This fountain stands at the foot of the cathedral. It was designed by Paulo Antonio Pisoni, who completed the Cathedral of St. Urs and Viktor in Solothurn after his uncle’s, Gaetano Matteo Pisoni’s, death.

The neoclassical basin, column and urn conform clearly with the Louis XVI style, but in a local touch a pair of “Uristier” (warriors from the Swiss canton of Uri wearing horns) mouth the water pipes.

The Stegreif Mill is in a lovely area: as well as the peaceful canals of the St-Alban Teich that run amongst the traditionally decorated buildings, there is a preserved section of the old city wall and the
St-Alban Tor, an original city gate, visible on the hill from almost everywhere nearby. And one of the Rhine ferries crosses the river near the mill. The ferries are strung from pulleys on a cable over the river, and operate entirely by hydro-power. The ferry pilots simply adjust their rudders so that the flow of water past the boat pushes it across the river. Overall, it was a charming quarter, if a little sedate.

There were some downsides to living in an old museum building, however. The first of these materialised each Friday and Saturday night, as a series of screeching, creaking noises that seemed to emanate from above us, and went on until around 1 o’clock in the morning. Marion’s first theory was that someone was moving furniture upstairs. When it continued, Mark decided someone might be demonstrating some old piece of machinery in a display room up there, but it seemed too relentless even for that. It took several weeks before we hit upon the correct explanation: dinner guests were moving their chairs on the stone floor of the restaurant below us and the sound was being transmitted by the walls of the building into the beams of our apartment. On other nights of the week, the restaurant was quieter and so people were more careful when getting up and down. We eventually grew accustomed to falling asleep to the accompaniment of squeaks and scrapes.

Another issue was privacy. Our kitchen and living room windows looked, not only over the water wheel, but also directly into the printing machine exhibit room on the second floor of the Gallician Mill. Museum visitors often paused to watch us having lunch, only a few metres away. Of course, having seen those visitors pulling levers and operating other impenetrable machinery, we couldn’t resist visiting the museum ourselves.

As advertised, visitors can make their own paper there. On the ground floor, the water wheel drives a crude cam that lifts and drops three meter long wooden hammers. The crashing noise dominates the space, as old strips of linen are smashed into a fine pulp, suspended in water. The suspension can then be deposited onto filters by hand, creating a thin layer that dries into paper. Visitors are invited to perform the filtration step, and it turned out that even a three year-old can manage it.

The rest of the museum is devoted to all aspects of printing — casting of type, printing presses, linotype machines, and even a somewhat poky display on the history of writing systems. The best bits are those directly connected to activites historically performed in Basel, which are well worth the entrance price.

Less than three weeks after we arrived, the boys turned three. Their grandparents came down to celebrate, bringing some especially appreciated birthday presents: a drill and a circular saw. These kept our would-be tradesmen busy for hours.

Meanwhile, we were spending our days viewing potential permanent apartments. Most rental contracts in Switzerland have a three month notice period from both sides. This means that good apartments are often advertised three months before they become available. To make matters worse, it is conventional for all Swiss rental contracts to begin and end on the first and last day of the month respectively. When we pointed out to one agent that this meant movers had nowhere to stay on the last night of the month, she replied “Yes, that can be a problem”. We remain flummoxed by this apparent collective stupidity. Either you pay double rent for a whole month, or compete with everyone else who is moving that month for transport services such as removalists and rental trucks on the first day of the month, and find somewhere to store all your goods for a single night on the last. It seems informal work-arounds are commonly agreed between tenants and landlords, but the official rules are rather impractical.

We looked at a handful of underwhelming apartments that were empty and available immediately. Some of them had been vacant for months, and one even had graffiti on its street face. It seems Swiss landlords have a fixed rent in mind, and if no-one is willing to pay that amount, they simply wait. The idea of lowering the rent to bring it into line with demand apparently never occurs to them.

On the road to despair, we finally found an apartment that had every feature on our original wish list; it was a spacious, light apartment overlooking the Rhine river in the more lively area of Kleinbasel (the part of Basel on the north-east side of the river). But the previous tenants were still there, and would be until December 1st, almost three months later. Worse, the landlord wanted to repaint the walls and repolish the floors, which would take more time. And it is also not customary to begin a rental contract on January 1st (for reasons we can only guess at), so it looked like we would have to spend more than four months in temporary accommodation.

