Lucerne

(This is my second post in a fairly short period of time, so scroll down if you don't want to miss anything.)

So, Lucerne. I like Lucerne a lot! I would definitely come back here. Here is the famous lion sculpture of Lucerne:



It's a monument to the Swiss mercenary soldiers who died protecting the French royalty during the French Revolution. It's really big. It's a lion. The end!

Another famous feature of Lucerne are its wooden covered bridges. This is the Mill Bridge, I think. There are paintings in the middle of all the supports for the bridges. I like this one with the dancing skeletons:



There's a lot of stuff in the dancing-skeleton sort of vein. I believe all the paintings have skeletons in them somewhere (I read that somewhere and certainly in the ones I looked at there were skeletons), to remind people of their eventual demise. Cheery! Most of the skeletons are just sort of off to the side, leering and waiting.

The river water flows very fast to one side of the bridge because of a complicated kind of dam, and there was a guy surfing in sort of rapids there:



He seemed likely to meet his eventual demise sooner rather than later. Maybe he needs to take a hard look at those skeleton pictures.

Another cool thing in Lucerne is that many of the buildings in the old town have these murals on them, like this:



And this:



Pretty!

Also, I bought some souvenirs at the oldest giftshop in town:



Whee! Actually, it was not really a very good giftshop. There is a lot of Switzerland-themed crap in the world, my friends. I did end up buying a little of it.

That was all yesterday evening; today I took a really cool trip to the summit of Mt. Titlis, which I will write about in a separate entry which might not get posted until I am home. Which means tomorrow night, just a little over 24 hours from now. Sadness!