By the time the first school holidays came around we all needed a break even though it was only five weeks since the kids had started school. It had been a long five weeks in which we’d got lost, turned up late and been misunderstood more times than we ever had been in our lives.

 

The school holiday coincided with Basel’s Fasnacht. Long before we left Australia, when our trip was still in its dreaming stage, Eric, Pete’s dad, had made us promise that we’d go to Fasnacht in Basel. An annual festival held at the end of winter, beginning of spring with origins dating back to medieval times. He’d told us it was special, different to anything he’d ever been to before, something that we shouldn’t miss.

 

So when we were packing our bags getting ready to go and stay with Pete’s Aunt in Basel it felt like we were in the hazy world of a dream. Fasnacht had been thought about and talked about for so long it was hard to believe that we were actually going.

 

We arrived at Denise’s on Sunday afternoon at five. Monique, Denise’s daughter, who’d driven from Bleiken near Thun to come to Fasnacht with us, had arrived five minutes before us. Monique’s a keen trumpet player who performs in a band regularly and Fasnacht is one of her favourite times of the year.

 

Dinner was again at Christian’s and Francois’. They happily fed all six of us another gourmet Swiss meal. We tried out our five weeks of French lessons at the dinner table but about two sentences into a stumbling conversation full of pardons and can you repeat that we flipped back to the easy flow of English.

 

The plan was this. We’d go home to Denise’s and sleep until two thirty in the morning, then, after everybody was up and rugged in warm clothes, (apparently the temperature for Fasnacht often got down around minus fifteen), we would meet up and Christian’s and Francois’ house, leave the car there and then head into town on one of the city trams.

 

We stayed at Christians’ and Francois’ way too late when we had such an early start the next morning. It was so nice to sit and chat with family that we usually only got to see every couple of years or so that we lost track of time. By the time I looked at my watch it was already ten thirty. That was a late bedtime for the kids even when they didn’t have to get up at two thirty in the morning. There was no way we were going to get out of Fasnacht without a tantrum or two, and no doubt a major sulk somewhere along the way.

 

Jack and Noah stayed with Francois and Christian. Jack stumbled up the stairs to bed as we were leaving complaining of head and a sore throat, and that was before we dragged him out into temperatures below zero in the middle of the night. By the time we got back to Denise’s and put Poppy and Kai to bed it was eleven o clock, exactly three and half hours before we had to get up. Of course, knowing that the pressure was on to grab the little amount of sleep that was available to us, both Pete and I struggled to go to sleep, and didn’t manage to find that peace of deep sleep. When Denise knocked on our bedroom door and said it was time to get up, we were both already dressed.

 

The lights were on when we pulled up outside Christian and Francois house. We all piled out of the car. It was freezing outside, we hadn’t brought enough beanies and scarves and we’d forgotten Poppy’s jacket. Luckily Christian had an old black leather jacket that he used to wear when he was about Jack’s age. So Jack wore that one and all the other jackets got passed down the line until there was one for Poppy. Jack, thankfully, had slept well for three and a half hours, and after some vitamin or medical concoction that Christian and Francois swore by, he was back to his normal hyperactive self and quite excited about an outing the middle of the night in a town he didn’t know.

 

There were enough people at the tram station to have a line two people deep spread across the front of the platform. It was crowded, but nowhere as crowded as what I’d thought it would be. The number of the people on the platform would have easily fitted into a tram with space left over. Everyone who was waiting on the platform had their long winter coat on, scarves pulled tight around their necks and hats pulled down over their ears, except for the three chickens dressed with feathers, wings and a big pointy tail. Each chicken had two spindly legs sticking out from their costume and carried a carefully painted paper-mache chicken head.

 

When the tram arrived I gathered all the kids together to make sure nobody got left behind. We squashed up close with the rest of the crowd ready to get on but when the tram doors opened there wasn’t enough room inside the tram to squeeze another person on. The tram sat at the station for a minute or so as if tease us, then sucked its doors closed and pulled away from the station. The crowd on the station shuffled, took a few steps back from the edge of the platform and then stood waiting for the next tram.

