Once again, I’ve managed to blow my electricity. I didn’t feel like another day of sitting on my own in the dark, so I decided to go out for the day, the entire day, and not come back until about ten, so I decided to go to Interlaken. No real reason, it just seemed to be pretty far away and was on my list of places to go.
It took fifty minutes to get to Bern, then I changed trains for Interlaken. It was a double-decker train, and obviously, I went upstairs. It felt very different from a normal train. Darker, smaller, more closed in and the weirdest thing was not being able to hear the wheels properly.
I had a ticket for Interlaken Ost but I got off at Interlaken West. There was a nice mountain view from the station, and a very odd-coloured river behind it:

I had read in my guidebook that there’s not a lot more to Interlaken than a main street with a station at each end. As soon as I came out of the station, I saw a big building, very Alpine-style, which claimed to be Migros. I hadn’t had any breakfast (I meant to get bread at the stations, but I always had to run for my next train), so I went in. It was one of those massive shopping centres, but upstairs it had the biggest Migros I’d ever seen and the entrance was right in the middle, so it was very difficult to know where to start shopping. Eventually I managed to get bread, butter, Pom bears, chocolate and a bottle of apple juice. The apple juice turned out to be fizzy, but it did at least taste of apples which is more than most fizzy apple juice seems to.
I start wandering up the road, deliberately took a side-street and walked up the road. There was a sort of park with benches, so I sat down there to eat my bread:

Nice mountain view and because the field was half-dead and all brown, it looked almost like New Zealand looking across it:

Behind me, there was a coach and it started reversing. I assumed it was going to try and turn around right there in the road and get in the way of all the cars, but it didn’t, it reversed down a tiny side-street. Ok, it was going to use that to turn around. But it didn’t! It just kept reversing down there. There was nothing there, the road would come to a dead end in about 200 yards, but the coach driver knew what he was doing. I think. I finished my bread, forgot about the coach and went on.

As I was walking down the road, I saw something that didn’t quite look right. I wasn’t entirely sure why, but when I thought about it, I realised what it was…

An English phonebox. I didn’t notice the dumpy coke machine with the chinese roof next to it until I was coming back down.
The next interesting thing I came across was a church apparently growing out of a Chinese garden (a half-frozen Chinese garden). I was in the middle of taking a photo of it when a man walked past wearing a Christmas tree hat. Obviously, I had to get a photo of that, but as my victim didn’t know, he walked away as I was taking it. Here’s my attempt – that hat is tree shaped!

And here’s what he distracted me from:

Anyway, I got to the end of the road and came to the East station. Without intending to, I had managed to walk all the way up the high street. I stood down by the river and looked at it for a long time. It was an incredible colour and I took about ten photos, just to try and capture the colour. They say the sky is blue because it reflects the sky, but it’s not true. The sky was completely grey. There was no reason that I could see for it being such an incredible colour. This one gets the colour well:

This one gets the view up the river, complete with mountains in the background:

I wandered around the station, noticed there was a Coop next to it. It seemed a very sweet little arrangement: Migros next to one station and Coop next to the other:

I walked back down.
I stopped at a shop to get some postcards for my wall and when I went inside, discovered it was a toy shop. I checked it for goats but there weren’t any. Then I spotted a rainbow koosh and couldn’t resist it. I also wanted to get a picture of something I saw on the way up, but I had been on the wrong side of the road at the time. Now I was on the other, so I could get a photo of it properly….

Half a cow sticking out of a wall!!! I followed this back road. There was nothing down there. Literally, once you’re off the main street, there’s nothing there, except a couple of pretty buildings and a big wall of mountain:

I was back at the station about fifteen minutes before my train was due and took lots of photos of the German high-speed train that came in. This is only one of about six:

The view was better now, although it might not look it in the photos:

The train that I got back to Bern was only a normal one. Disappointing. I sat opposite a man with a baby (actually, they sat opposite me, I was there first!) and honestly, although it was quite cute, the baby looked like a baby orc. It had that sort of face and ears. It could have been a horrendous hour, trapped in a train with a baby, but every time it cried, the man took it away.
I had planned to stay in Bern a while, maybe have a drink, delay coming back to Neuchatel, but it was cold and I was tired, so I decided to just come back.
Back in my dark room, I threw myself on Jemma’s mercy. Peedee’s here as well, so we’re all just sitting in Jemma’s room, playing computers.