Euro 2008 host cities on the web: Bern

I've been writing a series of articles looking at the official information being made available by the eight Euro 2008 host cities. So far I've looked at four venues - Salzburg, Klagenfurt, Innsbruck and Wien.

Euro 2008 isn't the first time that the tournament is being co-hosted. Belgium and the Netherlands jointly hosted the tournament 8 years ago, and during Euro 2000 I went to matches in Amsterdam, Liege, Bruges and Brussels. Euro 2008 won't be the last time that the European Championship is co-hosted either, as Euro 2012 is scheduled to be held by Poland and the Ukraine - although the apparent failure so far of the two to get organised is creating some doubt about that.

So far in this series of articles I've concentrated on the Austrian venues. Switzerland are holding half the games as well, and so today I want to look at the official websites of the first Swiss venue I've examined - Bern.

Bern

Bern has been building up to the event with infrastructure investment, and has just recently re-opened the Stade de Suisse Wankdorf stadium.

They have also been working on their transport, and currently have a special football tram on the network promoting the tournament.

Berninfo.com has plenty of Euro 2008 information. The Netherlands have all of their games based in the city, and the site features information in Dutch, and in the languages of the other three teams that make up this year's 'group of death' - France, Italy and Romania.

You can download a PDF brochure about the city from the site, which adds English and German as supported languages, but drops the Romanian.

In contrast to the videos made available on the regional Tirol site promoting Euro 2008 in Innsbruck, the videos made available about Bern use YouTube and so can be embedded in other sites, like so:

The multimedia gallery also features some podcast download guides to the city.

em2008bern.com is another site with information about the host city. This offers content in French and English, but does so using Google's 'rotten meat' translation engine.

Another site with coverage of the tournament in Bern is euro08-bern.ch. This also uses Google tools, but in this case it is the rather more reliable mapping tool. This is also where, if you are so inclined, you can download an mp3 of the Bern Euro 2008 song. The mind boggles.

The site also publishes Bern's "Stapi-blog" about hosting the tournament.

Next...

Tomorrow I'll be looking at a second Swiss Euro 2008 venue - Zürich.