A Postcard from Luzern

Dear friends

I thought I would send you a postcard to tell you  all about our one night in Luzern. We have been on the road for seven months and to our great shame we have sent no postcards so here is one for you.

It is such a distance from Wengen to Venice, our next planned destination, that we decided to break the journey into some smaller pieces. And so we spent one afternoon in Luzern.

We booked first class seats on the scenic train, a complete waste as the view is the same and we could not see a difference in the seats either. We met a lovely American family on the train and we shared our travel stories. I was able to get some good advice for our Christmas trip from Amy who had visited family in Germany as a child and had studied there also.

She told us that we shouldn’t miss the dinner show at the Stadtkeller in Luzern and so after arriving at our hotel we booked it straight away. Instead of heading out to see the town we decided to rest a few hours first, knowing it would be a late night for the kids.

At about four o’clock we walked into town and over the famous Kapellbrücke, a bridge and water tower originally built in the 1400’s with its somewhat dark paintings, in more ways than one. These few 17^th century paintings, are all that remain after a fire in the 1990’s destroyed many of them.

We then took a quick peek in the Church of St. Leodegar where we sat for a few minutes of the service before wandering over to the Lion Monument.

Built as a monument to the Swiss Guards who died at the Tuileries at the beginning of the French Revolution, this beautiful lion is carved from a rock face. The kids were sad to see that it showed the lion was dying, which they could tell from the spear sticking out of it and its pained expression. We therefore didn’t stay for too long.

Still too early for dinner we wandered the street of the old city, which mostly consisted of window shopping though we did see wonderful old city walls.

Dinner was a real eye opener. Our first surprise was to discover our new American friends sitting at the next table. While eating fondue and schnitzel we enjoyed hearing about Amy’s horses and Emma is keen to return to Australia via Chicago, a rather long detour, so she can visit with the horses and our new friends.

Our second surprise of the evening was finding that the room was filled with coach tour groups. Once the entertainment began we realised that 90% of the room was rather inebriated Australian tourists. How could we tell? The frequent cry of “Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi” was a dead giveaway.

We enjoyed the music including traditional instruments such a playing the bottles and the huge mountain horn. Emma went bravely up on stage to have a try of playing it, and after a number of adults failed to get more than a squeak out of it she managed to make quite a good sound. The Aussie’s in the room went crazy when she said she was from Western Australia. Amy’s trombone playing son had a turn and impressed even the musicians.

While we had a fun night, mostly entertained by the antics of our compatriots I would say that all in all the entertainment was tailored to suit to bus tours. We really enjoyed listening to a wonderful singer yodelling but were disappointed that most of the room talked over her but they joined in gleefully with sing-alongs of Waltzing Matilda and other crowd favourites.

After watching the Conga line snake around the room we decided to call it a night and walked back to the hotel, getting a lovely view of Luzern by night. I think Luzern is great way to see Switzerland if you are limited for time as you have Switzerland in a microcosm, mountains, Swiss chalet houses, lake, fondue, watches and Swiss army knives galore. But give me Wengen any time.

That’s all for now.

With love and best wishes

Louise