 

I asked Christian if the full tram meant that we had a long wait ahead of us. He laughed and shook his head, ‘No, no, the next tram will be fine.’ I didn’t believe him. I’d heard Fasnacht had twenty thousand participants and could have anywhere between three to five hundred thousand on lookers. That was a lot of people to move around one city, even for one of the most efficient public transport systems in the world. But the next tram arrived with in two to three minutes and true to Swiss form it was empty, following the motto that no one in Switzerland should ever have to wait longer than five minutes for anything, particularly when it came to public transport.

 

By the time we arrived in the city it was three thirty in the morning. There were people everywhere. It was the sort of crowd that you gently had to nudge your way through. I grabbed Poppy’s hand and Pete grabbed Kai’s. We told Noah and Jack to stay close and to be aware of where they were all the time. Jack in particular has a bad habit of getting distracted and wandering off in the opposite direction. The last thing we needed was him doing a disappearing act. The crowd was unusual, there was no yelling or yahooing, no singing out loud, nothing that even came close to drunk and disorderly. The feeling was one of seriousness and suppressed excitement.

 

We followed Christian in a long line of linked arms so no one got lost, weaving our way through the audience that was slowly meandering along the streets and past many of the cliques who were getting ready to march. The people in the cliques were dressed in their costumes with drums slung around their necks or piccolos in their hands. All of them had paper-mache masks on which covered their whole face; a whole had been left for breathing and playing the piccolo. The masks were pieces of art, carefully sculpted and then painstakingly painted. On top of the masks were lanterns, not yet lit, but you could see the bright painted colours on the lanterns that were waiting to come alive in the dark night.

 

We weaved and nudged our way through the crowd for what seemed like ages before Christian stopped us and pointed to the restaurant we would be having a very early breakfast at. The instructions were that if anyone got lost they were to go to that restaurant and wait until someone came and found them. I made sure Jack and Noah were listening and that they took note of the buildings around the restaurant. Then Christian took us further along the road and stopped at what he said was one of the best places to view Fasnacht. All of us had front row pavement space, proving once again that you should never go anywhere without local leading the way.

 

Monique, who hates the long Swiss winters, was huddled up next to me with her hands deep in her pockets.

 

‘It’s warm,’ she said.

 

I thought she must have been joking. I glanced out from underneath my hood to see if she was smiling, making a joke, but there was no smile on her face.

 

Monique’s pretty good at English but I thought maybe she’d got her words mixed up, ‘Warm?’ I asked her.

 

She tightened the scarf around her neck and then plunged her hands back into her pockets, nodding her head. ‘Most of the time Fasnacht is minus fifteen, tonight is three degrees.’

 

My fingers, which had no gloves on them because I’d had to give them to Poppy who’d dropped hers a long way back, were already tingling at their tips. Kai, who had enough clothes on but was coping the worst with being woken up in the middle of the night, was sitting on my feet holding on to my legs and saying he was freezing and wanted to go back to bed. There was no way we would have survived the minus fifteen degrees. I think we would have had to turn around before the second tram even arrived.

 

The tradition with Fasnacht is that when the church bells chime for the fourth time at four am in the morning every light in the city goes out leaving the city in darkness and an anticipated silence. Luckily as Kai’s mood descended further, verging on a tantrum, the church bells started their four chimes.

 

‘Watch Kai, watch, all the lights are going to go out, every light in the city.’

 

Kai stopped mid gripe about some sore toe or other that was squashed up in his shoe and stood up next to me, eyes wide holding my hand.

