Friday was a beautiful day so I headed back to Luzern to finish my sightseeing there. On the edge of town, the old city wall, Museggmauer, still stands and is actually accessible! I started my morning walking to and on the wall. You can climb two of the towers; one of which contains the oldest city clock, which actually rang as I was climbing!
From there, I headed over to the Löwendenkmal-- a massive lion statue in the side of a rock. It serves as memorial for the heroic deaths of Swiss Mercenaries who protected King Louis XVI (husband of Marie Antionette) after he moved from Versailles to Tuileries Palace in Paris during the French Revolution. Over 600 Swiss were killed in the battle and another 200+ died in prison afterwards.
Right next to the lion is the Glacier Garden and Museum. The "garden" was discovered when trying to dig a wine cellar. It was excavated carefully and now displays evidence of Luzern's ecological history-- from subtropical (fossils of shells, impressions of Palm leaves) to glacial (glacial pits, rounded stones, cracks from glacial movement).
A hole created by water around a glacier... Huge!!
There is also a museum in a historic Swiss Chalet behind the garden. It has a lot of information about glaciers, climate change, and alpine living as well as a temporary exhibit on avalanches.
Underneath the museum there is a mirror maze. It's like the ones at the fair but four times as big and a lot creepier!
The are around the lion monument and the glacier garden is pretty touristy and I got sucked into one of the traps. There are two panoramic paintings in Luzern. Sounds pretty cool, right? Yeah, no. I went to Alpenium and I'm so glad it was covered by my Swiss pass and I didn't waste any money! First of all, not panoramic- they were just seperate paintings of different views around Zermatt. Also "paintings" is a bit of a misnomer. Yes, they were painted but not with any skill or attention to detail. So that was a waste of five minutes.
At that point, I was starving but apparently it's pretty harder to find cheap take away the further you get from the train station. Luzern is shaped kind of like a U and the train station was on the other leg of the U, so I decided to finish up the leg I was on before walking back around. All that was left was Stiftskirche St. Leodegar.
I walked back to the train station, found a sandwich, and went to eat in Inselipark on the lake. I took a nice break and spent some time planning my afternoon. After lunch, I headed back to across the river to the old town by way of the fist of two lovely covered bridges. Then, I wandered through the old town plazas to the hydroelectric dam and the second covered bridge.
At that point, I'd pretty much done all I wanted to do in Luzern so I headed back to Zug to check out the Zug Burg Museum. The museum was pretty cool bit most of it was in German so I couldn't read it. I did enjoy the views out of the castle windows and the historically decorated rooms. It aaas definitely the most well-kept of all the castles I've been to-- but, someone lived ther until the 1940s so it never really had a chance to fall into disrepair.
After Zug Burg, I headed back to Baden where L and I went to the Bier Garten with Our across the hall neighbor who also works at ABB. The bier was tasty and HUGE!! Then, we went home, made dinner, packed for Madrid, and fell asleep!
Oh yeah, here are the two churches I went in on my first trip to Luzern. The Jesuitenkirche and the Franziskanerkirche.
