I am Basel, Switzerland.

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I am alive and well. Long time no hear.

And thus the trend continues, that I shall bad mouth a town-city as soon as I arrive in it.

Basel. It's big, it's expensive.

Good thing I have ditched the habit of converting everything into Polish zlotys.

Today I had a drink that came in a bottle, approx 3 dl -- wasn't freshly squeezed, wasn't some exotic berry, wasn't even organic, for 4.50 Francs. That comes out to about 4 bucks. That's like 15 zlotys! (ok, I did the conversion just this one time) And it wasnt even in the airport! I pretty much have to take out a mortage to eat a decent meal in this town.

So here's the story I have with Basel. I arrived here around noon today thinking I can find a hostel somewhere and sleep for one night, no big deal, 50 francs tops. But when I arrived and went to the tourist office, I was told that there's probably nothing within a 100 km radius for tonight because of some stupid fru fru art show that's going on. The lady looked for me on the computer though, she was nice. And she pulled up 2 rooms. One for over 400 Francs a night, and the other for a tiny bit less, but in Germany.

Hello. For 400 francs, I think I can just fly myself to London tonight, sleep there for TWO nights, and STILL have enough left over to pay for overpriced internet.


Well, that all worked out ok. Long story.

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Am I really that hard to please? Ok, maybe I don't want to hear the answer to that.

I went out to eat dinner today with my Basler Host from HospitalityClub (someone who was nice enough to host me, so last minute). I offered to pay for dinner, as I'm always up for a good meal... But food just seems so mediocre here in Basel. There are some cutsie restaurants by the water (the river Rhine) but they charge more than the cutsie restaurants by the water in Venice. And there was a Thailander restaurant that had waaaaay overpriced food, my friend Vorapat would be shaking his head if he's here seeing this. 5 Francs for a bowl of rice! You can buy a 20 pound sack for that amount!

Welll, we ended up at this Italian restaurant. The service was rather sourly and the food was, as I like to say now, ausreichend.

Man, I really wanted it to be a good dinner!

More later. Much more. I have almost 2 weeks to catch up on, and lots of pictures to share.

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