Visiting Basel (Switzerland) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
My husband Laurent and I visited Basel, Switzerland, because it is part of the cultural region that encompasses Alsace, France and the Baden-Würtemberg region in Germany where we lived.
Switzerland is part of the Schengen Area, which allows for the free flow of travelers once you are inside Europe’s borders. However, travelers and Swiss residents alike must post a Swiss vignette in their car windshield to prove that they have contributed to the upkeep of mountainous roads. The vignette costs 40 Swiss Francs and is a pricey amount to put on top of your lunch outing, but the views are worth it.
Basel is Switzerland’s third largest city after Zurich and Geneva. Bridges into the city center tower over the rolling Rhine River below that flows to Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Basel’s port, chemical and pharmaceutical companies, and banks are its main industries.
Bank offices surround the Market Plaza downtown and showcase the Rathaus. The Rathaus, city hall, is very German, being built in red stone with murals painted on it. German is the language of Basel. French, Italian, and Romansch (a Latin language) are the other three official languages of Switzerland. However, if you do not speak German, English is the preferred lingua franca of Basel.
We ate in a restaurant directly opposite the Rathaus. I dined like a local. I ordered fried cervelat sausage, grated and fried rösti potatoes, salad, and hefeweizen, wheat beer. Laurent ate freshly harvested Alpine mussels.
Cervelat is made of beef, bacon, and pork rind. The Swiss consider it one of their national dishes. The rösti poatatoes, fried in duck fat, are beloved by German Swiss, but not by French Swiss. The French Swiss eat their sliced potatoes baked with milk, crème fraiche, butter, and gruyère cheese. I think both taste good and make the French Swiss potatoes in winter.
Gruyère cheese, by the way, is French Swiss cheese. It has no holes in it. Emmenthal, the German Swiss cheese, has holes in it. Emmenthal is what is known as Swiss cheese in the United States.
Basel’s most famous Swiss export, though, is Roger Federer, the seven-time Wimbledon champion and Rolex wearer.
The University of Basel, Switzerland’s oldest university founded in 1460, has produced some famous alumni as well. Among the alumni are Carl Jung (1875 – 1961), the psychiatrist who founded analytical psychiatry, and Leonhard Euler (1707 – 1783), the mathematician and physicist, who created modern mathematical notation.
Basel invites multiple visits especially as the auto vignette is good for one year. According to Switzerland – Culture Smart! The Essential Guide to Customs and Culture by Kendall Maycock, there are 27,000 restaurants in Switzerland, which makes this densely populated Alpine country worth the entry fee for lunch choices.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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| Laurent Paget Photography |
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| Laurent Paget Photography |
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