Europe - Day 15 - Basel, Switzerland

David just made a comment to me, something about, "It doesn't sound like we had any fun in Switzerland. You didn't make anything funny." I have two things to say about this: First, after 2 1/2 weeks of trains, planes, boats and automobiles, I am tired. I don't have the energy for lots of stories. Second, there are only so many times you can tell about the time you tried to find the hotel/train/museum and failed. Or paid $35 for a sandwich and $3 for a glass of wine, the complete opposite of how it is in Singapore. Or how many times someone's wife dragged someone's husband so far off the beaten path that someone didn't think they could hold it together long enough to make it back for fries and mayonnaise. It just happened too many times to be funny anymore.

But I digress. Today is our last full day in Swizerland, we were in our second German-speaking city and starting to get the hang of the language. Basel (in Switzerland) borders both France and Gernany on the Rhine River, so number one on the agenda was a boat tour.

The intersection of the three countries is not on land, it's in the middle of the Rhine River. You can still visit it though, there's a sort of concrete walkway with the actual spot marked like this:

Just to make sure they had the right spot, David had to double check Google maps on his phone:

Close enough. After docking, we barely had time to inhale some fries (with mayo, of course, this is Europe) before meeting up with our guide for the walking tour of Basel. The good part was that he spoke fantastic English, the bad part was there were 15 other people in the group who didn't. So we had to listen to everything twice, first in German, then in English. The English part of the talks always seemed a little shorter though, and I wondered what part of the information he thought we didn't need to know.

The first main stop was a church, which was under construction so there weren't many good pictures to be had.

Inside the church, there were a bunch of tombs, and we bickered back and forth about whether there were actually people in there:

The most famous was the tomb of Erasmus Von Rotterdam, who was a Christian philosopher back in the 14th century, around the same time as Luther. Our tour guide was a big fan:

Another main stop was the RatHaus, or town hall. Fully restored, it was pretty neat:

Along the way back to the starting point, we were treated to "the best view in Basel":

Which was fine, but in this same alleyway was a little nook with this, which I though was much more entertaining:

At the end, was a gallery with pictures of another of Basel's famous resident, Roger Federrer:

Tomorrow we have the morning in Basel before heading to the airport. I will have cheese and chocolate for breakfast.