Basel

On the 10th of December, I visited the city of Basel, near the German-Swiss border. The journey lasted around two and a half hours; we took a train from Lausanne to Bern and then from Bern to Berlin, only to get off at Basel SBB.

From there, we walked through the city centre and had lunch by the Rhine. We walked past the town hall, a building in red decorated with Christmas trees inside. We also saw the oldest university in Switzerland from the outside. The buildings reminded me a lot of Germany, as we were in a German-speaking canton and close to the border with Germany.

I spent the afternoon looking through the Kuntsmuseum, housing the oldest public art collection in the world. Before heading to the Christmas market, I bought a postcard and practised my German (saying hello, thank you, and bye).

We reached the Christmas market after the sun had set. Their stands sold everything from souvenirs to various foods and typical Christmas market products such as mulled wine. Fairy lights adorned the trees and wooden hut-like stalls, and I ended up sharing a Nutella crêpe with a friend. This was the last activity of the day, before heading to the trainstation to catch our first train, towards Bern. We then reached the Lausanne train station at around nine pm.