Luckily, the landlord agreed not to renovate and we signed up for a December 1st start. The landlord of our temporary apartment also agreed to extend our lease until then. So while the wait would be longer than we had hoped, at least we knew where we would be living in Basel.

Another fountain by Alexander Zschokke, this one commemorates Johann Rudolf Wettstein, who is credited with negotiating the recognition of Switzerland’s independence from the Holy Roman Empire in 1648. It was installed in 1955, although allegedly it was planned for the 500th anniversary in 1892 of the union of Grossbasel (on the south-west side of the river) and Kleinbasel (on the other). The story goes that fund-raising yielded less than 10% of the needed capital, so it took a further 62 years for enough compound interest to accumulate.

We’d been told about the higher cost of living in Switzerland, and even that meat was especially expensive. Perhaps the 20 Franc (A$24) per kilo import duty on meat should have raised our expectations too — we assumed this was essentially punitive. But it was still a strange feeling to stand at the supermarket fridge and see slim packets containing single chicken breasts selling for 38 Francs (A$46) per kilo. The cheapest meat available in the main supermarkets was turkey breast, a mere 34 Francs per kilo. Lamb chops were a staggering 65 Francs (A$78) per kilo. Indeed, most of the lamb here is imported from Australia or New Zealand. To avoid terrifying the customers too badly, the fresh meats are labelled with costs per 100g.

Given these prices, there’s a strong incentive to seek alternative sources, and we knew about the local habit of shopping just across the French border.

© Gveret Tered
Source: Wikimedia Commons under GFDL

We decided to try it out — after all, lamb would only have to be below 45 Francs per kilo to make it worthwhile paying the import duties. And there are always duty-free quantities for personal use, even if they are rather limited.

St-Louis in France is 3km northwest of Basel, but is more like a suburb than a separate township. The urban environment stretches right up to and through the border without a break. However, there is a notable difference in the housing on either side. On the Swiss side, the regular rows of well-maintained rectilinear apartment blocks project a sense of reserve and conservatism. On the French side, the houses have a rural, friendly character and are noticeably more rundown. It is as if you have stepped from a densely packed German city straight into a French countryside village.

Not everything is smaller in St-Louis though. The supermarkets are massive, bigger than anything in Basel itself. The cheaper cost of land, combined with the steady stream of Swiss border-hopping shoppers, has bloated them out of all proportion to their surroundings. And the prices are indeed lower. We have taken to doing at least one large shop per month across the border, in either France or Germany (the supermarkets in Weil Am Rhein turn out to be closer and cheaper, and people speak German which cuts down on the daily language-switch churn).

Also in Weil Am Rhein is a swimming centre called Laguna Badeland, just 5 minutes’ drive from the Paper Museum. With summer fading fast, we took the boys for a swim there soon after arriving. It was only when we reached the German border that we realised we had forgotten to pack our passports along with the swimming gear. We went back for them; the thought of being refused re-entry to Switzerland, with nothing but our wet swimming costumes on hand, was rather disturbing. It was a reminder that, while the borders are trivial to cross, doing so can have significant consequences.

Once at the pool, we found that they had an interesting new rule. Board shorts, in fact any bathing pants that weren’t skin tight, were prohibited. Allegedly the additional fabric in such garments results in too much dirt being deposited in, and to much water being withdrawn from, the baths. We’re sure it has nothing to do with the fact that the people who wear such costumes tend to be either young, rowdy males or observant, Muslim females (the web page on the new rule makes clear that the rule also applies to “bathing garments of other cultures”). Mark had to leave a 10 Euro deposit to borrow the least stylish pair of tight bathing shorts imaginable, as his swim shorts were deemed slightly baggier than his skin.

In addition to numerous pools and spas, Bade Laguna have three giant slides, including one called the Black Hole that is entirely dark in some twisting and dropping sections. Given how eager Wiki and Loxon were to test these, we were forced to surrender ourselves to them as well. But at least we had someone to cling onto in the dark when the terror took hold, even if they were only three years old.

