The Swiss town of Biel is situated right on the language border between the French and German speakers and for this reason on stations they used to give both names for so it was displayed as Biel-Bienne. However I'm sure there are more German speakers here and it does feel more like the german part of Switzerland. Buswise it was not particularly noteworthy apart from having a trolleybus system and working on it was this R&J bodied Volvo of about 1990.
I stayed a few nights in Biel/Bienne, arriving the day Kosova/o declared independence from Serbia, as a result of which I can tell you that at that time there were rather a lot of Kosovans living in Biel/Bienne - they spent all of that evening driving round the town in convoys blasting their car horns!
ReplyDeleteSwitzerland being Switzerland, of course, they went home at 10 p.m. and all became peaceful again.
It was also in Biel/Bienne that a checkout lady at the Co-Op was so insistent that I must have a Co-Op loyalty card that I produced my UK dividend card, which confused the heck out of her!
Other than that I don't remember much about the town so I didn't find it particularly noteworthy either.
Thanks Ross, no not a town that tempts one to linger then, but they do build bus bodies here including the one on this bus. Switzerland is a bit like another world one can pretty well leave things out on the train come back and they are still there.
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