Basel: an hour in the rain

We made it into Switzerland without any fuss and even found the train station. Since Der Vater wasn't due in for another couple of hours, we decided to go exploring. After reaching the downtown area, however, we decided to part, because my Austrian kept on getting distracted by jewelry stores and I kept on getting distracted by neo-gothic churches. What can I say, except she's engaged and I'm American.

We arranged to meet in front of a certain jewelry store in an hour. I wandered a bit until I saw the Rathaus (town hall) which was looking very Swiss:



Then I found the Rhine:



And from that vantage point I could see where the Münster was suppose to be. So I headed for it.



But as you can see, a storm was also heading for it. And beat me. But before it got too wet I managed to snap a picture of the outside of this romanesque/gothic/protestant church:



And being Swiss it has to have a clock too:



The interior is quite the combination of the mentioned Romanesque and Gothic styles that fell victim to the iconoclasm of the Reformation. I love the chandeliers and the crypt (no picture, sorry). I also liked how bright it was inside for a church:



I stayed there as long as I could, until I had to leave in order not to offend my Austrian's penchant for punctuality. As it was still raining when we met up, we popped into a bookstore nearby to wait out the rain. I've been meaning to buy a Luther Bible not in fraktur. When I looked at a couple of places in Vienna, they only had Catholic Bibles or the Einheitsübersetzung (done jointly by Protestants and Catholics), which was sort of a "duh" moment. So, thinking to myself, "hey, Swissers can be Protestant" I checked out the Bibles. I was embarrassed to discover (or remember) that yes, there were many Protestant Bibles - translated by Zwingli. They did have two Luther editions. One with woodcuts by Dürer and the other a faithful transcription of the original manuscript (wacky spelling and all). Not that I'm opposed to either of those, but I was looking for a 10Euro Bible, not a 75Euro+ Bible. Seriously, where are the German Lutheran Gideons when you need them? Carrie Nation assures me that her Sweet Baboo can help me make my own side by side edition of the Luther and the Zwingli, so I may have to go that route. Especially when I realized that I won't be visiting any of the Protestant parts of Germany this time around. That made me shed a little tear in my heart.

It was still raining when had to leave to meet Der Vater, so we hurried to the train station and met him just as he got off the train. We had a little cake and then the Austrians took off for their hotel I went back to the station to catch my train to Strasbourg. I had to go to a special part of the station called "France" to catch my train to France. Apparently this was actually "France" and not "Switzerland" because the train was delayed. By hours. Fortunately it was not quite as severe as they predicted so I only had to wait about an hour. During this hours the rain stopped and the sun came out. C'est la vie.