Meanwhile, we had found two childcare places for the boys at a well-recommended centre. The centre is inside a former 15th century Carthusian monastry which was converted into an orphanage in 1667. The original medieval wall surrounds expansive grounds that include a church, a school, a playground, a climbing wall and an enclosure for farm animals. Basel’s cathedral, just across the river, is clearly visible from most parts of the grounds. They have goats and pigs, which the children are allowed to feed and pet. The whole place is such a wonderful change from the artificial, hyper-modern environment of the childcare centre in the CBD where the boys went in Sydney.

There is also a corresponding absence of bureaucracy, with so many fewer forms and rules that one starts to think something must be wrong. There are no parent’s sign-in sheets, no accident report forms for trivial scrapes, no detailed step-by-step hygiene instructions for taking your child to the toilet. Common sense and casual conversation prevail. Childcare workers in Sydney spend so much of their attention on satisfying the regulations of the Department of Community Services (DOCS) that it must surely detract from the attention they pay to the children. Here in Switzerland there simply isn’t the obsession with legal liability that there is in Australia. Perhaps this has terrible consequences if your child is involved in neglect or abuse. But it is amazingly refreshing to drop your child off with a chat, rather than a half dozen signatures. And as for the pigs in the yard, DOCS officials would probably have a heart attack.

The Mittlere Brücke (middle bridge) was the first bridge over the Rhine anywhere when it was built in 1226, and provided a useful route for pilgrims from Germany heading to Rome. Back then, only half was of stone. The southern half, crossing the deepest and fastest part of the channel, was wooden. It remained that way until 1903, and even supported a line of the earliest trams. The wholly stone replacement was completed in 1905, and today is a centrepiece of the beautiful old city.

Slowly we reconstituted the paraphernalia of life. We had been living out of our suitcases for eight weeks when the Rhine barge bearing our container chugged into Basel. Because our permanent flat wasn’t available for another two months, we couldn’t take delivery of all our goods. But we managed to convince the moving company to let us extract some boxes as they emptied the transport container into a storage one (pictured at right). We would be moving these extra boxes to the new apartment ourselves, so we didn’t want to take too many. But the weather was already turning cold, and we had only summer clothes with us.

It was a rather intense hour as the packers rapidly transferred the boxes while we tried to decipher obscure labels and to guess which ones would have the items we needed most. Luckily we ended up with a few warmer clothes, some extra shoes and some additional toys. Then the storage container was sealed up; all our other possessions were locked away for a further two months.

Though a car is unnecessary in Basel itself, we decided that it would be useful to have one, at the very least to visit relatives in Germany. Mark had been so impressed by the European diesel wagon we had rented, that he convinced Marion to buy one: a Passat Variant with all-wheel drive and a diesel engine that uses just 5.9l/100km on the highway (40 miles per gallon in the old units). We found a 15-month-old demonstration model on the internet, being sold by a dealership in Diepoldsau (that’s on the opposite side of Switzerland, a whole 2 hours drive away).

© Thomas doerfer

Source: Wikimedia Commons under GFDL

Car registration in Switzerland is attached to owners, rather than to cars, so it can’t be passed on with the car when it is sold. As a result, we had to order number plates from Basel city canton and then post them to Diepoldsau to be affixed to the car.

It also appears the Swiss normally pay cash for their cars, tens of thousands of Francs in cash. We called the bank to ask whether we could withdraw such a large amount in one go, and if any pre-arrangement would be needed. The bank’s staff chuckled — unless we were wanting more than a quarter million, we could just walk into any branch. The Swiss it seems like cash, the ultimate in banking secrecy, even if it means carrying the median annual wage around in your pocket. So it was that Mark walked down to meet the dealer when he came to deliver the car with the equivalent of over A$40,000 in large notes stacked inside his jacket. He was, needless to say, happy that there were plenty of people about on the street.

