Basel, Switzerland Summer Virtual Walking Tour - 4k City Walks Videos for Treadmill

Hello walkers and welcome back to City Walks, the channel where I walk you around various cities or hiking trails and nature areas and we find interesting things together, little bits of serendipity thrown in our path. I do a lot of talking, it's not one of the quiet channels so prepare yourself for that. We are in today Basel or Basel, Switzerland just across the Rhine from both Germany and France. I guess it's not across the Rhine from France and I'm going to spin you around real quick. My name is Henry, I will be your proxy walker today, your virtual travel guide, your co-discoverer and I say co-discoverer because that's really the important part and that has to do with the finding interesting things and pointing out little details. So I'm just to show you this Ferrari over here. In fact I actually took a wrong turn, I do that quite a bit, got distracted by the vehicle. We are going to head down into the old town section. I'm going to talk a little bit and I'm going to point stuff out and we're going to have a good time. First thing I want to point out is look at all these bikes. Super bike friendly town, super super well laid out, organized as you might expect in Switzerland. It is 68 degrees today, 3 30 pm, 20 degrees celsius in May actually, the latter part of. Love it! There seems to be, it's a Saturday, but there also seems to be some sort of festival or something going on. It's quite crowded down here. I'm going to go ahead and tell you I rolled into town two hours ago. I did a little bit of Wikipedia reading and we left the motel room to come out and my son's going to the art museum, the Kunstmuseum, and I'm going to do a city walk or so. So let's discover what we got here. I'll try and find you a street name. We started out near the Kunstmuseum, down the street a little bit. We are on Freie Straße. Look at this. This is, I believe, the Munster or the big cathedral here. Started in 1019 I believe and I don't know that we can go in there from here, but look at it. It's kind of a big area. I don't know if this area was, is this part of the Munster? Hmm, I don't think it is. I think it's a different church. The Munster's over there. Oh, look at this old wooden stuff. We'll get back to the main downtown area in a bit. Looks like you got a bike store down here. Very cool. All right, we're gonna backtrack once again. I just like these, this old wooden, very Germanic Alpine style. Let's get back to this main drag. Even though we're just across the border from France and there are French-speaking areas of Switzerland, I'm hearing a lot of people speak German. So I'm going to assume that's what they speak here. Big line for cinnamood. Seems to be cinnamon rolls, cinnamon buns. A Gucci shop over here. Look at the, I don't know if you can see it down there, but the red tower with a bunch of cranes around it. It's pretty cool. Off to the left is Kaufhausgasse, which Kaufhaus is, I believe, a department store. Got a little narrow street going over there in the Munsterbahn. Some busking folks dancing. Look how crowded it is down here. Might need to go off to the side just to get away from the crowds here. Backpack. It's a bakery. Pastries and sandwiches. So Basel. It's been around since at least the 300s, or some semblance of it has been. People have been here. But it sort of got its wings, I guess, in the early middle ages, around the 11th century, 10th century. It is, it has been a, oh look at this square. Look at all these people out enjoying the day. What am I trying to say here? It's been a place of, historic museum, cultural assimilation and toleration. It's been a place where a lot of people come to negotiate treaties and has been a place of, I guess, tolerance for the most part, except for the Black Plague when they blamed the Jewish population and burned a bunch of them at the stake. Not ideal. Look at this. This is awesome. This is the fun part of these walks. Well, one of the many fun parts. Just discovering and walking around and having a little, being awestruck a little bit. It's so easy to, if you travel a lot, to have your awe maybe knocked down a little bit and to find the details and to look and notice stuff is super fun. It's fun to have that sense of awe, in my opinion. Hopefully I'm sharing that a little bit with you guys and you're getting a that. I just want to thank our Patreon supporters. Those of you who have made donations and subscribed with, I think it's a five dollar a month subscription, helps me do these walks and share them with you. And for those who have also done the one-time contributions through PayPal and Ko-Fi, you can find links below in the YouTube description and you can find other walks on the website so you watch virtual tours. But I don't want to talk too much about that. Look at this cool building and the bears motif. Switzerland is the Confederation Helvetica and their plates say CH, I think. CH. Because it is a confederation of cantons. This is Steinberg and Steiner Vorstadt. What's this? It's known as the cultural capital of Basel. It's known as the cultural capital of Switzerland. It's got 40 museums around town. Our hotel that we're staying in gave us a Basel card which gives us free use of the public transport system. I haven't tried that yet but they seem to have a cool system of trams and buses. This neat old building. The canton itself has about, I want to say, 200,000 people and it's a city canton so that's pretty much the population of Basel. It seems bigger and part of that I think is that all around it in France and in Germany there are other cities