3 - Basel

Rode a bike through Basel today.  Crossed a bridge near the La-La König (a big statue of a head of a king sticking his tongue out stuck on the corner of a building – in this way, greater Basel can forever taunt lesser Basel across the river).  Everyone rides bikes here.  Cars follow bikes down medieval pathways. 

Riding through Basel on a bike made me think of the time I rode in the sidecar of a motorcycle in Havana.  A world apart, but what fused them together in a shared space in my memory was the taste for the local flavor of locomotion. Everyone in Basel rides bicycles.

My friend Beat grows cactus.  San Pedro cactus.  They are exiles here.  Basel is not a desert (Beat says they just experienced the hottest month ever recorded in Basel), but they are resilient.  Beat says they are edible.

On the way back from lesser Basel, it started to rain.  A car transferred the entire contents of a puddle onto me. 

Basel is clean and quiet.  The money is beautiful.  They put Le Corbusier, Arthur Honegger, Sophie Taeuber-Arp on the multi-colored bills.  The more important the personage, the lesser the denomination.  My theory is that they put the more important figure on the lesser denomination since the lesser denominations are used more.  It is also true of US dollars.  George Washington IS more important than Ulysses S. Grant.  Abraham Lincoln IS more important than Andrew Jackson.  Why are only politicians represented on American money (unless they are women?).   Are we not proud of our architects, composers, and painters?  The Swiss are.  I remember that on the old Belgian Franc, they had Adolphe Sax (the inventor of the saxophone on one of the bills).  That would be equivalent to putting Les Paul or Leo Fender on the dollar (and why not? the electric guitar is the most important new instrument of the 20^th century!). 

German is not a real language.

The German keyboard juxtaposes the “y” and “z.”  It’s a lot easier to type in English than the French keyboard. 

What I don’t understand is why there is a Starbucks here.  Why are there any Starbucks at all anywhere in Europe?  They have better local coffee here.  They have an evolved culture of coffee here.  Americans only drink coffee to get pumped for work.  Americans take large quantities of watered-down coffee to go in paper cups.  Here, they sit outside and consume coffee in proper porcelain cups with saucers with a side of chocolate.  Coffee accompanies conversation.  The temporal experience of coffee is different. 

Europeans also walk slower, especially the French. 

Basel feels deserted.  It is summer and many residents have gone south for their vacancies. So few people here.  It’s not a real town.  It’s a more like a movie set, one in which they hadn’t hired enough actors.

I have the idea of vastly differently sized chapters.  The travelogues of the journey between cities will be interludes to the larger episodes of times and thoughts in cities. 

Everybody knows everyone here.  That’s because they don’t have enough people here.

For three hours my last night in Basel, I was in Germany.  Lörach, Germany.  There is a summer “Stimmen” (voice) festival.  I noticed on the calendar of events that later in the month they will have Alanis Morissette and Simply Red.  But we were entertained by the French-Canadian cello-plalying chanteuse, Jorane.  Think Enya.  Mildly worldbeat rhythms serving as background to a singing style devoid of consonants.  It was impossible to make-out any of the words, no matter which language (French or English) she sang.  The German audience clapped on the one and three – like American teenagers on American Bandstand in the fifties.