Posted on August 3, 2014 at. August 3, 2014 by Drea Fekety

The second week of my time in the UNHIRES program was spent visiting Basel, Switzerland. Unlike most of our other trips outside of Stuttgart, this trip was a 2-day trip so we only stayed 1 night in Basel. Regardless, it was still fun and I saw a lot of cool stuff.

One of the main reasons for planning this trip was because we wanted to visit Micah’s family living in Switzerland. They were very accommodating hosts for us in allowing us to crash at their apartment and giving us some pointers about hot-spots to visit in the city.

The day we arrived, we started by taking a boat ride across the Rhine river to visit a church on the other side. We explored the church and the surrounding city center for a while, then went down to a shopping/retail area where I bought a neat shirt. Lots of the merchandise in that area was crazy-expensive so we didn’t really stay there for long before moving on.

After exploring that side of the Rhine, we decided to walk down to the nearby Jean Tinguely museum. I’d never heard of Tinguely before visiting Basel, but his work was really cool. Basically, Tinguely’s style of art focused on creating exhibits that usually had some sort of movable mechanical elements in them, but these machines were very unreal and dream-like. In other words, it’s like what would happen if a surrealist painter tried to make Rube Goldberg machines.

I also decided to take some Swiss Francs back from Basel as a sort of souvenir from my time spent in the famously stable Swiss economy. Basically, I like coin-collecting.

One thing that I regret about the trip was not having enough time to go see Art Basel, which is supposedly the biggest art exhibit/festival of the year in that area. But, there was plenty of other things that we were able to do in Switzerland which made for a great visit.