 

True to what we’d been told the fourth bell rang and the city went dark, goose bumps pricked over my skin. There was an expectant hush in the crowd and then the shouted commands of ‘Morgestraich, vorwärts, marsch,’ were heard. Then the city was filled with the shrill melody of the piccolo and the sharp rapping of the drums. Within moments the cliques with their drums and piccolos, dressed in their costumes with masks that covered their faces were marching past us. The lanterns of bright colours and designs on top of the masks were glowing. The costumes varied between policemen with big noses and big bellies to Chinamen with chopsticks in their hair. Every clique, along with their small mask lanterns, had a bigger lantern, often carried by four people. The poles that supported the bigger lanterns, rested on the shoulders of those carrying them. The bigger lanterns told the story of what the clique wanted to say often in pictures, but there were words too. The pictures were usually enough for me to understand what the message was, like the bright red painting of a Chinaman eating a globe with chopsticks. But sometimes I didn’t get it without the words and had to get Monique to explain. She said the one with the policemen was about Switzerland having too many rules and being over regulated. I told her it all seemed very serious, but she laughed and said no, not all. She told me often visitors got the wrong impression. She said yes that the people of Basel definitely took Fasnacht seriously but a lot of what was said was done so in good humour, even if it was humour with a pointed direction.

 

The music and the colour, the cobbled streets and the old buildings which lined them, and witnessing a tradition which had been evolving in the town of Basel for centuries was overwhelming. We’d been in Europe now for three months and seen so many wonderful things, but standing there on that cold street, the sound of piccolos piercing my eardrums as they whistled ancient marching tunes, I felt immersed in a culture that was so different yet so similar to ours. You could feel the heart of Basel pounding along with the drums. I was surprised to find myself crying.

 

The magic didn’t last quite as long for Kai though. After twenty minutes the lanterns and the drums had lost their effect and he was thinking of bed again. I managed to string him out for almost three quarters of an hour pointing out the lanterns as they went past and making up little stories about the mask wearing characters. Just as I started to think I wouldn’t be able to find another story, Christian suggested we headed off for breakfast. Kai perked up at the idea of something warm in his belly

 

The restaurants won’t take reservations for the morning of Fasnacht, it’s who’s ever there first gets the table. Christian figured if we got there just before five we should be able to get a table.

 

The restaurant was huge with long wooden tables and bench seats that seated no less than fourteen people. It was already packed but with Christians’ local knowledge we’d turned up just in time to grab the last table.

 

I was starving even though it really hadn’t been that long since dinner. Fasnacht has a traditional breakfast. You have a choice of three things and every restaurant serves the same three things so there is no point in shopping around, bircher-museli or fresh fruit salad with yoghurt simply won’t be found. The first choice is flour soup which has flour, butter, onion, meat stock and topped off with grated Gruyere cheese (you know the type of cheese the one that smells like really bad foot odour). Then there’s the onion-tart which is sort of like a quiche except with lots more cream in it. And lastly a savoury cheese-pie which is sold as a cheesecake. My taste bud at five in the morning weren’t impressed when I bit into this salty cheese pie expecting the sweet cheesecake that I’d eaten back home. Jack and Noah were happy to try bits and pieces but Poppy and Kai weren’t interested at all. Kai started telling me again how much he wanted to go back to bed.

 

We didn’t last long after breakfast. We wandered through the crowded streets for a while jumping in behind cliques and following them when we couldn’t make our way down the street on the pavement. We meandered down the oldest parts of Basel. The centuries old facades combined with the lanterns and sometimes a soul piccolo player really did make me feel like we were wandering through a time from long gone.

 

By the time we got back on the tram it was just after seven. The plan was to go home and get some good sleep and then come back in the afternoon for a parade that was more orientated towards the kids. I was the only one that fell asleep on the tram, unable to resist that night duty drugged feeling. Kai, who I thought would collapse, sat next to Pete on the way home talking on and on about how wonderful the parade had been.

 

It was a mistake to sleep on the tram. It meant that when I finally crawled into bed at Denise’s I couldn’t sleep. Poppy and Kai, as exhausted as they were, couldn’t get their heads around going to bed in the middle of the morning. Poppy resisted going to sleep for about an hour and half but then finally collapsed. Kai after all his wanting to go back to bed talk didn’t sleep at all. We were in for a fun afternoon.

