HR Giger Tourism II - The Bar

Shopping Center Milieu

Since we weren't able to visit the Giger Bar at Gruyères back in 2002, because the bar was under construction, I made sure we'd route our next Switzerland trip two years later via the city of Chur. It's the artist's birth town, and one of the country's oldest.

I'm not exactly sure any more what I expected of a Giger Bar. Maybe an ancient black castle or cathedral. Or some underground caverns, where HR Giger's sickest sinister artistic ideas would fit like a biomechanical tentacle in an eye socket. The greater our surprise was when we pulled over the parking area ...of a futuristic shopping center!

Ok... so this is a mall or an industrial park or something made of giant plastic cubes or  something... well, it kinda has some kind of a space station looks, somehow, but not quite what I imagined a Giger Bar to look like. Once inside the actual establishment it was more like it, very Gigerish interieur with Harkonnen chairs, biomechanical details - even the floor plates looked like they were part of an Alien space ship.

Giger Mirror

The next surprise was actually the clientele. One could imagine that a genuine Giger Bar would be crowded with freaks, goths, metal heads, artists, xenomorphs and other rejects. You know, black leather, tattoos and piercings, frowning sulky faces, a Charles Manson lookalike mad DJ playing dark music. Granted, we paid our visit during the afternoon hours, so no wonder there was no freakshow of a customer base present in the almost empty bar. The few customers were just some regular white collar salarymen, probably work mates having a beer before going home. I mean, they didn't look like they had deliberately come to the Giger Bar - they looked like they had gone to have an after work pint at the nearest pub which just happened to be a Giger Bar.

Happy Tourist

Nothing wrong with that, of course. It's not like me and my wife would have fitted into the alleged freak scene much  better. But hell, we travelled thousands of kilometres for the sole purpose of having a pint in a Giger Bar! I actually told that to the barmaid, who seemed genuinely surprised why anyone would do that. But she rewarded my fanboyhood by giving me some freebies from the bar, matchbooks and photos. I also bought The Mystery of San Gottardo book as a souvenir for myself. I was expecting a weird place to visit, and weird it definitely was, in a slightly different way, but undoubtedly worthy.