It’s been a while since the last post on The Basilisk’s Gaze because we’ve been on holiday. We drove around southern France, as well as to Barcelona and Lake Como, with much excitement along the way. But news of that holiday will have to wait because, having persisted this far, we want to continue in chronological order. Now that we are past the initial cultural adjustment of settling into Switzerland, the pace should increase and it won’t be long before we catch up to the present.

In the previous post we covered Christmas, and the flood of presents that came with it; a couple of weeks later Aunty Marina and Sheryl came to visit, bringing still more gifts. Given Marina’s penchant for the ancient world, it was necessary to visit Basel’s Antiquities Museum to look at their extensive collection of Etruscan artifacts. Thick glass separated Loxon and Wiki from the daggers and spears, but there were plenty of fragile ancient jugs and vases in danger, and opprobrium from the museum attendants was palpable. Eventually Loxon found a gap beneath one glass barrier and reached under to set off the alarm. The attendants enthusiastically showed us the way as we hurried out.

Marina and Sheryl headed off for the rest of their tour of Europe and a week later Mark’s cousin Chantelle dropped by. With her we drove the 15 minutes down to Dornach for a look at the curious Goetheanum, a building with a perverse aversion to right angles. This centre of learning was designed and built by Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the spiritual movement Anthroposophy (you may have heard of the Waldorf schooling system based on his teachings).

While Chantelle was in town, the festival of the Vogel Gryff took place. This is a prelude to Basel’s biggest annual event, the Fasnacht carnival, to which we will certainly have a post devoted at some point. The Fasnacht is organised by a collection of honorable societies. Three of these in Kleinbasel, that is on the north-east side of the river, have mascots called the Vogel Gryff (the griffin), the Leu (the lion) and the Wild Maa (the wild man) respectively. On the day of the Vogel Gryff festival, these three characters appear, and march through Kleinbasel performing dances for various elected officials of the societies.

First, the Wild Maa comes down the river on a raft, dancing all the way as small cannons are fired around him. He then meets the other two for more dancing, accompanied by a band of drummers. They even do a dance on the Mittlere Brücke (middle bridge), but they are careful never to face the Grossbasel side of the river — a consequence of the rivalry between the two half cities. The whole process is naturally electrifying for small children, who run after the procession with wild eyes. Loxon and Wiki were especially intrigued when the Vogel Gryff “took his head off” and stepped into a local restaurant for some well-earned sustenance. But the event was a mere hint of what was to come in Fasnacht itself.

Meanwhile, we were still waiting to get the phone and internet connected to our permanent apartment. This finally happened in mid-February, a total of 13 weeks after we had ordered it, despite the initial estimate of three weeks (yes, even that is long, but it seems to be standard here). The telecom sector has officially been deregulated in Switzerland, but the old government operator, Swisscom, retains heavy controls over their competitors when it comes to house connections. This combined with the ineptitude of our provider’s customer service, and the utter sluggishness of anything technical over Christmas here, to drag out the process beyond all expectations.

At numerous points, we were ready to give up and start all over again with Swisscom, but there were always explanations for the delays and promises that all would be right in two more weeks. In total, Mark spent over 8 hours on his mobile phone to customer service (Marion tells him he should be grateful to them for all that practice speaking German), over an hour visiting their shop to see if twins destroying their premises might convince them to try harder, and over two hours working with technicians as they tested the wiring in our apartment. In all, he interacted with twenty different representatives across five different business units. As the previous tenant of our apartment quipped when he learnt of the delay, “sounds more like Zimbabwe than like the middle of Europe”. When we did finally get connected, it felt as though we had gained entry to Kafka’s Das Schloß.