Holy crap
This is looking more and more like a serious storm. My guess is that we've got about a foot on the ground and it hasn't let up at all (I shoveled at around 4:00pm and six hours later it's entirely snowed over with about another six inches already). I had dinner with friends tonight, where we must have watched three or four huge tree branches come down in their yard while I was there. It's usually a direct 10-minute tram ride to their place, but this is how it went down instead:
I showed up at tram stop, where there was a tram sitting there with a number 0 on it (Basel doesn't have a line with that number). I went up to the driver, who luckily spoke English, and she told me that there were trees down on the wires so the tram couldn't run, but a bus should be by shortly. Sure enough, a bus turned up and got me as far as the Heiliggeistkirche stop, where I was made to understand I could pick up the regular tram. The sign said it would be 8 minutes until the next tram, and when it got down to 3 minutes all of a sudden it changed and said 22 minutes instead. WTF?!? (At this point I thought about trying to go back home but realised I didn't have my friends' phone number with me. Doh!) Luckily about 5 minutes later a tram finally came by and I figured I was in business. The driver made an announcement in German that I naturally didn't understand, at which point about half the tram got off. A woman tried to ask me what was going on, but I had to tell her I didn't speak German. Sure enough, we got going...and started heading in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go. At this point I was feeling truly screwed. I got off at the first stop and managed to wedge into the shelter on the other side (one thing I learned from this experience is that as more people are squeezed under a tram shelter, the number of smokers increases exponentially). The first tram that came by got me to the train station, which was close enough to where I wanted to be. Then I got really bright and decided to try to find a shortcut to their place, which I naturally couldn't find and ended up trudging twice as far as necessary through the calf-deep snow. In the end my 10-minute trip ended up taking almost an hour. Luckily our friends are really easygoing, so I could just have a beer and laugh about it with them. Going home I figured there was no way I was going to be able to catch a tram so I hiked it through the snow instead (thus assuring that my lower body will be as sore as my upper body tomorrow, which is good because I'm all about symmetry).
The real question is, what does this mean for Fasnacht, which starts Monday morning?
I showed up at tram stop, where there was a tram sitting there with a number 0 on it (Basel doesn't have a line with that number). I went up to the driver, who luckily spoke English, and she told me that there were trees down on the wires so the tram couldn't run, but a bus should be by shortly. Sure enough, a bus turned up and got me as far as the Heiliggeistkirche stop, where I was made to understand I could pick up the regular tram. The sign said it would be 8 minutes until the next tram, and when it got down to 3 minutes all of a sudden it changed and said 22 minutes instead. WTF?!? (At this point I thought about trying to go back home but realised I didn't have my friends' phone number with me. Doh!) Luckily about 5 minutes later a tram finally came by and I figured I was in business. The driver made an announcement in German that I naturally didn't understand, at which point about half the tram got off. A woman tried to ask me what was going on, but I had to tell her I didn't speak German. Sure enough, we got going...and started heading in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go. At this point I was feeling truly screwed. I got off at the first stop and managed to wedge into the shelter on the other side (one thing I learned from this experience is that as more people are squeezed under a tram shelter, the number of smokers increases exponentially). The first tram that came by got me to the train station, which was close enough to where I wanted to be. Then I got really bright and decided to try to find a shortcut to their place, which I naturally couldn't find and ended up trudging twice as far as necessary through the calf-deep snow. In the end my 10-minute trip ended up taking almost an hour. Luckily our friends are really easygoing, so I could just have a beer and laugh about it with them. Going home I figured there was no way I was going to be able to catch a tram so I hiked it through the snow instead (thus assuring that my lower body will be as sore as my upper body tomorrow, which is good because I'm all about symmetry).
The real question is, what does this mean for Fasnacht, which starts Monday morning?
<< Home