 

2pm saw us all sitting in the tram again heading back to the city, red eyed and yawning. Kai had attached himself to me again sitting right up against me his head resting on my arm.

 

‘I don’t want to go back,’ his voice was on the edge of tears.

 

‘It’ll be fun,’ I said watching the cars driving along next to us on the road.

 

‘It will be boring just like it was boring last night.’

 

‘It wasn’t boring last night.’

 

‘Yes it was.’

 

‘No it wasn’t.’

 

‘Yes it was.’

 

‘Kai, it wasn’t.’

 

‘Well you’re not me are you? It was boring for me.’

 

‘What about all the lanterns and the people dressed up in their costumes? Remember the policemen and the chickens? What about the drums and the piccolos?’

 

‘Boring.’

 

I was starting to get a very clear image of my afternoon at Fasnacht. It would be full of cajoling and patience, me trying to enjoy the carnival while placating a very over tired eight year old. But then again there was soft drink. Maybe I could ply Kai up on enough sugar to get him through the afternoon.

 

Monique leant over the chair from behind me.

 

‘ He is tired?’ She asked.

 

‘Mmm, just a bit,’ I said.

 

‘Maybe he’s better when we get there.’

 

‘Yep, he’ll be fine. Won’t you Kai?’

 

Kai didn’t answer. Monique reached her hand over and ruffled Kai’s hair.

 

‘You sit with me?’ She said to Kai. ‘ Sleep with me until we stop.’

 

Kai didn’t answer.

 

‘Kai, Monique is talking to you.’

 

‘No thanks.’ Kai said without looking around. It was going to be fun.

 

When we arrived in the city I did a head count as everyone got off the train. The city was as crowded as it had been the night before but seemed somewhat different in the light of day. It was noisier and messier. The confetti on the streets was now mid calf deep in come places.

 

Denise said something to me in French.

 

‘Pardon?’ I said, my tired brain hardly able to think in English.

 

She repeated it in French again. I tried to make the words slow down and separate in my head but there wasn’t a chance.

 

‘Pardon?’ I said again.

 

‘Have you and Peter got the badges I gave you pinned on where they can be seen?’ She said in perfect slow English.

 

‘Oui, oui,’ I nodded showing her the little bronze badge with a carnival mask imprinted on it that she’d given me pinned to the front of my jacket. The idea with the badge was that if you were wearing one you wouldn’t be attacked by The Waggis. That is of course if The Waggis saw the badge and what the hell was a Waggis anyway?

 

Well apparently The Waggis is one of the best-known characters of Fasnacht. He wears a mask with a huge mouth, large teeth and gigantic nose; his hair is often yellow but can be other colours. He wears wooden clogs, white trouser, blue shirt and a red handkerchief around his neck. The colours of the French flag. In times gone by the Waggis was supposed to be a nasty jab at the Alsatian farmers who sold fruit and veg on the open street market. Now though that is all forgotten and The Waggis is simply out for a good time, which can often mean causing trouble in the way of confetti being stuffed down the collar of your shirt.

 

Monique had already warned me not to wear any jewellery around my neck. She said that one year she’d had a necklace on and had been attacked by a Waggis who in his excitement of shoving confetti down her collar had broken the chain of her necklace. Unfortunately she hadn’t been able to find it. Sounded like a lot of fun.

 

Kai walked with me, his hand shoved into my pocket kicking the confetti up in front of him as we went. The other three kids who’d had just enough sleep to get by on were up ahead with Pete grabbing handfuls of confetti off the ground and trying to get it into Pete’s hair.

