When I saw this house, my first thought was: “I’m glad I don’t have to pay their heating bills.” Perhaps that is why the “Private Museum” in the Heidi Weber House was only open during the summer months, if at all, because it would have been too expensive to heat. Read More …
If you come to Zürich in the summer months (July-October), starting in 2025, you might be able to visit the workshop of the Swiss sculptor Hermann Haller at Höschgasse 8a, near the eastern shore of Lake Zürich. At other times of year you can take a peek through the window, Read More …
The big open-air opera production at the St Gallen Festival in 2022 was supposed to have been Orleanskaja dewa (The Maid of Orleans) by the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893). But then, (as the general director of the St Gallen Theater explained it in the German opera magazine Das Read More …
Right in front of my hotel in Luzern (aka Lucerne) was a bus stop where every five minutes (during peak hours) a 24-meter double-articulated electric trolleybus glided in silently and stopped to discharge and pick up passengers. Since I was there during a heat wave which made cycling unattractive, and Read More …
Lake Lucerne in central Switzerland has always seemed mysterious to me because of its German name Vierwaldstättersee, which looks as though it ought to mean ‘Four-Woods-Place-Lake.’ But it turns out that Waldstätte is simply an old-fashioned regional word for Canton, and the name Vierwaldstättersee means that the lake used to Read More …
When I arrived in Luzern (aka Lucerne) I was surprised to see a sign pointing to a Richard Wagner Museum. I had come to Luzern to see an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, and had completely forgotten that Wagner lived here off and on during his long exile from Germany resulting Read More …
The Luzerner Theater is on the left bank of the Reuss River, at the lower end of Lake Lucerne (Vierwaldstättersee in German). The theater dates from 1839, and now describes itself as “the oldest multi-genre venue in Central Switzerland” and as “one of the largest cultural institutions, offering a variety Read More …
The central railway station in Luzern (aka Lucerne), Switzerland, is at present a purely terminal station, meaning that all fourteen tracks end there. The only way for a train to leave the station is to change directions and go out the same way it came in. In former times, this Read More …
As a non-flyer, I wasn’t planning on spending much time (if any) in the aviation exhibits at the Swiss Transport Museum in Luzern. But then by mistake I chose the wrong museum entrance and found myself in a high-tech exhibit on SkyGuide, the Swiss air traffic control agency. Under ordinary Read More …
On the sidewalk in front of the Transport Museum (Verkehrshaus) in Luzern, they have set up the front end of ‘Sissi’, one of the four gigantic tunnel boring machines that were in use simultaneously for several years to create the Gotthard Base Tunnel, a flat rail route consisting of two Read More …