There
was one weekend near the end of May where I just needed to get away: escape a
stressful living situation, demanding work responsibilities, and
psycho-emotionally draining friendships. I just needed out.
FRIDAY
So. At around 5pm Friday afternoon, I booked a hostel in Basel for that
same evening and the following two nights (Monday was a holiday).
Why Basel? It's incredibly old (we're talking ancient Roman times), sits
directly on the Rhine River at the crossroads between Switzerland, France, and
Germany, and hosts the most museums of any other Swiss city (including your
typical/kinda boring art and natural history museums but also more interesting
ones, which we'll get to).
Catching the 7pm train from Cornavin, the 5-hour journey brought me to
the hostel shortly after midnight. It took a bit of time to figure out the
safe-system for late-checkins and the handwritten German instructions on how to
find and open the room, but eventually the large 10-bed dorm was entirely my
own for the next several hours.
SATURDAY
My first day in Basel (Saturday) was very slow, calm, and unplanned
(Tbh, I just needed to decompress from the week and couldn't be bothered to
organize anything). Grabbing coffee from one of the small stands at a Saturday
morning market, I wandered through the old city taking photos, watching people,
sitting beside the Rhine river to write and nap, and wandering through the
cathedral and its crypt.
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| Elisabethenkirche |
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| Old City gates |
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| Inside the courtyard of the Basel Munster |
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| Jesus lookin' sexy |
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| The Rhine River, where Switzerland meets both Germany and France |
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| Accidentally buying fancy coffee and cakes during a writing break |
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| Reading along the Rhine |
There was a large market in central Old Basel, Basel Marktplaz, where people in
traditional Swiss German clothing were playing these massive horns
that sounded similar to a didgeridoo... but more Swiss. There was also an
abundance of hard-pressed cheeses to choose from; I went with 100g of both
Napfkäse and Sörenberger-Alpkäse to taste and add to my cheese chart (which
is updated far more regularly than this blog - just a heads up). The
Napfkäse was a classic good hard cheese but that Sörenberger-Alpkäse somehow
managed to taste super-aged and sharp without creating any sort of granules
(those tiny cheese crystals that show up inside aged cheeses), resulting in
an incredibly smooth cheese with all the rich sharpness
of a strong aged cheese.
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| Cool Swiss didgeridoo. They're flying the flag for Obwalden canton, which is... not where Basel is? |
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| Cheese cheese cheese! |
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| A classic, good hard alpine cheese. |
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| One of the smoothest hard, aged cheeses I've tried! I have no idea how they managed to avoid the cheese crystals |
That
night, I brought the most delicious garlic fries (which were easily ordered and
handed to me but weirdly complicated to find someone to pay for them?) to eat
at my hostel while planning tomorrow's Sunday Adventure, which I'd already
determined to be much more organized than today. After hours
sifting through brochures (thank you, Basel Backpackers), this was the final
itinerary:
10am - free walking tour of Basel Old Town
12:30 - walk to the Anatomical Museum (Anatomischesmuseum), grabbing
something to eat on the way
1pm - explore the Anatomical Museum
3pm - walk quickly to the Pharmacy Museum (Pharmaziemuseum) before it
closes
4pm - walk quickly to the Toy Museum (Spielzeug Welten Museum) before it
closes next
5pm - find sausage to eat at a restaurant somewhere. Gotta enjoy classic
wurst from the German part.
SUNDAY
Somehow (almost) everything went smoothly! Our tour guide was a
sweetheart who adored Basel and I wish we'd had more questions for him.
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| Tinguely Fountain: facing the new opera house, it is designed in the space and using the materials of the old opera house. The statue's face is shooting tears at the new opera house. Architect was not a fan of change... |
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| Basel Town Hall. Such vibrant red! |
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| Brains in the anatomy museum! |
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| Tattoos last a long time... |
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Pickled sniffer
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Bodily
consent is obviously an important topic here with some weird gray areas in
relation to its history. The legal requirement for medical consent to
use/display someone's dead body for scientific purposes isn't that old; common
practices used by average respectable doctors 200 years ago would now be
completely illegal. Yet many of the body parts on display were significantly
older than body consent laws. Apparently (according to the student running the
ticket counter), universities are able to keep displaying bodies obtained
before these consent laws - it is only new bodies that are
required to meet the current standards. As a result, there are certain
specimens on display right now that will only be possible to see until they
disintegrate because current consent laws would not allow new ones. The most
significant example of this was the fetuses: the museum had an entire wall
depicting every stage of fetal development (no photos of this one - obvious
reasons). Since a fetus cannot consent, this display will only be around until
they naturally disintegrate.I
ended up staying at the Anatomical Museum until it closed and had to skip the
Pharmacy Museum but it was definitely worth it. The entire museum is just one
room with several rows of specimens, but almost every specimen is utterly
fascinating.
The Toy Museum was spectacular and I wish there were more than an hour
to spend it in.
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| Mouse home |
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| A monastery basement |
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| Wildly intricate dollhouse! |
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| Risqué artist's nook of the 1800s? |
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Tutus! So detailed
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By
a happy coincidence, the Toy Museum is right beside the street with all the
outdoor restaurants and food stalls. It took a surprisingly long time to find a
restaurant selling sausage (a common response: "you need a festival or
sporting event for sausage - it's not a restaurant food." Oh well - I
still want sausage). Eventually, I did find a restaurant selling sausage and
enjoyed happily eating that sausage on a busy Basel restaurant patio.
I also met a fellow traveler on this restaurant patio - a young German
man escaping the German COVID restrictions. We ended up exploring Kleinebasel,
finding random paintings of Naked Jesus, trying Croatian ćevapčići, and
wandering along the Rhine.
MONDAY
HIKING
On Sunday, I went hiking in a more rural area outside of Basel (which
took a while to get to - Basel is quite large).
I found...
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| Pfeffingen Castle, an abandoned medieval fortress |
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| With a beautifully placed tree |
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| One of the largest castle ruins in Basel canton |
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| From multiple angles |
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| A rock that was apparently a tactical Swiss location during WW1 |
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| A sign looking like it was from LotR |
That evening, I boarded the long train back toward Geneva. Arriving around 2am, I snuck back into my house to avoid waking up the small children, tucked into bed, and fell fast asleep to recharge for the workday tomorrow.