that are basically share border here. 36% of the population are foreign born. Number one of which I think is Germany. Second is Italy. And Americans make up about I think 1,600 or 1,700 people. Certainly heard numerous people speaking English but that could also be just other tourists like myself. Look at the ivy and just the it's such a different architecture all of a sudden here. We've been riding across France. First along the Loire and then sort of northeast, east northeast to Basel. We went through Alsace and it's got a little bit of a German flair to it but all of a sudden this is very distinctive. Awesome fountain. People are playing their boules or potomac or something. Excuse me, there's a there's two dogs down here and there's like a sculpture of a rhinoceros and the dogs are not having it. They're not friends with the rhinoceros. I was getting hoping to get a little, where's this hilly here? Let's go back this way because I love this little courtyard. I'm going to give you a bit of a pan. Seems to be part of a church. Look how peaceful this is. Eglise Francais Reformé Evangelique de Bale. I think Bale is the French name for Basel. Bikes are everywhere. I love it. How amazing is this? Seems to be just a courtyard. I love all the greenery in the city and a lot of these European cities. They really have invested in it. Oh my gosh, this is an absolute warren of streets and alleys. I love it. Languages. I think I saw some fellow Americans up there. There's some people speaking French. Tea import. I love it. Another thing I don't notice a lot of is just single-use disposable stuff. A lot of people, I read something where one of the characteristics of Americans is that we we eat while we walk and apparently not many Europeans do that. It's Flugaslein down there. I thought that was interesting. I had never noticed it until I read that but I think it's true. A lot of stuff in the U.S. is to go and much less so here. You can get pizzas and sandwiches and pastries and stuff but most of it is eaten in place, seems like. Another thing I've been noticing, we've traveled to Europe several times over the decades and I'm noticing a lot of burger shops, like hamburgers. They finally caught on to how awesome hamburgers are. There's a Bernie's or some variation of a Mountain Dog. It's a tram. I'll try not to get run over. Everything looks delicious. Look at all of these bikes. A lot of cargo bikes, electric bikes, regular bikes, all over the place. We came to Switzerland in 2019, the summer, and stayed over near Lotte Brunnen, an old town called Wengen. It was amazing. Did several walks over there so check those out on the website. But we never really went to a big city. This is the biggest city in Switzerland I've been to and it's different. It's interesting. Sorry about that. Look at this place. Looks like either a market or part of a fair down here. Walked into the bike lane. Look at it. One of the reasons I'm excited is we've been seeing a lot of medieval stuff around France. Very cool, very interesting. This seems to be a little bit more recent and different. I love it. Not sure what this stuff is but there's that red tower I was referring to earlier. I don't know if that's painted or that's the color of the stone. Definitely a mural on there. Sorry about that. I had a guy that wanted to talk to me about books which was awesome. I think he's probably, they're probably religious books of some sort and that's fine. But I talked to him, he had a boats and bikes tours hat on and I wanted to ask him about that as well. So we had a little fun little conversation. You know what? I just realized that I forgot to put on my microphone so I'm going to turn that on now. Luckily the microphone on these Osmo 3 pockets are pretty good so hopefully you picked up a fair amount of my voice. In any case, if not, I'll do what I can to make it work. Look at the ornate work on all of this. On the clocks, the gilded tower, but also on these little balconies. Seems to be food trucks and flowers, some wrapping paper. That looks good. Cool, cool place this is. That's where we just came from. We'll progress along here some more. I kind of like these old wooden and glass frontages. They're more end of the 19th century vibe to them but there's something kind of neat about them. Look at all the trams man. That's an older one looks like over there. It's been interesting that throughout our bike tour we really haven't heard or seen a lot of other Americans. And then in the big city here, certainly a lot more of that. Already heard several American or I guess it could have been a Canadian but they didn't sound Canadian. Anyway, talking. It's interesting to see if we can find our way down to the river. Slipping off curbs today. A panoply of colors. I find this interesting as well. We've got these trams that I believe are going to cross the Rhine which I think takes them into Germany. Let's go out onto the Rhine real quick. We've got a tour boat down here. Look how ripping that current is. Wow. All right, let's cross over a little bit and we'll come back on the other side of the bridge maybe. Maybe it's not Germany. I think Germany's that away. That makes it more sense. Actual bus. Hotel Marien, Café Spitz. Let's make our way actually down to the riverfront and we'll walk along there. Because I had to stop the film, the camera for that earlier conversation, which was actually interesting, I'm going to... I'm not really sure how long we are in terms of length of video. So there's a bubble maker. A lot of people dipping their feet in the Rhine, enjoying the sunshine, etc. We're going to go this way. In my French walks, I've talked