Abenteuer Zwei: Das Münster

Ok, technically, this was Abenteuer Eins, I just forgot about it because

1. I don't have any good pictures
2. It was a long time ago 
3. It was a pretty short adventure. 

The Munster is a huge and very beautiful Gothic cathedral in old town. Construction started around 1276 and ended in 1893. Since that day, they've been doing restorations on it, because this is Europe and every historically important or interesting building is being restored LITERALLY all the time.  Because of the Muenster's size, the outside is very difficult to photograph. Because it's a church,
photography on the inside is highly discouraged. TL;DR, if you want to see good photos, I'm sure Google has plenty.

Anyway. 

It was a cold, blustery Sunday on my first weekend in Bern, and dad and I were wandering about the city, looking for something interesting to do. Pretty much everything in Bern outside of the Bahnhof is closed on Sunday, so finding an interesting thing to do was, understandably, difficult. Fortunately for us, our listless feet led us to the one thing in Bern that would be open (and FREE) on Sunday: THE CHURCH.

Here are some bits and pieces of the outside:

 

 

Beautiful, non?

Behind the church is a little garden full of ping-pong tables and an amazing view of the city. Unfortunately, this was the moment my camera chose to die, so you don't get to see any of that.

Anyway, having satisfactorily observed the outside of the church (and satisfactorily frozen our noses off), we decided to take a look inside. Admission to the church is free--unlike most everything else in Bern.

The inside of the church--well, to be honest, it looked like the inside of a church. Ornately decorated pews for the rich, plain benches for the poor, stained-glass windows portraying each guild of Bern and most every important historical event, a guilded pulpit, vaulted ceilings--the gothic-church-works, really. What impressed me most about the church was the one thing that wasn't supposed to be there--the graffiti.

If you go back through the church to the farthest wall and look closely at the stone, you start to see faint carvings--scratched messages from attendees in days-gone-by. Some are love notes or profanities, as with most graffiti, but the majority are just names and dates.

Intrigued, I started to pay the dates closer attention.

1999. 1976. 1876.

Wait, what?

1826. 1789. 1772.

1672. 1640.

The oldest I found had no name, simply a date--1546.

1546.

Punk kids have been sitting bored in church for a really, really long time.

When we finished looking around the interior of the ground level of the church, we decided to explore the church tower (five franc admission, but worth it).

The staircase up the tower is one of the most terrifying things I've experienced in a loooooong time.

The staircase is narrow--we're talking one American-sized butt (maybe two Swiss?) at a time. The staircase is also perpetually turning--no resting platforms, no stops. I didn't mind that part so much. What I did mind?

THE WINDOWS.

Yes, as soon as you reach roof-level of the church, there are open windows all along the staircase's height. And when I say open, I don't mean someone drew back the shudders. I mean no glass, no blinds, no panes, see-all-the-way-to-the-ground-and-fall-to-your-death open. ONE metal bar ran across the windows in each direction. ONE. And the windows were BIG.

I could have easily slipped through. Did I mention that I'm afraid of heights? Especially when they involve plummeting to your impalement atop a spiky old church? Or just plummeting to the ground? The tower is 100.6m high, so plummeting to the ground would take a long, long time.

Anyway, the second drawback of the windows being open, aside from their active testing of my terror of gravity, was the fact that it was snowing. Windy and snowing.

Icy-cold slippery wet stone stairs, anyone?

Oh, and fair warning: the higher you go up, the colder, windier, and snowier it gets.

Needless to say, by the time we actually reached the top of the Muenster, I had gained a new appreciation for what it means to be alive. And the view from the top of the church tower? Well, that made it all worthwhile.

All but the hike back down, that is.