And so it begins!!!

SOOOOO, I'm here!! After 16 hours of traveling from San Diego (to Chicago, to London) to Basel, Switzerland I'm finally here!! Hooray!! Here is the first bit of information and pictures! I'm going to try to keep things up to date with what I'm up to over here and the many adventures that live becomes when you're in a foreign country!

First of all, it's SO true! Just about everyone speaks English! Not everyone can hold an intelligent conversation, though there are a good amount of people who can do that, but they all seem to be able to speak enough to get through whatever is happening at the moment and figure out what needs to happen! It's incredible! Now, just so people know, the official written language here is High German and the spoken language here is a Swiss German, so far from the high German that if all you speak is German you won't be able to understand more than a couple words of what they say. So already you know you're dealing with a relatively intelligent (haha or maybe not since they don't just speak what they read and write!) group of people for being able to use so fluidly two languages.

The sights are beautiful and rather normal at the same time. They have old historic buildings that are in perfect condition but they also have tons of graffiti and tons of wires everywhere for the trams which run off of electricity. Their public transportation systems are amazing! They have a combination of trams, which are mostly all you need, busses, which you use sometimes, and trains, which you use for long hauls. They're car traffic is really pretty light and it seems that most people either use the public transportation or their BICYCLES!!!! Bikes are the craziest things here!! At places there will literally be hundreds, or at least 1 hundred bikes locked up on the sidewalks (which are bigger than sidewalks in America). And back to the cars real quick, they stop for the pedestrian EVERY time! Like if you are approaching a cross walk, not like you're already beginning to step into it, I mean like you're still about 3 steps away from the crosswalk, the car will stop. Sometimes I'm not even aware that there is a car coming near cause I haven't even looked both ways to check for cars because I don't consider myself at the crosswalk and the car has already stopped!! It's insane! Hard to adjust to honestly. haha

Now for some pictures!!! :)

The houses here have lots of colors! It makes walking down the street a bit more pleasant.

Here is just a TINY example of how graffiti is everywhere! I guess Basel is just a city full of expressive people? haha O those artists/designers!












 
 This is The Rhine. It cuts right through Basel. The school I go to is on one side of the river and I live on the other side. From what I hear, people here are obsessed with the river and float down it for recreation, but I haven't personally seen this yet haha

 




A random boat on the Rhine. I just thought it was cute and like how it was flying it's Swiss flag!

This is a neat little statue thing they had on the river bank that was a miniature of the other bank of the river. You can see the church steeple and roof top in the statue right behind them on the river bank!

I just liked he sign and bike. All their signs are round and cute. haha :)

And meeee!

And a beautiful swan just came floating up the river! I'm not sure I've ever seen a swan in the wild (wild as in the middle of the city...? haha) in real life, nor have I been so close to one! It was really nice.

The street performers play the accordian here! It's quite nice. Definitely enhances the "romance" of the city. And look! Even the "bum" has a bike and is well kept! But speaking of bikes..........

In this second picture the bikes went on in clusters like that for the entire block. And that picture only shows 1/2 of that cluster. Sometime soon I'll seam together a panoramic of this block so you can get an understanding for just how many bikes were parked here and how many people ride bikes! Like I said in an earlier email, bikes are treated like cars. They have to follow all the same rules, they're not ridden on the sidewalks anywhere that I've seen, and if you're "caught speeding" on a bike you can have your driver's license taken away! Bikes are serious business here! haha

 Here are some trams.

This is just a small example of all the wires needed to run the trams. The night thing is though that unlike telephone wires that go to EVERY house, the tram wires are only on and above roads that have trams on them! SO they are not at all everywhere, but where they are, and especially where trams cross eachother's paths and have exchanges, there are SOO many wires!

This is a really neat fountain. I'm going to go back and read more about it hopefully, but the lady we're renting from told Lisa that this fountain has like 7 or 8 different little fountains and each one represents the 7 or 8 different character types. Overall, just seeing all the pieces at work at once is really neat and the pieces themselves are beautiful! We walked over the the church steeples behind us in this picture next.

The church was beautiful! I don't know the name, but it was beautiful!




















Now, this next set of pictures if for Andrew! haha And I think everyone can enjoy seeing some everyday differences in life from here to there.

This is our toilet! haha Not sure why they tank is so high up but it is! and you pull the chain on the left to flush it! By they way we have a room for the toilet and a separate room for the shower!

This is our light switch. You just press the button. Below it is an outlet. The button makes it super easy to turn off and on lights, even with arms full! Those efficient Swiss! They really are sooo efficient! Lisa and I decided that their designs are great because they had to learn to design in order to have any sense of order in life! They have 3 languages printed on every grocery item! The top is High German, then French, then Italian. On top of that, all the nutrition information is usually in all three languages as well! They had to be efficient and learn to organize information well!

 









This is how all the door handles in our house look and the picture on the right is seriously the keys we use within our apartment to lock doors (like the closets or the bathroom doors).

Final image for this post, this is how house keys are cut! with a series of circles carved out of the key. And they're tiny! Well, not that tiny, but they're maybe about 1 and a half inches.












Well, this is all for now. haha I'm currently using starbuck's internet and for some reason it won't let me register properly so I have to keep re-registering every 10 minutes........ so I'm going to go for now. But look forward to posting more and sharing this exprience with everyone! :)

Love Elishia