Thursday April 22, 2010

I had most of another day in Basel, and I was kind of museumed out, so I wandered around some of the shopping areas, bought some medicine, and bought some chocolate.

The city is full of ‘apotheke’ shops, that is, apothecaries a.k.a. pharmacies or chemists. In the US, you can buy aspirin and other over-the-counter medicines off the shelf in grocery stores and convenience stores, no big deal. But apparently in Europe, even for stuff that doesn’t require a prescription they make you go to the apothecary and ask for it. All of their products are behind-the-counter. Go figure.

I found several watch stores. The Swiss are famous for their watches, but mostly they were so expensive that I decided I would have to appreciate them without actually buying one. They also sell Swatch and several of the other Swiss brands here in the US, so it was kind of pointless to buy one of those.

Oddly, the grocery store I went to sold Swiss army knives off the shelf, but you can also buy those exact brands and products here, so I didn’t get one of those either.

The chocolate was a little different. The selection of interesting chocolate at Target has even become impressive here, so I wasn’t sure what to buy. But, the Migros grocery store had some very interesting flavors that I’d never seen before: pear and caramel, lemon and pepper. And of course plain ol’ dark. So I bought a bunch of those to bring home and share, and I got Stephen and Melissa a huge sampler bag of bite-sized bars as a thank-you gift.

The three of us had pizza for dinner, and I finished packing. At this point the steady stream of e-mails had stopped, as everything had either already happened or could wait until I got back to the office on Monday.

Finally Stephen went with me to the train station so I could catch the overnight train back to Utrecht.

The train had a bunch of compartments with bunks that fold down out of the wall. I signed up for a compartment with up to four people because I had my huge suitcase. The compartments can sleep six if you buy the cheapest ticket. There were three of us in this one compartment as it turned out. There was me, plus a woman who had grown up in South Africa and was weighing the different options of where to go to university, plus a man a bit younger than me who was a sci-fi fan. We chatted for an hour or so, exchanged book recommendations, looked things up on my Kindle, then opened the bunks and went to sleep. More or less on the sleep. The train is kind of bumpy so I didn’t get much sleep. We went through many cities overnight, so the trip took about ten hours total, and we were half an hour late getting to Utrecht.