Basel

Today Emilie, her friend Nina, and I drove up to Basel to see the Christmas market. This was my first visit to the city, which is a couple of hours north of Lausanne near the French and German borders.

The Christmas market was very nice, but on a much smaller scale and far more expensive than the ones we visited the week before in Vienna.










Here are some of the items that were on sale.

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In addition to exploring the Christmas market, we also walked around the city center a bit and visited the Basel Rathaus (city hall).

The Rathaus had some interesting statues and balconies, such as following:















We also visited Basel’s Münster (cathedral), which was built from 1,000 - 1,500 and apparently is still somewhat of a work in progress.

And here's a photo from the inside.

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We finished up our visit at the Foundation Beyeler, which was having a special exhibition on Austrian paintings from the 1900s. The exhibition was actually very timely, as we had just seen other works by the featured artists (namely Klimt and Schiele) during our visit to Vienna the weekend before.

The foundation is located just outside the city and has a nice, open feel to it. Even when you're inside, you have nice views given the large windows.