Having had a very long day yesterday, I slept well overnight at Rita’s mum’s place, and had a late breakfast then a few games of Liar’s Poker with Rita and Mutti. In the early afternoon, Rita and I went for a bike ride, using her old bike that she stores each year in the bicycle room at her mum’s apartment, and with me on a bike that we brought down from Zurich from Joe and Karen’s. We saw this bike yesterday as we were leaving their place, as they were trying to sell it on the footpath out the front of their house. We offered to take it off their hands so that I could use it in Bern and then try and sell if for them and send them the money. While it has a relatively small frame, it was very comfortable to ride, with good gears and brakes. So we might end up buying it ourselves.

We rode out to the south of Gümligen and stopped at our favourite bench with a view of the mountains. Or at least it used to have a good view of the mountains, until someone planted a fast-growing hedge in the past couple of years along the edge of the path.

So we rested for slightly shorter than normal on the bench, and then continued on. As we rode back we saw that storm clouds were developing over the mountains. However, we don’t think that any bad weather would reach Bern overnight.

Sometimes, as you travel around, it is the simplest of things that grab your attention. As we were having lunch at Mutti’s today, I noticed that the orange juice cartons were a different shape (from Australia and from previous trips to Switzerland), with a slanted top and the plastic lid on the lower side of the slope. I wondered for a while why they had changed the design, and then realised that it made for a package that was much more easily stacked vertically on supermarket shelves, with the top of the lid at the same height as the highest point on the sloped top. Clever?

In the evening, Janik (Rita's nephew who has previously stayed with us in Australia and on the barge) came over for dinner. Having known him since he was a little kid, it is now amazing to hear him talk about his work with the Swiss Government in international affairs, specialising in refugee policy. My, how time flies.