Also during this time we had our first holiday visitors. Mark’s uncle Nick and aunty Sue dropped in during a research trip to the Mannheim area, where they were tracking down some Lauer family ancestors. They had also rented a modern European diesel car, this one a Citroën C4. It came equipped with a satellite navigation system whose German voice instructions could not be turned off, nor switched to English. Nick and Sue had no choice but to drive on as the German voice became more and more exasperated with their failure to heed its directions. But at least they managed to find Basel.

We also took the last chance for the year to ride on the Ysebähnli am Rhy (Swiss German for Klein Eisenbahn am Rhein, or little railway on the Rhine). This is a model train just outside Basel whose scaled down locomotives have true steam engines, complete with coal fuel. Kids, and over-excited adults, can ride the loop for a small fee.

The weather was beginning to cool, prompting us to begin toilet training Wiki and Loxon in earnest — postponing it even longer would likely have meant dealing with toileting accidents on snow-covered footpaths in freezing temperatures. So we bought an abundant supply of underpants and posted a sticker chart in the bathroom: every successful toilet visit was rewarded with a sticker. When the excitement potential of stickers inevitably waned, watching a short video of Der kleine Maulwurf became the reward. Since we have no television, such videos continued to provide strong motivation throughout the process.

For those who have never toilet-trained a child, it is difficult to imagine the quantity of dirty laundry that a pair of three-year-olds can produce in the process of trial and error. The volumes are staggering, about one full load per day, seven days a week. The shared laundry facilities in our temporary apartment consisted of one middle-sized washing machine and one tepid dryer, in a tiny room in the cellar. Unusually for Swiss apartments, there was no laundry booking chart; we competed for use of the appliances with four other apartments, plus the popular Paper Mill Cafe who washed their table cloths and napkins there, on a first-come first-served basis. This was a rather challenging period, and regular success — enough to notice diminished laundry volumes — took about six weeks. We are still completing the exercise, six months later, although thankfully accidents have become relatively rare.

This fountain is paired with a nearby birdbath, making the crow look as if he is about to flit over to it. It stands beside a kiosk on Aeschenplatz, an extended round-about with tram lines weaving in from all directions. The live birds that make use of the bath simply add to the commuter hubbub. The crow was made by the Swiss artist Armand Petersen in 1925.

We waited for our apartment to become available, as it grew colder still. The first snow fell at the end of October and, though it melted almost instantly in Basel itself, it remained visible on the surrounding hills. Before this though, came the Basel Herbstmesse (autumn fair), the first of the many festivals and events that crowd the calendar here.

For a couple of weeks beforehand we had watched a gigantic lilac ferris wheel being pieced together beside the cathedral. The parts arrived in lilac semi-trailers that crossed the Wettstein bridge at regular intervals. Since all this was visible en-route to the childcare, and even from the windows of the childcare, Wiki and Loxon were telling us how many times they would ride it long before it was even open.

Soon every public space in Basel filled up with rides and stalls, and the crowds milled along the narrow channels that were left. The stalls displayed all manner of crafts, food, jewellery, clothing, puzzles and even furniture. There were large model landscapes in which hundreds of woven elf dolls cavorted. There were circus-style throwing games, tests of strength and fortune tellers. Music from the carousels mingled in the streets, which, relatively speaking, were now the open spaces. And then there were the rides: bumper-cars, spinning arms, circular trains, miniature ferris wheels whose carriages were pumpkins, seats swinging on chains, and towering above everything that lilac ferris wheel. Wiki and Loxon stumbled from one square to the next with wide eyes.

The Herbstmesse has taken place every year since 1471, when the trade fair privilege was granted by Emperor Friedrich III. There is a wondrous double-decker carousel that is erected each year in Petersplatz — it is at least 50 years old. Beautifully adorned with painted wooden reliefs, it has turned brass railings, majestic white stallions and garden seats of stained wood swinging on chains. If you look closely at the picture to the right, you’ll see Wiki and Loxon leading a dazed Mark down its staircase.

Although most of the games of skill are typical of those at any circus, there was one distinctive enough that we couldn’t resist having a go. It comprised a large pond with a rotating frame of metal lilies, onto which one was supposed to send leaping frogs. For a couple of Francs, each entrant received three frogs to be placed on swivelling catapults. A blow of a hammer would then send the frogs hurtling into the air. If you managed to land your frog on a lily, you got a prize, although much more often the frogs ended up taking a dip.