 

The music that was filling the streets was different to the piccolos and drums of the night before. The marching rhythm of the piccolos and drums were still there but they were more in the background. The music of the afternoon was dominated by large brass bands with everything from a saxophone, to a big base drum carried sideways down the front of the body, to a set bagpipes. The music had a slightly messy out of tune sound which seemed to be almost deliberate, the unwieldy notes and rhythm being pulled together by a strong under current in each group of key instruments. It was only later that I learnt these brass bands spend the whole year rehearsing to get that off key effect just right. You couldn’t help but move your feet in time, couldn’t help but want to get in behind one of the groups and follow them along the road. The big lanterns were still with the groups and even though they weren’t lit their bright colours were still striking.

 

We meandered our way through the crowd until we found a place on the edge of the road where the kids didn’t have to look over anyone’s head. Kai, who still had his hand wedged in my pocket, was sighing repeatedly letting me know in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t wait for it to all be over.

 

Just when I thought I couldn’t handle another sigh, that I was going to have to transfer Kai’s hand to Pete’s pocket for a while, a huge open truck drove up in front of us. There were masked characters up on the flat deck of the truck looking down at us and then without any warning we were being bombarded with confetti, lollies and oranges. All the kids around us were putting their hands up to catch what was being thrown. It only took my kids a few seconds to cotton on to what was happening. They had no idea what the German word the kids around us were shouting was, but they soon joined in mimicking the word exactly and catching any lollies that came their way. Kai was all of a sudden out of my pocket and crawling around on the pavement scavenging lollies, oranges and hoping to find one of the few small toys that might have been missed in the crowd above him.

 

The afternoon past in a whirl of confetti, oranges and music that wouldn’t let you sit still. All of the kids, including Kai had a ball, joining in with the confetti fights, seeing who could grab the most lollies and dancing along behind the occasional group that we followed down the street. Before we got back on the tram to go home to Denise’s house in Dornach we dusted off all the confetti. This meant taking off all our layers and brushing off each other’s backs, shaking out our jackets and picking the confetti out of each other’s hair. We got most of it out, but that night back at Denise’s we were still spilling the occasional bits of confetti on the floor.

 

We went back into Fasnacht for one more time the following night; it was the final night for the carnival. This night was different again. There were big stages set up around the city where the so-called Cliques and Gugge (the off key brass bands) performed. The crowd was different also. The solemn serious crowd we’d met on the first night had either disappeared or evolved into a partying beer drinking crowd that were keen to stomp along with their favourite Gugge or Clique. It was amazing to see young people, the age group you’d expect to be head banging with the latest heavy metal, whooping it up with the slightly whacky beats that were being belted out on the stage by the bands that were still fully masked and costumed.

 

We wandered from stage to stage, the kids, even Kai, happy to listen and watch. Then we wandered through the streets. There were street performers working in groups, miming. We watched a few but most of the time we followed the lanterns and small groups of piccolos and drums that were still marching the streets as if in some sort of enchanted trance. It was easy to believe that they hadn’t stopped playing and marching since the carnival started on Monday morning. Following the Cliques we went into some of the oldest parts of the city finding our way through narrow cobbled damp lanes, past buildings that must have been built centuries and centuries ago.

 

We only lasted until about ten that night and as much as we didn’t want to leave because we knew it was the end of our Fasnacht, our sleep-deprived bodies were craving bed.

 

The next morning at Denise’s we packed up, picked up the new bits of confetti which had scattered on the floor, and said our goodbyes with lots of hugs kisses and thankyous. Then we headed off to the Eastern boarder of Switzerland to stay in a town near St Gallen and The Boden Sea for three nights.

 

The place we stayed at was a chicken farm and stunk of chicken poo. The woman who ran it spoke only German, no French or English so she showed us around the place using lots of pointing and demonstrations. It was clean and tidy with heaps of space for the kids to run around outside. The best part though was that it was all ours, there was no Moggys living above us.

 

We spent the next few days travelling around the local area. The first day was The Black Forrest and Lake Tittersee where we saw more cuckoo clocks than I could count, spent a lovely half hour in the sun watching the ducks ice skate on the frozen Lake Tittersee and then of course had a big slab serve of black forest cake. Unfortunately the cake was both expensive and average. I’ve got friends back at home who do a much better job of the traditional cake.

