Goodbye Basel

We left Basel for Zurich on Monday after a tearful farewell to the Nissens with whom we feel more bonded than ever. The day before we gathered with almost the entire clan to celebrate what seems to be Catherine's successful neck surgery. Zurich is about an hour’s train ride east. The two cities sit in relationship to each other much like Edinburgh and Glasgow, except the contrast is not so dramatic. For though Basel is as prim as Edinburgh, Zurich doesn’t have the working man feel of Glasgow. I haven’t been able to observe too much about the SWwiss, but when did that ever discourage me from making sweeping generalizatiolns? In fact, how can you make truily sweeping generalizations when you’ve got hard data to back you up? They seem to me a curious combination of things. The smoking bans that obtain in Italy and the US have not penetrated Switzerland, and a lot of people sit around after work at the outdoor cafes smoking. They seem a little sun-shy. Most of the cafes in Basel and Lausanne are on the afternoon-shady side of the street. They have sophisticated sweet teeth, and over and over again – that is, maybe twice – I saw otherwise unposted matrons brought up short by displays of sacher tortes, bonbons, mousses, in shop windows. The old guard in Basel hold their noses at a certain tilt, as thought alert for some offensive whiff to report to the canton authorities. The Swiss have an ability to look icily disapproving that would put an English lord to shame. The country continues to look to my eyes like a model train set. Even the construction machinery is kept spanking clean, and the names on factories and malls and stations look as though they’d been invented by some toy company functionary: SPU, Kronin, HAFF, etc. The tidiness of things accentuates this impression, and for a country bankrolled by such criminal entities as international banks and pharmaceutical companies, it’s remarkably civil. Debbie finds the cultural of efficiency and punctuality rather soothing. I find it conducive to work: inspiring, even, but then I always get a lot of vaunted ideas wherever I don’t speak the language, maybe because it confers on me a sort of uniqueness. But then it’s also the influence of our dear and cultivated friends the Nissens who have unaccountably befriended us Philistines.