The airport for Basel, Switzerland is not in Switzerland but in France. Officially, it is Euroairport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg, serving the area where Switzerland, France and Germany meet. We didn't have to go through passport control because we'd already done that in Amsterdam. From the baggage claim there are separate exits for Switzerland and for France and Germany. We just rolled our bags through the Swiss customs gate in the green "nothing to declare" lane--there was nobody there. After getting some Swiss francs from an ATM, we found the bus to Basel--if, like us, you have a confirmed reservation for a hotel in the city, you just show it to the driver and you don't have to buy a ticket.
The bus dropped us off at the main railroad station, where we went into the concourse to the Mobile Zone store to find a Swiss SIM card to insert into the cellular phone we had brought from home. We use Verizon at home and their phones aren't configured the same as European phones, so for our 2012 trip we had bought a phone with European configuration, with the idea of changing the SIM card as we changed countries. We had, however, never used it on that trip. Problem: the three-year-old phone used an outdated style of SIM card, which Mobile Zone didn't carry. The clerk suggested that we buy a cheap new phone from the Media Max store in the station. We did that, but I'm not sure we did it right. Our new phone and new SIM card (for the Salt phone system) with 25 francs in credit, cost us 49.95 Swiss francs (a little over $50), but it's run through our credits like a drunken sailor. Apparently, it's charging us 1/3 franc per minute for a domestic call and a whole franc a minute for an international call, which makes it expensive for Mary Joy to call her mother. We've had to add more francs to the card's credit.
Just down the street from the station's rear entrance is the Hotel Ibis Bahnhof. Ibis is a budget brand of the Accor hotel chain (Sofitel, Novotel, Mercure, etc.). They are modern, clean, formulaic and barebones (think a classy Super 8). In 2009 we stayed at the one at Charles de Gaulle Airport (Paris). The room, I think, was almost exactly the same as this one. The desk clerk was very welcoming and helpful. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to remember which trams to take to the old town and back, which led me to rely on my interpretation of the dense and complicated route map she gave us. Basel must be among the most streetcarred cities in the world--there are nearly twenty routes, going every which way. In the center city, you can't go more than a minute or two without coming within sight and sound of one or two or three of these big green or yellow metal monsters, growling up and down the streets.
It was after nine o'clock (though still light out), but I was hungry, so we decided to follow the desk clerk's recommendation and walk down to Baerfusserplatz, at the south edge of the Old Town, where there are all sorts of restaurants. The walk was a gradual downhill most of the way and took less than half an hour. We ate at a beer hall called "Braunen Mutz," sitting outside. I should give a weather report here: dry and unusually hot, around 36 degrees Celsius (97 Fahrenheit), though probably a little cooler by then. Unfortunately, most of Europe is currently suffering from extreme heat, and since air conditioning is the exception there rather than the rule, we'll be suffering, too.
I had a large bratwurst in onion sauce, with roesti (a sort of Swiss hash browns). Better than I've had in New Glarus, Wisconsin, and the brown beer I had was very good, too. Mary Joy had a salad and a good Swiss white fondant wine. As I looked at the tram route map, it seemed to me that the number 10 tram would go right past our hotel. We had a free transit pass from our hotel, so we might as well make use of it. The trams have specific stops, and they stop at all of them. As soon as we crossed the bridge over the railroad tracks, we would stand by the door and, at the next stop, push the button to open the door and get out. But after a while, we seemed to have gone a long way without crossing the bridge--it was dark out and not a whole lot was visible. I checked my map again and saw that we had gone several stops farther than we should have, so we got off at the next stop, which appeared to be in some suburb. Since the shelter for the stop for the other direction was minimal and had no schedule posted, we walked ten or fifteen minutes down to the next stop, just as a train was arriving. We got off at the next stop, which, according to my reading of the stylized map, should have been just up the line from our hotel, but as we followed the street, across from the tracks, the sidewalk suddenly went up a hill, away from the street and tracks. At first we followed the street, in the street, but I didn't think that was safe, so we went up the steps with the sidewalk, expecting it to come back down and rejoin the street. Instead, it joined and followed another street that curved off to the right. Down the hill to our left appeared not just one tram track but many tracks coming together, indicating a railroad yard. We asked a man if he could tell us how to get to the Hotel Ibis Bahnhof. He replied that the street we were walking along would take us right there. Sure enough, after a few blocks we arrived at the hotel, coming in from the side street, from the west instead of from the south, as I would have expected! When I was able to look at the map in better light, I realized that the number 10 line passed substantially to the west of our hotel, and that the line we should have used was number 16. All's well that ends well--Mary Joy was not amused.
Finally, we got to bed around 11:30, the end of a very long day.
No comments:
Post a Comment