 

The next day, a freezing cold day with rain and wind that would see most normal people stay home saw us at the Rhine falls with not only the rain whipping our faces but also the spray off the river. Needless to say there were no people there so we didn’t have to fight for the view of the torrents of water crashing down on to the rocks. The kids loved the water. The spray of it in their faces, the deafening noise. There were endless questions of, ‘If I gave you a million dollars would you walk out along that thin piece of wood balancing between those two rocks?’ Or ‘If someone was chasing you with a gun and the only way you could survive was to dive into water right here, what would you do?’

 

After the Rhine falls we went to Schaffhausen, a pretty town that Pete and I could have spent hours wandering around, sipping coffee, (well if I drank coffee but you know what I mean), visiting museums and art gallery’s, but instead we ended up in McDonalds and buying Jack a new pair of sport shoes which he desperately needed for his first class when we got back.

 

The last day we caught a boat across The Boden Sea to Germany with our car and went to Lindau, the town where Pete’s mum grew up. Pete had been there before, when he was seven, and had amazingly clear memories about the place although he couldn’t remember exactly where the flat was that his mother had grown up in, the same flat that his grandmother had still been living in when he came to visit. We spent a good half an hour driving around a group of unit blocks that Pete knew the flat was in but he just couldn’t quite pin point the exact flat. We even got out of the car and retraced a walk that he remembered doing. Apparently his grandmother had taken him and his two brothers over to her garden in the community gardens one morning. His grandmother had got busy with her gardening and the kids had got bored so had decided to find their own way home. Pete remembered it very clearly, crossing the busy road on the over pass, coming back down along the path next to the road, but he just couldn’t quiet get to the flat. He also remembered the fear in his mother’s face when she finally found them after an hour of searching, playing happily in a park near his grandmother’s flat. At age seven he couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about, but now, dragging his own four kids around Europe, it was very clear.

 

The island of Lindau was beautiful. Full of tiny little gift shops, intricately painted churches and town halls, every roof had a carved statue or intricate design. The kids had fun throwing rocks in the frozen shore waters, seeing who could get a rock to go through the ice.

 

On our last day on the way home we stopped at a small Swiss town called Appenzell at the base of the mountains that are the home to Davos, Switzerland’s most well known and yuppie ski resort.

 

The town was full traditional Swiss chalets painted with mountain scenes. A river, bordered by ice under which you could see fish swimming, ran through the middle of it. We were there on a Sunday so all the shops were closed. This meant that the smooth footpaths were relatively empty, perfect for rollie shoeing. By this stage of the trip Poppy was no longer the only one with rollie shoes. Jack, seeing how much fun Poppy was having, had decided that he should get a pair too. So with the money he’d got for Christmas he’d bought himself a pair of Jack sized rollie shoes.

 

Poppy with all her practise in Rome was pretty good at the whole rollie-shoeing thing; she had it down to a fine art. But Jack, well that was a whole different story. Not only was he just starting to get the hang of it but he was also determined to jump off everything that was above ground level and achieve every possible trick his brain could come up with. This, as you can imagine meant a lot of stacks, a lot of cursing and a lot of Jack’s big body sprawled across the footpath in front of unsuspecting tourists or even worse, suspecting locals. Appenzell on a Sunday is a pretty quite town, but the gentle calmness that we arrived to soon disappeared. It was filled with loud thuds, the occasional scream and the more frequent, ‘Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap,’ then a crash. Then there was of course the ‘pardon, Je suis desole,’ as Jack pulled himself up off the ground in front of group of wide eyed tourists and then started on his merry way again.

 

We learnt fast not to turn around when we heard the crash. It was much easier to pretend he was with someone else, or better still a rogue local kid who was harassing the town.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 1:40 am and is filed under Switzerland Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.