Week 10: Basel Switzerland

A few months ago I got an email from a friend that I will paraphrase thusly:

OMG!! We r going to be traveling to EUROPE!!! and will be in Switzerland!!!!! That is in EUROPE!!! You are in EUROPE!!!!! We should totally HANG OUT!!! OMG!!! I love exclamation points!!!! and OMGs!!!!

Again, I am paraphrasing.

But, how can you refuse such an email? Especially from a college friend who lives on the west coast? So, Jason and I planned a trip to Basel, Switzerland to catch up with said friend, her husband and her fetus for an afternoon and spend the rest of the weekend hanging out in the place where the smartest people in the world live.

Basel is a very nice city. I present exhibit A below.

Jason, enjoying the sunset and European public drinking

The river splits the city in two. We stayed in 'Klein Basel' (small Basel) in an apartment I found through AirBnB (it was a small but fantastic place--if you need a place to stay in Basel, I can tell you which one it is). The main part of the city was across the river, which is where the cathedral, the Marktplatz (market square) and many shops and restaurants are located. The best thing, though, is the river.

Not only can you sit along it and drink beer, but you can also, during the day, swim in it (and in certain sections, lay naked next to it). The swimming looked particularly fun. The right way to do it, from what we read and saw, is to go buy a dry-sack from the tourist information booth in Basel, put you clothes and keys in the sack, jump in and let the current carry you down stream. We didn't have our swim suits with us and are not yet European enough to jump in naked, so this only means we will have to come back. 

Look for the heads and sacks between the boat and bridge abutment

Another main site to see in Basel is the Tinguely Museum. Tinguely made extraordinary kinetic sculptures. For those of you who have been to the MIT Museum and seen Arthur Ganson's work, Tinguely does similar stuff, but with much less precision and much more size. There was a great fountain, shown in the video, in a square in Basel. This gives you a bit of an idea of his work. It by no means exemplifies his pieces in the museum--I found them much more raw and fantastic than the fountain. There was also a very interesting collection of car-based art in the non-permanent collection area that was very good--some one had done a 3-D, full-size exploded view of a VW Bug. That was fantastic.

We caught up with the previously mentioned friend, husband and fetus on Sunday afternoon, a few hours before Jason was to head back to Speicher. We had a great time, which included, brunch, ice cream and a bit of walking around. We bid Jason adeau at the train station. I hung out a bit more, including a sunset trip across the Rhein in one of the ferry boats. A great end to a great weekend.

Said friend, fetus below her, husband behind me