Leapfroggin'n central Europe-La Suisse

Well another evening of "How to make 20 recipes of how to make keso/chicken fillet" is the tip as to where I've been for 40 minutes this evening.
Grunters and munters...

Anyway, just back from a wee trip to Basel in Switzerland. Always nice to get a wee weekend trip away on official spy business ( I wonder if this gets picked up by CIA covert operations if I write Spy? hmm, lets try Bin Ladin! This blog is now being probably read by an oversizer eating a muffin and donut the size of Switzerland in a hidden Cia Covert Operations server farm.Cool!).
Calm down fatboy Slim, I was just over watching a match. I'm not very conspicuous and after the game was herded into the Vip room , meeting up with a bunch of ex-scottish pats who sponsored the entire Basel Junior squad. Good times indeed.

As I was on official business I did laugh when my first flight had me with a window seat with a pleasant view of a red SAS jet engine that had enough noise and vibration to remind you what thrust was about. It's always a wee bit embarrassing getting "that" seat 'cos unlike getting a Justnu 2'an ticket on the X2000 where you mix it up with the suits, "That" seat just lets everybody know they just about had to pay you to accept the ticket.
So, if you ever get seat 32 D, wear earplugs and buy dark glasses.Don't worry though, even if you have screaming babys around you wont hear them.
Luckily Gbg to Copenhagen is only a 25 minute flight so it was over soon enough. But I ask you, whats all this nonsense about everything has to be removed from in front of your seat, you can't keep your jacket, all electronic items off especially telephones. I cannot understand how my minidisk is gonna effect the flight, is it another terrorist idea that we may trigger the bombs in all the shoes and belts that got thru the scanner?And of course we still get to see where the exits are, just in case we crash...and if we survive the crash (cos that happens often) and just out of pure luck land in the water we still have a chance of survival by calmly putting on the life vest NOT forgetting the fact that if it doesn't actually fill with air well you pull the chord you can still manually blow it up yourself...now that scenario I would love to see...false hope u see, cos basically I reckon your fucked and I'd rather be listening to Pink Floyd "Us and Them" and trying to phone up somebody to tell them how Stoopid they really r, than clearing the lungs just in case the vest doesn't expand..in fact, sod that I'd have to be charged for lighting up a cigarette on a plane, a serious offence even in the toilets! I love that, when they say,
"And SAS would just like to remind you that all SAS flights are non-smoking.And that includes the toilet"...Its almost tempting to try and get away with a wee smoke in the bog to see if anyway would notice...like the whole plane would notice!!!!

Anyway, my luck was to change on the flight from Copenhagen to Basel. I sat with a delightful young woman who wanted to become an actress and who did contemporary dancing. The conversation I'm sure would have flowed better if it were for just two small hiccups.
1.The screaming baby sitting in the seat straight behind us...an "öron barn" I believe...
2.She was Danish. I think I at the last count I was up to around 5o with "sorry, didn't quite understand that last sentence"...

Ah but what the hell, here we go, back to the land of my birth with a bit of Swiss German mixed in.As already mentioned elsewhere I hadn't been in Basel since '85 and that was for the Rolling Stones.
First thing I noticed was the passion of using the horn.Everybody blasts their car horns at the slightest. The trip wasn't long but the taxi driver must have been in "Anger Management"...

Hotel was bang in the Centre and I met up with the team manager in the bar of course. Down to business straight away.Main Observation was that every male under or around thirty had a gold earring in their right ear..hmm
Switzerland is a country of cliches in a sense. Well, Basel was anyway. It felt like every third shop was selling Davidoff cigars , Mont Blanc pens and exquisite lighters. And the only shops that out numbered these were the watch shops. Swiss watches are of course famous but we're talking watches that you have never heard of before,special edition pens and watches with diamonds and of course a country of Haute couture . To see Astons, Maseratis and other top quality cars just adds to the experience and yet its perfectly normal in Switzerland and dare I say expected. I had forgotten about this as I hadn't been there for so long.

The Swedish kronor is weak at the moment so brunch was hitting the 120 mark for not so very much and I have to say the best meal of the day was the hotel breakfast which was a buffet of smoked salmon, viande seche , smoked ham and other trimmings. That kept us at the breakfast table for several hours and if you wanted sparkling wine you could have that as well. Very Swiss and very civilised, a big difference to the Skandic equivalent of meatballs, prins korv, bacon and scrambled egg and of course Calles Kaviar ( although many of those have been finished as well..)

We took a long walk around the city and managed to not only get lost but nearly missed the match.Not surprisingly we ended up at Basel zoo...Of course another irony are the trams. Coming from the rather mix and match of the trams of Gbg with that exclusive stench they sometimes carry we marvelled at just how amazing spotless the trams were. Once again, very Swiss.

Saturday ended up a long day and we never moved away from the bar, especially having been given the most potent Irish Coffees of all time. 101 francs later and it was time to hit the sack.
I dreamt I woke up at 02.24 in the morning from somebody that claimed to know me but as I was in Switzerland I put it down to the coffee..

Sunday was a 3 hour breakfast and CNN. Flight home was as interesting as this time I sat next to a professors wife from Uppsala and the conversation ended up on my latest reading material, "The essential Dalai Lama..." no comment required.

It's always quiet and strange to return to an empty pad after such weekend adventures in other cultures , but with a leap frog to Serbia in a couple of weeks, and Marseilles after that I'm just praying I don't get seat 32D and that the wains manage to be sat far away.Unless of course we're booked on Air Baltic or some Russian flight were smoking, drinking and having a telephone switched on is promoted...

áyé