thursday

[nibot]

Picked up Alex in Basel.. it worked out beautifully.. I arrived there at 09:45, one minute before his train was scheduled to arrive, and was there waiting when he stepped off the train, me after three hours from Geneve, him after an all-night train from Hamburg.

We loitered about Basel for the day, enjoying the sporadic showers and brilliant lightning of a passing thunderstorm. In the sun we walked through the old town, sat at a quiet cafe near kantonspitzen, where the sun umbrellas shielded us from another (welcome) passing shower, and a nice lady paid for our coffee and coke for some reason.

Basel is a triple-point where Switzerland, France, and Germany converge. It was a quiet town, and, wondering where everyone was, we noticed that the stores on that particular street were closed for a four hour lunch break. Open 8-10, 2-4:30. We strolled down along the Rhine.

Drove home via Bienne and Neuchatel, enjoying new views of Switzerland. The area between those towns is particularly nice. Back in Geneve, we went for dinner with the NEU students to a crepe restaurant in St. Genis for several hours of crepe-eating yumminess.

Comments

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Euler lived in Basel!

And my friend Chris who was on Mathcamp staff was from New Zealand, and one of the campers called him Paul, because that was his middle name! Strange minor coincidence...

When do you return to my continent?

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there was Hotel Euler right there in the city center. We were also interested to learn that Basel was the birthplace of LSD, and is still a center for pharmaceutical industries (it's the home of Novartis, iirc).

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, my plane ticket is right now for September 20, but I might move it later by a few weeks for my trip to the baltic/poland/sweden.