As can be seen from his expression below, Mark was reluctant to be involved in such trivial activities, but Wiki and Loxon’s enthusiasm forced him to assist in multiple attempts. Sometimes parenting can be such a trying experience, but one must make sacrifices for the little ones, of course.

This fountain stands in the grounds of the Waisenhaus, where Wiki and Loxon attend childcare. The figure represents Caritas, the personification of everyday love, which is a fitting subject both for the orphanage in which it was first constructed and for the modern school and childcare which the orphanage has become. It was built by Balthasar Hüglin in 1677, about a decade after the orphanage was established from the medieval monastry.

In the late afternoon, the children depicted with Caritas are often replicated on the ground around the fountain by living infants: the youngest section of the childcare waiting to be collected by their parents.

Finally the time came to move into our permanent apartment. Luckily for us, December 1st was a Monday. This meant that the handover inspection from the previous tenant couldn’t occur on the last day of their tenancy, a Sunday, and the handover was done on Friday evening instead. This gave us the whole weekend to move in.

In another fortuitous piece of timing, Mark’s father was in Austria (accompanying Susannah, Mark’s sister, to a ski school in Leogang) at around this time and he was able to come to stay with us beginning a couple of days before the move. Marion’s parents also came down from Ludwigsburg for the weekend. The parental assistance from both sides was very much appreciated.

A complex plan was hatched to move all our belongings from the temporary apartment, clean up there for handover, receive the container from Australia (including such luxuries as our own beds to sleep in) at the new apartment and make sure the twins didn’t get maimed under-foot in the bustle, or otherwise injure themselves in the new environment.

One hiccup came three days before the move when the internet service to our temporary apartment was suspended. It turned out that the previous bill hadn’t been paid on time, and though it was now paid the ISP wasn’t going to reconnect until after we moved out. Ordinarily this would be a minor nuisance. But with so much to organise around the move, it was a serious handicap. For example, we were using Mobility to rent a van for some of the move and we needed to modify our booking over the internet. We were also planning to use internet banking to pay the bond on the new apartment: if the bond wasn’t paid on time, we would be homeless until it was.

In Basel, and in many parts of older Europe, furniture can only be brought into the upper levels of many houses directly from the outside, because the stairwells are too narrow. In Amsterdam, the protruding beams on its terrace houses are famous for this purpose. The modern solution is a furniture lift, a clever device that folds out from a trailer to form a telescopic vertical conveyor belt. The removalists erected this against our fifth floor balcony in a matter of minutes, and a stream of boxes began flowing up the lift and into our lounge room, where Mark frantically tried to work out where everything should go.

When you rent an apartment in Switzerland, you are supposed to bring your own lamps. Each room has a hole in the ceiling with two wires protruding from it. Needless to say, we hadn’t brought our own light fittings with us from Australia, so thankfully Marion’s father had a few spare light bulb sockets which he lent us until we could buy appropriate lamps. Otherwise we would have been stumbling around a dark unfamiliar apartment soon after dusk.

There’s something unnerving about having a pair of exposed wires, potentially carrying 230V, hanging above your head while moving tall items of furniture around. The Swiss light switches, simple toggle buttons from which it is impossible to know whether they are on or off, don’t help. The feeling is exacerbated by having two hyper-stimulated three-year-olds running about opening boxes, potentially finding metal curtain rods. No-one was electrocuted, but it did make for a certain level of, well, high tension.

Although we had been living mostly from suitcases for four months, we had still accumulated a couple of cubic metres of additional clothing, furniture and toys. This, combined with substantially more than one hundred boxes from the container, spilled into the generous space of the new apartment with nowhere to go. In Australia, our house has numerous shelves, cupboards and wardrobes; the new apartment, a modernist style space bounded by sheer white walls and glass sliding doors, has relatively few. So until we could buy some storage furniture, Mark’s father’s bed in the guest room was literally surrounded by high walls of removalist boxes.

The apartment came with a 5cm thick folder of instructions and rules. Since we weren’t given this until a few days after moving in, we were unaware of the detailed requirements for moving day, such as explicitly instructing the removalists to be careful of the parquetry — yes, this is written in the house rules.

