Today was a literal wash-out. The weather forecast had shown that today would be rainy and true to form, a thunderclap woke me up at around 4:30am. I had been hoping to go to the Reichenbach Falls, where the fictional Sherlock Holmes faked his death, but the Hebrew Internet reviews that we read had been less than lukewarm about the falls, and so we decided to forego this pleasure, instead spending the day shopping (or looking around shops) in the constant rain.
Not a fun day.
We bought a cuckoo clock at a souvenir shop called Casagrande, which is slightly off the beaten track. There was a wide variety of items for sale in the shop at reasonable prices. We had earlier bought a fair amount of Switzerland tat at a shop called Harry's (one of three) directly opposite our hotel, which probably gets more than its fair shop of custom due to its location, but I got the feeling that Harry was more expensive.
Carrying on from the entry about Bern, George Smiley uses the alias 'Lachmann' in the novel 'Smiley's people'. Not knowing German, I had never known the meaning of this name, but now being in the German speaking part of Switzerland, I became curious. As far as I can establish, it means Smiley - lach means smile! Not a subtle cover name
No comments:
Post a Comment