Five Things Basel Lets You Get Away With

Two years in Basel taught me that this city has a set of habits you would not get away with anywhere else. When people asked me at first how different life here was from life in Germany, I struggled to answer. The border is only a few kilometres away, the same Rhine runs through both places, and the language sounds familiar enough to fool you. Then I started keeping a list. These five things are what I came up with.

1. Swim home from the office, or to your lecture

The Rhine runs straight through the middle of Basel, and in summer it belongs to the swimmers. I have watched colleagues use a lunch break to float a stretch of the river and then sit back down at their desks. Students do the same on the way to class.

On any clear evening from spring onwards the banks fill up: grills, music, people sitting on the wall with their feet over the water. By midsummer there are hundreds of them, most carrying the same piece of kit — the Wickelfisch, a fish-shaped waterproof bag that keeps your clothes and phone dry while you drift. You wear it on your back, you look ridiculous, and nobody cares. That is the whole point.

2. Eat three meals in three countries before dinner

Basel sits in a corner where Switzerland, Germany and France touch. Shopping in one country before lunch and exploring another afterwards is not an expedition; it is a tram ride. Tram 8 will put you in Germany within minutes, Tram 11 takes you into France.

Which means the day can be planned around the map. Breakfast in Basel, lunch across one border, dinner across the other, and all of it inside a ten-kilometre radius. The meeting point of the three countries has a name — the Dreiländereck, the Three Countries Corner — and it is worth standing at for a moment, if only to watch a national border turn into a line on the ground.

3. Take most of a week off for Fasnacht

Basel's carnival is not the carnival I knew from Cologne. For the three loudest days of the year, ordinary people are spectators rather than participants. Nobody hands you a costume. You get up at three in the morning and queue in the dark to watch the Morgenstreich, the opening parade of lanterns and pipes that starts the whole thing.

The people in costume belong to a clique, and a clique rehearses all year — drums, piccolos, masks, the lot. Each group works for months so that seventy-two hours go right, and most of them barely sleep while it happens. So when a colleague disappears for nearly a week, nobody raises an eyebrow. Half of it is Fasnacht, and the other half is recovery. You can read more about what those days feel like, confetti and all, in my account of Fasnacht in Basel.

4. Speak a language that does not officially exist

Living this close to two borders leaves marks on the local dialect. Swiss-German here carries a good deal of French, so the standard way to say thank you very much is merci vilmal — half French, half German, entirely normal to everyone within the city limits.

Basel is also full of expats and people who arrived for a job and stayed for the river, which means English will carry you a long way. Between the dialect, the French, the German and the English, sentences get mixed and somehow everyone still understands everyone. If you want to make sense of the local sounds before you arrive, I collected some basic Swiss-German words to help you move around Basel.

While you are looking at the city's oddities, keep an eye out for the basilisk — the creature on the city's coat of arms, carved and painted on fountains and facades all over town. It has its own place in the local folklore, which I wrote about in Mythical Mondays.

5. Cross the river for the price of a coffee

Basel is two towns, really. Klein Basel on the right bank and Gross Basel on the left are joined by four bridges, and you can walk or take a tram across any of them. But there is a third way, and it is the one I still use when I have time to spare.

The four traditional wooden ferries are called Fähri. They hold a handful of people, they are driven by the current on a cable, and they get you to the other side in a couple of minutes. The fare is CHF 1.60 for an adult and CHF 0.80 for a child. It is the cheapest boat trip in Switzerland and quite possibly the most charming.

Vogel Gryff is one of the four, and its boarding point is easy to find on the bank. Stand there for a few minutes and you will see the rhythm of the city: commuters, schoolchildren, someone with a Wickelfisch, all queuing for a crossing that has not changed in centuries.

If you are only here for a weekend

Visitors can borrow most of these habits for a day or two. Swim if the weather is warm, ride a ferry for the price of a stamp, walk over to Germany for lunch. Fasnacht is the exception: it cannot be borrowed, only booked well in advance. If you plan to stay, here is a guide to hotels in the city.

What I love most is the least remarkable thing — sitting on the wall by the river as the sun goes down, watching the water move and the city slow. It costs nothing, it needs no ticket, and after two years it is still the reason I am happy to live here.