Amongst other regulations are airing your apartment three times per day for fifteen minutes, regularly wet-wiping the parquetry with the cloth provided (indeed, a plastic envelope in the folder contained a soft mesh cloth), cleaning the bathtub only with soap and a soft brush, and washing your section of the cellar at least once per year. The long list of things that are forbidden includes washing pets in the garden, playing music with your windows open, filling or emptying the bathtub after 10pm, shaking out table cloths from the balconies, or hanging up laundry on the balcony facing the Rhine river. At least we now have our own washing machine, even if there are limits on what time of day we can use it. We were also required to order and pay for the engraved steel name plates for our mailbox and doorbell, to be made in the specified font and character size, and fitting the spaces allocated.

It is also forbidden to carry any kind of furniture in the lift, which technically means you have to hire a five-story furniture lift whenever you buy a new bookshelf or armchair. We unilaterally decided that this rule didn’t apply to still-in-the-box flat-packed furniture, and proceeded to buy almost everything we needed from Ikea. On one trip, Mark and his father packed the Passat wagon so full that there was barely space left to move the gear lever. The Ikea in Pratteln also sports the globally recognisable ball room, which meant at least some of us (pictured at left) were happy to be out furniture shopping.

Jean Tinguely, a Swiss sculptor and painter, grew up in Basel and has his own museum here on the banks of the Rhine. His works are mostly mechanical devices, using moving parts to generate their impact. Perhaps the most well-known, at least to English speakers, is the Stravinsky Fountain beside the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

It is difficult to capture the motion of his sculptures in stills, but in winter the ice forming on the Tinguely Fountain (built in 1977 in front of Basel’s theatre complex) provides a trace of movements past. Perhaps video is a better medium. Each statue in the pool has its own name, and in the coldest periods some of them become covered in towers of solid ice.

In the English-speaking world, Santa Claus comes on Christmas eve and sneaks into your house alone through the chimney. Although Santiglaus shares the red suit and gift-giving traits, he comes here on December 6th and is accompanied by a dour assistant called the Schmutzli. In the distant past, the Schmutzli was responsible for punishing those children who had been bad, but after a couple of centuries of failing to find a single bad child, he took over the job of handing out the presents to the good ones. The boys were excited to meet both of these reclusive characters at a special lunch at the Zoo.

After overcoming initial suspicions, they collected their presents, which turned out to be plastic figures of the Incredible Hulk riding motor-trikes (these were chosen by the event organisers, not the parents). Loxon later determined the best use for these ugly effigies, namely cracking peanuts open, and they were soon dubbed “the nutcrackers”. It seems that in Basel at least, having yielded his gift-giving role to the Schmutzli, Santiglaus has found other activities to occupy himself, including canoeing and water-skiing, as we discovered from our windows on the afternoon of December 6th.

Sabine, Edgar and Lea visited us on our second weekend in the new apartment to check out our views over the Rhine. The panorama is almost its own Wimmelbuch (a children’s picture book whose pages are filled with busy activity that can take hours to absorb, such as those by German artist Rotraut Susanne Berner; wimmeln means to teem or swarm). Freight barges and cruise boats ply the river, and must dodge the traversing ferries. On the far side, a helicopter lands on the roof of the hospital and a tram line intersects with the bus route that runs over the Johanniter Brücke. The bridge is also populated with ambulances from the hospital and local car, van and bike traffic. When the wind blows from the South, planes taking off from the airport rise into the sky beyond the cranes working on the new hospital building. And one of Basel’s two fire boats docks at a wharf on the opposite bank. Also on the river are police boats and solar ferries from the Drei-Länder-Eck (three country corner), and below our balcony people stroll or rollerblade along the promenade above the water’s edge. The procession is never-ending. Do come and visit some time to have a look for yourself.

As Mark’s father was staying with us in December, Marion and Mark took the chance to go out for some evening entertainment, getting tickets to one of Mark’s favourite shows of all time, The Blue Man Group. Seeing it translated into German only enhanced its brand of hyper-novelty, underscoring the incisive theme of information overload. If you get the chance to see it, go.