Monday, February 27, at four in the morning, the city of Basel’s Fasnacht celebration began. Fasnacht is the German word for Carnival, and Basel’s lasts three days. Yesterday morning, despite darkness, icy cold, and the painfully early hour, thousands of people lined the streets of Switzerland’s third largest city to watch groups of men andContinue reading “The Cold Days of Carnival”
Tag Archives: Basel
The Birth and Death of the Aare
When I first came to live in Bern in January 1987, only two months had passed since the Rhine had been disastrously polluted by a fire in a Sandoz warehouse on the river’s bank in the Swiss city of Basel. The water used to put out the fire had caused huge quantities of dangerous chemicalsContinue reading “The Birth and Death of the Aare”
Kim Hays 