Bananas for Basel

Even if you tried really hard, I think it would be hard to get run over in Basel, Switzerland. Polite driving rules here – drivers stop, trams stop, bikes stop. There is no honking – no frenetic weaving or cutting other cars off.

It’s a telling contrast to Paris. My final Uber driver – going to the Gare de Lyon to catch my train to Switzerland – ran red lights, stopped in the middle of intersections, cut off buses, and just ignored the honking. He made me get out a long block shy of the train station area and just pointed in the general direction and drove off.

He would be my worst cab ride of the France stay but for the man who drove me from Versailles to Paris. He was okay behind the wheel but he made us listen to a song that made me so uncomfortable. I’ve never given any thought to standards of civility I expect from a cab driver but WOW did I want out of that cab.

I’d never heard this Busta Rhymes song before but here were the continuously-repeated lyrics I found alarming – and he played it loud and proud:

Baby if you’ll give it to me, I’ll give it to you, I know what you want.

It’s a fine example of why last-mile transit is my Achilles’ heel and how I often end up dragging my suitcase a mile or two through cities…I just can’t get comfortable getting into cars alone with (almost always) men I don’t know.

It’s part of the reason I ended up in Basel. I needed to get from Paris to Munich and I needed somewhere to hang out for a few days. Basel met two requirements: 1) nice hotels and walking areas near the train station and 2) easy walking access to good museums.

Now that I’m here, I love Basel! It’s Switzerland’s third largest city at about 180,000. It’s not touristy – it’s just a livable city with tons of pedestrian streets, a river flowing through, and a very laid-back feel.

Here are a few shots from my strolls around – all of these areas are less than 10 minutes from my very well-located hotel (yes, I ate at the McDonald’s in that first picture):

This is the city hall, from 1504, with tower added around 1900:

Basel has a lot of construction going on – so as you transit around, you see a lot of streets that look like this. There is an ongoing effort to get 70% of the city on clean heat energy by 2037 and so new piping is being laid underground:

I had two sites on my list for Basel – and I accomplished them both…sort of. I’ve come down with a sore throat here and so I’m a little low energy. I’d like to blame the sore throat for my uneven touristing performance, but I think it’s more general incompetence and refusing to listen to the travel advice of total strangers.

The first place I wanted to see was Fondation Beyeler – a private collection museum owned by Hildy and Ernst Beyeler. It is supposed to have over 400 works from 91 artists, with art worth over 2 billion dollars.

But many of the exhibition rooms were closed off and there was very little wandering space and so I don’t feel like I saw much more than half a billion dollars worth of art. There was a piece by one of my favorites, Joan Miro (historical fact check since I can’t be trusted: male, actually lived, no longer living).

This is Miro’s Oiseau lunaire from 1966, but I think we can all agree that it looks like a My Little Pony, painted black, even though the title means Moon Bird:

Fondation Beyeler also has at least 23 Picasso paintings and I was struck by two of them: Harlequin with Black Mask from 1918 and Woman in Green (Dora) from 1944.

I also liked this painting by French artist Maurice de Vlaminck , who was one of the creators of Fauvist painting – characterized by pure, brilliant color, applied right from the paint tubes so that the color looks like a burst/explosion.

It only took me about 20 minutes to get through the whole Beyeler collection and so I looked around on Google maps to see if there was anything else around – I was about a 25 minute tram ride away from my hotel. The Memorial for World War II Refugees looked nearby, so I set out to find it. En route, I noticed the first of these bananas painted on Basel buildings, the work of Thomas Baumgartel – known as the “Banana Sprayer”. Here is the banana I saw and I have to tell you – despite much research – I cannot tell if this is an official banana or an imposter graffiti banana:

Baumgartel has grown famous for his bananas over the past 40 years and I’m sorry I wasted your time with those Picassos, because look at these! He’s got art all over the world! He tags museums and galleries with his banana seal of approval – he’s at 4000 and counting.

But back to the World War II memorial. Strolling through a residential neighborhood:

I turned a corner and spied the memorial:

I walked around the garden area for a few minutes, looking at some plaques, and was approached by a man, who invited me into the building:

I was the only visitor and the man was extremely curious (in his modest amount of English) as to why I was there…did I mean to visit, was I lost, where did I come from…

When he heard that I actually sought the memorial out, he was quite surprised and said I should come have coffee with him and he led me to the back room, where one of his friends was reading a magazine.

So I sat down and had coffee with these two men. I could not get that much information from them – other than they were volunteers and they wanted me to look at this big map on the wall, they were going hiking later, and they might eat some pizza:

The Memorial for Refugees commemorates people who were denied entry to Switzerland. The house on the memorial site sits in the municipality of Riehen – right at the German border – and the crossing was not fenced off by the Germans due to lack of available materials. The house was the crossing keeper’s house. The total number of civilians denied entry to Switzerland between 1939 and 1945 is over 20,000. The number denied entry at that exact crossing is unknown.

The memorial is privately funded. The land and house was purchased by businessman Johannes Czwalina in 2010. He was contacted by the three living sons of the crossing keeper – who was an employee of the German Reichsbahn – and they shared the sad history of the house. They had grown up seeing refugees being turned away. Johannes Czwalina decided to convert the house to a Holocaust memorial – it opened in 2011…Switzerland’s first Holocaust memorial.

The story serves as further evidence of one of my travel weaknesses – I often don’t really understand what I’m looking at until after I’ve gone back to my hotel…first the memorial and then again when I went to the Vitra Design Museum.

The Vitra Design Museum is the other major reason I came to Basel. It sits right across the border into Germany – a 30 minute tram ride and then a 20 minute walk. It’s billed as a site dedicated to industrial furniture, interior design, and architecture. There is a Frank Gehry building there – the first one he built in Europe – in 1989. In keeping with the current travel theme – buildings I went out of my way to see that turn out to be mostly closed – it was closed:)

Warning: One thing the two Memorial for Refugees men told me was that I should take some of my Basel time and go to the Novartis campus – as in Novartis, the pharmaceutical company, and I forgot all about it until tonight, when I looked it up and they were right – I should have gone there!

Novartis took an old chemical production plant and used the site to build a campus to symbolize their transparent and science-driven corporate image.

Novartis has a way better Frank Gehry building, from 2009:

And there’s more – this is the Novartis Pavilion, from 2022:

And somehow, instead of listening to my coffee friends, I went to Vitra and took the 2 hour architecture tour and I swear it was 2 hours spent talking about the history of cement usage in architecture. The tour guide talked about this wall for 20 minutes and then made us each touch the cement to admire its smooth qualities.

I made it through 90 minutes of her two hour architectural cement tour and then I snuck off in search of something for my sore throat. Look at these non-FDA approved lozenges…a little benzocaine, a little anti-viral a little anti-bacterial…amazing results in 24 hours.

The Novartis campus looked so amazing that I looked up the Medice pharmaceutical campus in Iserlohn, Germany. Not quite as amazing, but they make a great cough drop!

I’m headed to Germany to meet up with my Rick Steves tour group. I’m on a totally sold-out train of very festive people heading to Oktoberfest. I’ve loved my quick initial visit to Switzerland and I aim to come back, from both an architectural and purchasing good cough drops point of view. The only downside is the food costs. This KFC meal was $27 dollars!