June 2, 2003 – Monday

Train Views

Woke up to Kelsey making the strangest noises. You know, like in South Park, when the guy makes the sound of the dying giraffe? Kind of like that, but with a little more gurgle to it.

Headed out to Bern, saw all the sites, including the Child Eater Fountain, which is as weird as the name implies. The Parliament building was especially beautiful. As we continued walking along the road, we came across a Starbucks. This moment totally made Kelsey’s vacation. She had been undergoing serious withdrawal from her lack of iced white mochas.

Headed over to the BarenGraben (or Bear Pits). There were 4 bears total, at least as far as we could see. They were so cute, but the smell wasn’t so adorable. We did some shopping, ate a quick bite, and headed back home to get to the market in time before it closed.

That night, we were invited to have dinner at my Grandma’s house. Kelsey was feeling a bit homesick, so she decided to stay at Laurie’s place in order to call Micah and her family and try to find something on the TV in English.

When I got to dinner, I remembered about this incident that had happened the other day on the train ride back from Solithurn. I had forgotten all about it. Kels and I were heading back, when the train seemed to go over this huge bump and start immediately slowing down. Someone came over the intercom after the train stopped, and it was very garbled, but I caught them saying something along the lines of “accident of person”, or something like that. At first, I thought that meant that someone on the train had an accident, although that didn’t make so much sense. I told everyone at dinner about it, because I wanted to know if they had heard of it, or knew what had happened. The general consensus was that it was probably somebody that laid down on the tracks to commit suicide. Apparently, this happens quite often around here. Laurie says Switzerland has the second highest suicide rate in the world. I’m a little disturbed now.

When I got back to Laurie’s, Kelsey was still feeling kind of down, so I decided to act like a total fool to try to help cheer her up. I started talking in really strange voices, telling her stories about evil puppets that would come to her in her sleep and eat her. She brightened up at this, so I spent the rest of the evening describing the puppets and their evil nightly deeds until we laughed ourselves to sleep.