Basel!

I got back last night completely exhausted from my 5 day trip but it was so much fun! I was in Basel for 2 days, Brussels for 2 days and Antwerp for 1 day. Since I have so many pictures and things to say I'm splitting the trip into multiple posts.

The trip started with a 13 hour bus ride from The Hague to Basel, of which I was asleep for about 3 hours...not a very good start to the trip. But I dropped my bag off at the hostel, got a coffee and was ready to begin my day. I went to Markplatz in the middle of the city and saw Town Hall. All the surrounding buildings are beige but Town Hall is a striking red with magnificent colored carvings. It was really a gorgeous building. 

Close up the carvings

City Hall...couldn't get a good shot
of it without the power lines

Next up was Munster Church which is a few streets behind Marktplatz. It was gorgeous! The church was built between 1019 and 1500 during which parts of it were destroyed and rebuilt and additions added. I walked around the inside of the church and went up to the top of it for a view of the city. I loved that Basel doesn't have many new buildings. This was especially evident from the top where in some directions you couldn't see any modern buildings!

Looking up at the church.

One of the statues on the front of the church

View from the top

Close up of the colorful roof

Selfie from the top!

I saw the Elisabethan church which was gorgeous as well.

Elisabethan Church in the background

In the plaza by the church is a cool fountain by the artist Jean Tinguely. All the different sculptures in the fountain move. My favorite was the face that shoots water out of its eyes. Below is a video from Youtube showing the fountain in action.

Then it was off to the History Museum of Basel which is right by the fountain and church. It was a really good museum with old religious objects, gorgeous tapestries and obviously a lot of historical information!
I saw the Spalentor which is the old city gate of Basel. It was neat but it was under construction so you couldn't see the bottom half of it.

Spalentor

Next was a Paper Mill Museum and then I walked along the Rhine for a bit to have different scenery from the city. It was really pretty! I also saw the boats that you can use to cross the Rhine to get to the other side of Basel (although I didn't ride in one). The boat is attached to a wire that spans the river and gets across by using the current of the water to propel it across and the wire to guide it. During the summer it's popular to swim across the river. You put your clothes and belongings in a waterproof sack and swim with it!

The Rhinefahre

Sunday was a slower day as I just went to two museums: the Kunstmuseum (fine arts museum) and Haus zum Kirschgarten. The Kunstmuseum was huge so some of the less interesting rooms I just quickly walked through. They had a lot of great paintings by Dali, Van Gogh, Monet and other notable artists. Their temporary exhibit right now is of the modern artists Mondrian, Newman and Flavin. I didn't find that very interesting since Mondrian and Newman's work is just lines on a canvas. Flavin does arrangements of different colored lights which was a little more interesting but I didn't think the pieces they had were very good. Some of his works that turned up in a google search look more interesting than what I saw.

  

One of the stoves. 

One of the clocks that's not very
convenient for telling time

Then I went to Haus zum Kirschgarten which  is an old house that is now a museum showing  what life was like in the 18th and 19th  centuries for the Basel elite. They had a lot of  interesting things on display. I thought the  porcelain stoves were really cool because  they're so big and heavily decorated. They also had a very large collection of  watches and clocks (2 large rooms!) and  though that doesn't sound very interesting, I  thought it was really cool. They're so decorative and on some of the clocks you had to search for where the clock actually was because their purpose was more for decoration, not for actually telling time.

In the afternoon since it was raining and so many things are closed on Sundays (not to mention my feet and legs were so sore from the previous day!) I decided to go see a movie and rest for a few hours. I saw The Butler which I really enjoyed! The movie had an intermission...I wish we had that in the United States!

That's it for Basel! I'll try to put up a post about Brussels tomorrow.