quite a bit about the ease and the benefits of biking in these cities. Now, the cities are compact. They tend to be compact. But even still, they're built in a way that is bicycle friendly and the culture is bicycle friendly. So motorists don't necessarily see you as an obstacle using their road. They see you as a And you can get from not very far out of the city to into the city really quickly and really easily. And it's not the perfect thing and I'm not saying it would work exactly in the U.S. the way we have it, but it sure is nice. Look at this. I love seeing people out here just enjoying the city, enjoying the weather. I think that church is the Münster. Look at the current, man. That's just crazy. I've seen quite an assortment of different types of bike trailers too, which is kind of fun. There's some interesting boats down here. I've noticed a different design style in different parts that we've passed. These seem to have a specific shape. There's a busker over there playing some trumpet, which is quite nice. I'll show these two here in a second. They're long, almost like a pierogue, but taller. They sit quite high. I kind of wonder how they're propelled in a current like this. Oh, so look at this. This is a ferry, I guess. We saw a lot of boats like that on the Loire, but you can see the flags running up the cable that goes up to another cable that goes across the river. I'm not sure how it's propelled, but it's attached to the ferry. It kind of just guides it over. Look at this cool old lamp stand. We'll see another one up here in a second. Stop in front of everybody's views. There are a bunch of bridges over the Rhine here, but for a long time, hundreds of years, they only had the one bridge built by a bishop because there's a lot of bishops that ruled here. Anyway, it was the only one between Lake Constance and the sea for a long time, and that made it a very important trade location. I was kind of hoping I could get up to that bridge. I mean, this is kind of like a theme park in a good way. Not like you're standing in line for everything, although there's been a few of those, but it's just so different, so unique. Not unique, but there's other cities like it, I'm sure, but it's so much. It's not modern. Really, it's modern buildings. I don't know how to describe it without getting myself into trouble. I see the stairway over here. I'm hoping that'll take me up to the bridge. I have to be careful around the bike lanes because people do zip along. Up through the trees. After three weeks of pedaling bikes, 30 to 60 miles a day, my quads are screaming. I can't help but be struck by the power of this current. It's a little funny that, by accident, we've looped around to right near where we started because the Kunstmuseum, the art museum here, is directly ahead. But I would really like to get over to the Kunst. So, this might be a longer walk. I'm not sure how the timing is going to end up, but I think we're going to go for it. It's another kind of boat. It looks like a canoe or a dragon boat, maybe. Of course, the Olympics are going to be in France soon. I've seen... Today, we saw a bunch of people sculling on the canals that we were following. Maybe that's a competitive sporting rig. I don't know enough about the Olympics. Okay, Switzerland is known for the Alps, of course. But here, the mountains are not particularly large. There's sort of a plateau, I think, around this area, the northern half of Switzerland. And then the Alps are in the southern half. I've seen some dragon iconography. If you know what that's about, please let me know in the description below. Or if you have any comments or corrections or memories or thoughts, please share them in the comment section. I love interacting with you guys there. Super fun for me. Just keep everything civil, if you don't mind. I see a dragon on the post of the bridge there. That's almost like a bird dragon. We're going to make a right on Rittergasse, I think. I hope. I hope this will take us where we want to go. I love these old, old houses. The iron grates on the windows for security. Look at this meadowlark. What is this? I'm a little silly sometimes. Look at the flowers, gardens, a little park over here. Must be some sort of reception back there. I think we're going to go in this little area. Sorry to backtrack. Old garden, cloister. Look at the carving along the beam here. What is this? You don't see a lot of parks with small trees, which I think is interesting. I forgot to show you the lampposts earlier. These ornate ironwork lampposts. We've got some branches being propped up. That's interesting. Well, it looks like I could just go on and on throughout the city. There's the ferry again. But I don't think I'm going to have the time to do that. So, I want to thank you guys for joining me here in Basel, Basel, Switzerland. Beautiful, beautiful city. Oh, lovely. And just kind of hopping with people. I'm surprised at how many people are out and about. I think I guess there might be some sort of festival or something, but I haven't seen any special events or anything. So, it could just be this is the way Basel is on a Saturday afternoon in early summer. Look at this park. Oh, I love this park. It just does the spirit good. I'm going to flip you around. Not flip you around, but rotate you around and we'll see a better view of this church. It's magnificent. Redstone Church. Thank you guys so much for joining me. We will see you again soon. Possibly Colmar, possibly Stroudsburg. In either case, I hope you'll join me for a wonderful walk of serendipity and discovery and just a run-of-the-mill jibber-jabber. Until then, keep on stepping.