Mushrooms and Summer Days: Day Fifty: Lions, Bridges, Museums, And Very Kinky Postcards

8/4/15, 11:20 PM CET

When this is the first thing you see in the morning:

If you squint, you can see the Toblerone bear in the mountains.

You know that today'll be a good day.

The first thing we did was look around Lucerne, see what sort of things we could see in the city.

Their lake, of course, was beautiful.

I think the flag really makes this photo.

And we saw this bridge over here, called Chapel Bridge, which is one of Lucerne's biggest landmarks.

Pretty pretty.

Joby about to enter the bridge!

Inside the bridge was really cool too...

As indicated by this guy holding a cheetah print plastic bag walking towards me.

But along the way, we saw this poor guy:

I don't know how this bird manifested his thoughts into a real-world
speech bubble.

He's a small bird that we found still alive, but barely breathing.

Maybe he's praying to a god that he doesn't believe in?

From the look of him (and the fact that he didn't react when we got literally inches from him), we could guess that he was dying, probably from a disease since we didn't see any wounds on him.

And we couldn't really do anything about it.

Sorry, poor bird. We wish we could help.

Megan cried and told me she wanted to be a vet now to make sure animals don't die anymore. I thought that was really touching, so I decided not to tell her that bacon was made out of dead pigs.

It's for her own good.

We also saw this beautiful monument.

"It's just a flesh wound."

This is the famous Lion of Lucerne. The story behind this monument is that some time ago, there were Swiss mercenaries in charge of defending a palace. One day, they were invaded, and in order to protect everyone else in the palace, the mercenaries refused to surrender to the invaders even though they knew they would die because of it. And they did.

So later, they made this statue to commemorate that event. The lion symbolizes the brave mercenaries who died. It's beautiful, or at least I think so. Here's some more pictures of it.

Look at how quiet of a place it's in too, a rock face in the middle of nowhere.

Two animals, one pic.

We finished today by visiting the most popular museum in all of Switzerland: The Swiss Museum of Transport.

Sounds boring, right? I mean who wants to look at trains and stuff all day? That's what I initially thought when I looked the place up online, and then I saw it in person.

And it looked AMAZING.

I don't know why, but I'm getting signs that this museum is gonna be fun.
HHEHEHHEH.

And yeah, I got the monkey in there too.

The museum was geared towards making kids excited about anything involved in transport, from planes, trains, and boats, to the more unorthodox things like ski lifts and construction vehicles. And they had SO MANY THINGS TO SEE. They had a giant high definition scale map of Switzerland:

Those aren't visitors on the map, they actually have giant statues of
kids in random places of Switzerland, it's kinda scary.

I only really liked it because of the little slippers they made us wear to prevent scratching the map.

I tried stealing them afterwards but I found that it was implusible. Pbbbbbth.

They also had some cool stuff like a free airplane simulator (that did FLIPS AND SPINS) and a WORKING INDOOR SKI JUMP, but the highlight was the large, open area in the center of the museum.

Here, kids had the chance to do a LOT of hands-on stuff. They could pretend they were construction workers in a rock quarry, which I thought was adorable.

It's like my own little army of cute, tiny little child slaves!

Or they could take to the GIANT INDOOR LAKE THEY HAD and go kayaking, pedal boating, or canoeing, the latter of which my sister and my dad did.

They also had a zorb, which you can see in the background. Veteran readers
might remember my experience with that thing a few years ago.

Just slap on a "Willkommen in der Schweiz" graphic in the left third and
you got yourself a damn good postcard.

Yeah, my sister looks smug right now, but they've actually been spinning
in place for 45 minutes at that point.

They also had a ton of kick scooters lying around the center area, free for anyone to take for faster transportation around the area. God, I love that museum so much.

Panorama! Click me!

I'll end today's entry with a bunch of funny, bad English translations of German phrases on postcards that I found in here. I won't caption them, because honestly, they speak for themselves.