Holiday in beautiful Bern

On Monday it's back to work, but we've had great time away from it all, particularly in Bern. The wonderful cobbled streets, the extraordinary art nouveau Pauluskirche (the most over the top gold decorated Reformed church we have so far ever been in), the street cafes, great public transport, Paul Klee museum, the local beer, Gurten park and even the strange expedition to the building site which is set in six weeks time to be Daniel Libeskind's Westside shopping centre. We even attended a beautiful service in the French church - the Psalms and Bach as an invitation to reflect on the different stages of life, so good that it even made the translation of the TOB sound moving and wonderful.
And the bookshops were brilliant ... yes the suitcase came back rather heavier than it left.
It's only taken us 14 years to get to Switzerland's capital city, as is often the way it looks as if I'll be back there in just over three weeks for a meeting! C'est la vie.
Ah yes and we saw the Bärengraben but not the Röstigraben.

Specially for Calvin's 499th birthday ...

We've already bought Budvar for our party on Saturday but I love this slogan, on this special range of beers named after John Calvin, "To be consumed even outside hours of worship."
There's a wonderful little video of Calvin drinking this local Genevan brew which is rather sweet but I shall have to ask Lac19 for some help in tracking it down - and I'm not allowed to link to his blog so you can't go there and search yourselves. Actually Dr B has now tracked it down here, it ends with the splendid phrase "in birae predestinas".
Anyway in case you think this is a rather frivolous approach to the great reformer of Geneva I should add that today I also attended the launch by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches of a new book on the relevance of Calvin's social and economic ideas in the 21st century, and a beautiful calligraphy calendar by Bridget Dommen. Both in honour of the 500th anniversary of Calvin's birth in a year's time. I'll say something more about book and calendar when I can provide links .. oh, and did I say, today is the 499th birthday of Calvin!
In the meantime, cheers!

On our way to and from beer this evening

I've decided that blogging about all this marginally theological stuff is just an excuse- really all I'm actually blogging about is beer. It is so far the only recurrent topic! Now have a photo of the excellent local brew called Ursus.
Anyway on our way to our beer and supper this evening with our friend Horst from Berlin, we bumped into Colin Williams and Jean-Arnold de Clermont and then some friends and former colleagues from the French Reformed Church and from the Eglise Evangélique Luthérienne de France. I told them I was following the French blog and they said that it would really worth reading in the morning - looking forwards to that! (I should add that the previous evening on our way to beer our friend Horst bumped into Wolfgang Huber, and Ishmael Noko was in the restaurant we ate in - the moral of this is you must go out for an evening drink, it gives you better opportunites for name-dropping in your blog.)
The main pedestrian street in Sibiu was full of lovely singing, in four part harmony from a delegation from one of the Baltic countries who were eating ice-cream.
But the highlight of the evening was bumping into Smaranda Dochia and some of the other stewards on our way back. Each of them was wearing rather splendid t-shirts in very refined and restrained professional navy-blue. The first one read "H.E. Metropolitan Gennadios (vice-president of CEC) started as a steward", the second one had the appropriate biblical quote and then "Martha started as a steward", the third one said on the front "Benedict started as a steward..." and continued on the back "and founded a whole order" and the final one said "Peter started as a steward ..." I'm not going to tell you what that said on th back - but it was worn by a young woman!!
The only disadvantage to going out for a late beer is that the bars were full of the journalists I'd been working with all day. Still can't complain too much, one of them is my husband.

The romance of travelling by train

I love travelling by train across international borders. Standing at the Gare du Nord or or de l'Est or de Lyon in Paris I love looking at the departure boards and dreaming about just getting on the train and going to Vienna or Berlin or London or Milan.



Railway stations are always slightly seedy places but I love the press of people and luggage and the fact that I'll be going somewhere. When I get on a train to another country I remember so many other crazy train journeys I've made in the past. In Zurich and Vienna on Saturday the train destinations were even more alluring and romantic: Bucarest, Budapest, Wroclaw, Venice...

We travelled by train to Sibiu.
It took a long time - 27 hours - it was tiring and occasionally a little too exciting (jumping off our wagon lit at 6.30 in the morning down onto a non existent platform on arrival in Romania was rather more athletic than I was expecting!).

But above all it was fun, interesting and for me much more relaxing than travelling by air. Waiting for our connexion in Vienna we ate a proper Wiener Schnitzel and drank fabulous Czech Budweiser Budvar. I promise after tasting real Budvar you'll never want to drink that pale US drink called Bud. (And no I'm not going to put up a link to their website!)

And of course if you do have to get up horribly early to catch your train, breakfast still tastes better in the restaurant carriage than on the plane. Proper table, with fabulous changing scenery and freshly made tea or coffee. Travelling this way has class; it's romantic and sensual; you meet interesting people, noisy school children and packs of mountain hikers; and your carbon footprint is much lower than travelling by air or car. More of that later. The downside to the train? In a word: luggage. No matter how hard I try I always pack too much. However as I looked out of the window this morning I realised that as usual I needed the one item I had chosen not to bring - my umbrella! We came to Sibiu and the Romanian heatwave ended abruptly, but at least the rain means we can approach the pre-assembly organisational chaos with slightly cooler heads. Here's hoping!