B-A-S-E-L!Corny as it sounds, yesterday was one of those awesome days that I'll probably remember for the rest of my life. The gang and I decided to take a day trip to Basel, Switzerland as a semi-early birthday celebration for me with full intentions of walking into France and then back into Germany. None of us have Friday classes, and with a Baden-Württemberg train ticket special of only 28 Euros round trip for the 5 of us combined, how could you say no? We took the 9:15 train to
Basel and got there a little after 10. Basel must be one of the most expensive cities in Europe. So much so that there isn't much else affordable besides walking around. We took in the old part of the city, checked out the outdoor flea market, and visited two old cathedrals before heading to our favorite restaurant to get our favorite meal (as previously mentioned in this blog): cheese tortellini. We had been thinking about this for weeks and you can only imagine our sadness when the waitress informed us that they had no tortellini; we had to choose between spaghetti or penne! We all ordered penne with low expectations, but it actually turned out to be quite delicious! When we were all finished, she brought us each a tiny cup of espresso. Out of the 5 of us, not one of us likes coffee at all but knew we had to drink it. Taking a deep breath, we all dumped in an entire package of sugar and an entire thing of cream and stirred our cups furiously before taking a sip at the same time. The reactions were not good (see video in the next post). We downed the espresso as quickly as we could and then drank water or had a piece of gum in order to get rid of the gross taste in our mouths. Immediately I could feel the caffeine kick in and got a headache from it! We also bought some Leckerli, a Swiss cookie that I sold tons and tons of over the summer when I worked at SwissBakers. I was totally shocked to actually see it in Switzerland--it really exists!
After lunch we contined to walk around for a while until deciding to cross the border into St. Louis, France. This was one of the few places I've seen so far where the border is actually marked in the ground, and we had way too much fun with it, taking a ton of pictures right in front of the border control guys. Here you can see Mitch in Switzerland checking his fancy timepiece and Jon in France being a tool and "smoking" a stinky cigarette. The part the blows my mind is how quickly the language spoken changes when you cross the border. All of a sudden everything went from being in German to French, and being the only French speaker, Jon had to translate for us all (and listen to us butcher the language by failing to pronounce anything correctly). We had a great time walking around, playing in random playgrounds, andenjoying the beautiful weather.
However, we still needed to complete our trifecta: breakfast in Germany, lunch in Switzerland, and dinner in France. It was too early for dinner in France so we stopped inside a bakery and got French pastries instead. The boys and I got eclairs and Emily got a lemon tart. Everything was amazing.
There is a gorgeous bridge on the Rhine called the three country bridge (again, with no marked border!) that we crossed to get back into Germany again. We found a small park and sat down for a while to relax and reflect on the day. Even though we were back in Germany, our train was leaving from Switzerland so we needed to cross back into Basel. We had been in three countries (multiple times!) in less than eight hours. We all crashed on the train and were back in Freiburg a little after 20:00. Overall it was such a fun day with gorgeous weather and many laughs.
Check out the rest of the ridiculous pictures from our day trip here!
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