What can I say. Berne's hotels were full owing to a bunch of over-padded glorified figure-skaters fighting each other under the guise of the Ice Hockey World Cup; I missed out owing to my own procrastination on the last decent value room in Fribourg; so I looked further afield to Biel/Bienne. Sounded interesting (this is Switzerland, remember, so interesting's a relative term), a bi-lingual town referred to by one or both of its names. Only a 30 minute train ride from Berne. How bad could it be?

I arrived at Biel train station. Ignoring the congregating alcoholics in front of the station itself, I walked along a quite pleasant high street, a charming square bridging the river and then more shops. Clearly thinking too much of some of Paris' boulevards named after military figures, I assumed General Dufourstrasse would be a grand street. Well, it was grand in the sense of being big and wide, but that's where the similarities ended. Think East Berlin pre-1989. And... more