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 I didn’t like (and threaten to move to), but Basel (pronounced BOZ-uhl) isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing city, at least from its Google Images search and the view from the train window. The riverscape is all right—it would probably be prettier in summer with the trees in leaf—but the Marketplatz, with its vaguely neoclassical hotels and its scrum of tram tracks, could belong to any American city.
That’s until your tour guide a.k.a. father gets his hands on an audioguide app and you find yourself following the narration up a narrow, steep cobbled street with an unpronounceable German name. On one side, between the hotels and offices, the hillside drops away to the river. On the other, you begin to pass leaning half-timbered houses with five-foot-tall doorways and overhanging upper stories.
This is Basel’s Old Town, a strange, beautiful, hilly maze that rings the Marketplatz on three sides and ends at the river. I’m going to upload the remainder of my Basel photos as a series of posts, because any post that attempts to catalogue everything we saw will either come across as a little ADD or else crash the cruise ship server.