Day 11: Lausanne
Welcome
Yesterday we sampled the Swiss national cuisine and played a show in the lakeside city of Lausanne.
After a late morning departure from our hotel we headed to the nearby town of Fribourg in pursuit of a restaurant that had been recommended to us the night before. There was a wait to get a table so we took a small walk to get to scenic viewpoint down the end of a nearby street. From our vantage point we could look out across the lower reaches of Fribourg and the Sarine river and take in the two very fine bridges that span the valley and link up the historic Bourg quarter with the Schoenburg district. The first structure we observed which was right next to our viewing platfrom is the Zaehringen Bridge, a stone arch bridge built in 1924 that is 246m long and carries it’s roadway 46m above the Sarine. Looking further down the valley to the North we could also see the Poya Bridge, a cable stayed bridge that was completed in 2014 and has a 196m main span making it the longest span in Switzerland. Built to replace the Zaehringen Bridge the Poya has now relieved it of all vehicle traffic and redirects this traffic outside the old part of the town relieving the load on the cobbled streets and reducing deterioration on the buildings.
The Zaehringen Bridge.
📷 https://www.fribourgregion.ch/
The Poya Bridge with the Sarine River in the foreground.
After a fruitful quarter hour of bridge gazing we made our way to Restaurant Du Gothard and crowded around a small corner table with our friends from Cherym. Liz did a great job of communicating with the French-speaking waitress and ordered Fondue for the table which came out on a trio of gas burners accompanied by bowls of bread and potatoes.
One hour later and thoroughly incapacitated from the piles of liquid cheese in our bellies we barely managed to drag ourselves along the footpath and back to the van before we all lost consciousness, falling into a deep sleep fueled by white wine and Gruyere.
Finally back on the road again it took us less than an hour to reach Lausanne but it was a spectacular drive that took us through farmland clad in rich green fields and then along the shores of a sparkling Lake Geneva for a short stint.
Our show was at a venue called Bar Cazard, a well-equipped room with an impressive lighting rig and great sound equipment. It was the basement of the building that made this venue stand out however. Based on a federal law from 1963 Switzerland aims to provide nuclear fallout shelters for it’s entire population that are accessible within a thirty minute walk of one’s home (sixty minutes in mountain regions). From the 1960s building regulation has required nuclear shelters in all residential buildings and this coupled with hardening of government buildings and construction of communal shelters means that as of 2006 there is coverage for 114% of Switzerland’s population.
We didn’t hear Cherym performing as we were ten metres underground sealed behind our blast doors but it seemed like they played a great set. Our performance was also a success and the audience behaved impeccably with well timed applause, great posture, and no heckling.
