had the most AMAZING breakfast cereal I’d ever had in my life. I couldn’t stop thinking about it two weeks after returning to Germany, so I emailed the hostel to ask for the name of the cereal. Turns out you can only get it in Switzerland – I did chance upon it once in a gourmet grocer in Germany, but it was a ridiculous 14 dollars for three hundred and fifty grams. It
has to be more affordable in Switzerland if they serve it by the free flow in
hostels, but then again, it’s Switzerland.. Either way,
you can only get my favorite breakfast cereal in Switzerland is a phrase that sounds a lot cooler than it really is. I’ve been comforting myself with cheaper imitations from local chain grocery stores but deep down I know I’m living a lie.
Anyway! On a lighter note. We spent daylight in Lucerne feeding swans and swooning over swiss chocolate. I’d never seen so many swans before in my life – in Singapore we have a Swan Lake in the botanical gardens and it has all of one swan that stays in the middle of the huge lake and ignores your attempts to get it to come closer for a photograph or to just, you know, hang out. It’s really sad. In Lucerne, swans hound you as you walk from one end of the lake to the other. I guess all tourists just look like walking breadsticks to them. How lovely. No – but really – I pretty much lost my shit when I saw all those swans and started snapping away with my camera like the stupid tourist I am, much to the horror/amusement of passing locals. My only comfort is that I’ll probably never see any of them ever again, and also, I have a fifteen minute long video of swans swimming from one end of the lake to the other taking up space in my laptop. I do feel so fulfilled.
x
♥jem
