SWITZERLAND 2009: Americans in Basel

PHOTOS TO COME

Guten Tag from Basel —

Gosh don’t know where I left off or where to begin…

Spent the morning in Besancon, walking around — it is truly a charming city… walked across the river and up to the Citadel. Had some interesting conversations regarding the LIP watches… When I was in Paris in May, I purchased a watch whose brand was LIP… which has a very long and complicated story about worker cooperatives.. Anyway, I knew the company was founded in Besancon, and I really wanted another watch like it… Turns out no one in Besancon sells the watch…

We decided at the very last minute, as we were getting into our car in Besancon to drive to Basel — to make a detour and visit Ronchamp (Corbu’s famous pilgrimage church — which we had seen many many years ago)… Ronchamp was about a 30 minute detour.. OK maybe an hour.. so we drove to Ronchamp — through many wonderful French villages — and it was worth the extra time.. especially since there were very very few people there as opposed to the first time we saw it.. Then at about 5:00 we left Ronchamp and headed to Basel.. which was uneventful.. until we tried to find our hotel.

We got to Basel at about 6:30 pm.. We had two GPS systems and we had a map and also directions from Google Maps printed.. I will spare you the details, but the story is that we didn’t get to the hotel until 8:30 — two hours — and all that time we were within one kilometer of the hotel… We had it plotted on the GPS.. and we could never find the hotel… we couldn’t find the street it was supposedly on.. and every time we tried we wound up somehow past it and would reset the GPS and start again.. After an hour and 15 minutes of this, we actually called my office in Oakland and had them try to look at the map on the computer since they could blow it up in more detail than we could see on the little iPhone or Blackberry screens… We then called the hotel and they didn’t speak much English (our German is not very good)… but I did come to understand.. as I told the receptionist all the streets we had been circling .. that we had actually been in front of the hotel many times and that the direction that the GPS was taking us was not necessary as we could enter more easily from another side.. but she couldn’t explain how to get to that side.. and of course we never actually saw the hotel.

We circled this old part of the city so many times we know the area well enough to live there.. In fact, there was one building with bay windows.. and Mike totally despised the design of these bay windows.. and we wound up sitting in front of that building six different times as we recalculated the GPS…

We decided maybe we should go to another hotel (as opposed to this older, quaint hotel — which we couldn’t find), and spotted a Hilton.. Mike was determined we just stop this nonsense and get checked in to the Hilton and have dinner.. But when we called the Hilton rooms were $500.. so we thought it was better to try to find the hotel again…

Then Mike got the very clever idea that we get a taxi and I become the passenger and he would “follow that taxi!”.. but naturally we couldn’t find a taxi… so we persevered again.. This time I told Mike that when we got to a particular intersection — where I thought the receptionist was referring and — he needed to just stop the car.. even if there was someone behind him.. because we needed to look very very carefully at that intersection.. By now, my GPS was out of power.

Anyway, we got to that particular corner.. where Leonhardplatz merged with Leonhardstrasse and led to Leonhardgraben!!!!!…. and we turned into a tiny alley that said no cars were allowed.. It was a little tiny square (By now we had actually driven on several streets where cars were not allowed…) There were some young people in this little park. We asked if they knew where the hotel was and we told the address, but they did not know.. so we started to back out of the square… Just at that moment, a woman approached us.. and we rolled down the window.. She was the receptionist from the hotel. We were directly in front of it.. but alas no sign on that side of the hotel.. Those young people were literally sitting in front of the building, but they were unaware it was the hotel.

OK.. we got here, we checked in; we had a great dinner.. bad news, we had to move the car out of the little square to a parking area few blocks away.. and tomorrow we need to get ourselves to Frankfurt to board the plane to Helsinki…

If you want to move to Basel, check with us; we know the city very well.

Guten abend…
Fern