South of the Border

If you ever get the chance to go to Müllheim on a Sunday, don’t. Unless you’ve had enough of this life and have decided that death by boredom is the way to go. Last weekend we decided it was time to get the hell out of Freiburg for a few hours, and had heard that there were many charming small towns in the region. And maybe there are, but picking a name from the train schedule at random is not always the best method. Anyone rolling up in a small German town on a Sunday, without checking in advance whether there’s actually anything to see or do there, is a person making a mistake. We would have taken just about anything, really. A local sausage festival, say. Perhaps a cuckoo clock factory. All we got was darkened shop windows, cold weather, and a few older people with closed faces walking their little dogs through the empty streets.

We decided to head back to the station and take the next train onwards to Basel. Unfortunately, it was only after we had purchased tickets, boarded, and made it halfway there, that it occurred to P and me that we were, you know, traveling to another country. A not-Germany, not-even-EU country. So, there we are, hurtling towards an international border, not a passport in sight, M (secure in possession of her EU travel document) looking at us with a combination of sympathy, amusement at our retardosity, and perhaps slight concern that she might end up implicated in our impromptu illegal immigration scheme. Meanwhile, I’m getting automatically generated text messages on my cell about per minute rates outside Germany, and then we see the last German flag and there’s the customs checkpoint on the Autobahn and tada we’re in Switzerland, oh crap oh crap, why are we so stupid? But nothing happens, no one came by to check our tickets let alone our travel documents, and upon exiting the train we were definitely not thrown down, cuffed, and whisked away to be interrogated about possible ties to international terrorism. Not that any particular scenerios had occurred to me or anything. Of course, just when we thought we were home free because there was no border control on the train, we stroll into the station and… you can see this coming, can’t you? There’s a customs booth. But! This is German speaking Europe. It’s a Sunday. No one works on Sunday. The customs booth was closed. Score one for economic regulation.

Apparently Basel is actually slightly smaller than Freiburg, but somehow it manages to feel like the Big City in comparison. Maybe part of that is that it’s set on a real river, the Rhine. Freiburg is also on a river, technically speaking, but the Dreisam is about as impressive a leaking garden hose. Maybe it’s the proper museums or the fact that less that 90% of the people on the streets look like they’re cut from the same ethnic cloth. Maybe it was just the novelty of being somewhere else, with different shop fronts and funny Monopoly money. It probably also seemed livelier because the autumn fair was on, spread out over squares all over the city centre, which we thought was quite clever, since the lights and noise and food smells seemed to always be beckoning out of the chilly early evening gloom from right around the corner, and the attractive smaller scale setting of the squares tempered the brashness of the manically flashing lights and clanging bells and scratchy speakers with a coziness and humanity totally lacking when these things are segregated to a huge, flat, grey fairground on the outskirts.

After an aborted visit to the art museum (we got there late, it closes early) and a bit of wandering, M had to be back in Freiburg early, but P and I decided to stay in Basel, get something to eat, see if anything was on for the evening. I’m not even going to tell you what a cheese pizza costs in Switzerland. The menu prices were physically painful just to read. In the end we found a kebab place. $8 for a fucking falafel. It was a damn good falafel, I’ll give them that, but $8! Now I understand why the Swiss guy we know here throws cash around like it’s squares of toilet paper.

On the other hand, we had stumbled over a concert rehearsal in a church while we were wandering around looking for the cathedral earlier, and after turning up and standing in line for what felt like roughly a million years (P spent about 10 minutes trying to teach me to roll my “r”s – unsuccessful, sadly) we managed to get tickets. Face value 25 Swiss francs (so about $22 or so). We got them for 10 francs a pop. “Oh, they’re for the very back here, but if you see something better go ahead and take it, we’re closing the doors now.” I guess I bitch about things here a lot, but when you find yourself in Europe, in a new city, sitting in the third row at a concert you’ve found by chance, in a lovely old church, for under $10, and the soloist starts in… you realize that maybe it’s time to pack in the whining for a while. Oh, and at intermission waiters came around with trays of macaroons. Yes. I guess I could question the interpretive dance that accompanied the fourth movement, but why bother?

Full of macaroons and culture, and glowing with the success of our spontaneity, we got back to the train station with almost an hour to kill before the next train home. Just as well considering how long we ended up fighting with the ticket machines. We eventually wandered down towards the platforms and I needed to use the toilet, which were immediately on the other side of the ever darkened and deserted customs booth. When I came out, we debated a little over whether we should go back into the main part of the station to kill some time where it was warmer. Then we noticed that there was a light on in the customs booth. “Hey, the computer’s on in there.” P walks over and peers in AND OH SHIT THERE’S A CUSTOMS AGENT IN THERE. We hightailed it hand in hand up the stairs to the actual platforms, laughing in the slightly hysterical way that you do when you get away with something seriously stupid. While we waited in the cold for the train, we celebrated our continued freedom by using our remaining Swiss change to buy American chocolate bars from the vending machine on the platform. Let me tell you, that Snickers tasted like liberty.