Wednesday April 21, 2010

I had most of the morning to sleep in and recover, then I went into town to do something. I took a tram to the Beyeler museum on the other end of Basel. Now, Basel isn’t a really big town, but they have an extensive public transit system: 15 or more tram lines, countless buses, trains to everywhere in Switzerland and beyond. Cars are really not a good way to get around there, which really makes Europe as a whole very tourist-friendly. I was impressed. In contrast, the bus system here in Charleston suffers from traffic and scheduling problems that make it very frustrating to use, but I don’t think we could switch easily to the tram system. It requires too much additional expensive infrastructure. Anyway, Americans tend to obsess with the freedoms of cars while ignoring the burdens. Europeans have the opposite problem: They go hop on a train freely at a whim, but every so often the workers go on strike (as was the case for the cleaning staff at the Amsterdam train station while I was there) and bad things happen.

Back to the museum: The Beyeler museum had an extensive temporary exhibit of paintings by Henri Rousseau. I liked most of them, but a good many had the same flatness that I disliked in Gauguin but not as bad. He has some great forest and jungle scenes which he’s most famous for. They had several of Giacometti’s sculptures. He’s famous for rough, almost faceted stick figure sculptures with big feet.

They also had a Black Box movie exhibit, where you sit in this tiny portable theater and watch a loop of ten minute short movies. I liked the one about the taxidermist. The one about the cave paintings was aggravating because as best I could tell, the story being told by the speaking narrator about discovering the ancient paintings had nothing whatsoever to do with the cartoony and clearly modern drawings of plants that appeared on the screen. The one where the girls got dressed up for a casting call, then destroyed the dressing room, well, it was just plain weird.

I saw two notable oddities while out about town: A bagpipe shop near the Beyeler museum, and an accordion shop close to Stephen’s apartment. The accordion shop makes a lot of sense, because a lot of traditional European folk music uses accordions. But the bagpipe shop seems a bit odd. I’d certainly expect it in the British Isles, but not Switzerland.

That evening, Stephen grilled dinner out on the porch, which was really good. We watched the news, and I checked e-mail as usual. The air space was mostly open again, and flights were slowly returning to normal. At this point, the real problem was the backlog: There were thousands of people who had been stuck in some other country for days, and the airlines, trains, and ferries were overwhelmed squeezing them in with the regular traffic that was starting to pick up again.