You’re welcome. Mistletoe is everywhere here. If you think about it, mistletoe is an odd choice of symbol for love, since the actual plant is a parasite with hallucinogenic properties and a tendency to kill its host. And it’s dratted hard to get rid of once it takes root. Or maybe that makes it particularly …
This tombstone from Basel is a whopping 1,200 years old…according to our guide, whose information seems shaky to me. Look at the third through fifth characters in the inscription. Arabic numerals didn’t make it to Europe till the 13th century. I think his estimate may have been off by a few (hundred) years. Not that I’m complaining, …
Apologies for the radio silence on Colmar and Strasburg. There will be a temporary gap in your feature presentation owing to the fact that your author is (sing it with me) technologically inept. I spent two days taking photos exclusively on my phone before I realized that the bandwidth on the boat isn’t strong enough to …
It occurs to me that perhaps I should toss out a little context for all these Rhine photos. My spring break is three weeks long and Dad and I are spending it on the Viking Vidar. This means many French and German towns, much French and German food, and very limited opportunities to botch a …
This statue to the right of the cathedral door was originally St. Michael sharing his cloak with a beggar. Sometime in the 15th century, the town fathers decided that it was unseemly to have the image of a beggar so close to a holy place, so they removed him and replaced him with a stump.
To the people of medieval Basel, the basilisk—unholy result of a toad incubating a cockerel’s egg—was a very real creature. Its glance could turn men to stone. It was invulnerable to weapons, and only its own gaze, reflected back at it in a mirror, could slay it. According to our tour guide, in the 13th …
The waiter translated the important part of the receipt for Dad:
Being Victorian does not require a Queen Victoria. Where medieval landmarks are concerned, the Swiss went through the same let’s-rebuild-it-bigger-and-add-battlements phase as their British counterparts around the turn of the 20th century. In Basel’s Marketplatz, you’ll find an imposing red building with three generous arches, false battlements, a tall clock tower on the left, and murals …
The Baselites have this extremely helpful habit of painting the year of construction right above the doors of their houses. Of course, left to a history-nerd father-and-daughter team, one of whom is armed with an audioguide and the other with a passion for historical architecture, any city tour inevitably turns into a scavenger hunt for …
If you pick up a tourist’s guide to Switzerland, the cities with their own chapters are Lucerne with its medieval covered bridge and Zurich with its turquoise river. If you’re like me, when you hear the name Basel, your reaction is probably: Is that…an herb? …a British guy? Now, I’ve never met a European city …