The Street Performer

It was a cold and drizzly day in Basel, Switzerland. I had a few hours to kill before meeting my dear friend, Shadi, and decided to have a hot chocolate before heading to the cinema for an afternoon film. I went to Starbucks... yes... ME... in Starbucks. Those of you who know me well will probably have heard me criticising the place mercilessly (apologies to my best friend who loves it) but it was convenient at the time.

It had been a hard few weeks leading up to this little weekend escape. Many things had gone wrong, and my life in London was feeling fairly bleak. As I sat myself down at a second-storey window overlooking the street below, I took some deep breaths and sipped my hot chocolate - Swiss-style. (By Swiss-style I mean that the look of disappointment and self-chastisement which usually follow a sip of Starbucks hot chocolate were lacking. It was Switzerland - the land where no bad form of chocolate exists!)

Things were already looking up... I settled into my chair, pulled out my journal and gazed out the window. There awaiting me was something very odd. I had box seats to the show in the street but it still took me a couple of minutes to work out what I was looking at. There was a tall man with khaki cargo pants tucked into his hiking boots, a pink jacket, and a Noddy-esque cap. He already cut a striking figure in the wet, cobble-stone street, but there was more. He had large cardboard signs that said things like, "You are beautiful" and, "Listen! Everything is possible! The only one who can stop you is your own self!" Next to them was a large teddy bear declaring himself to be "Winnie the PooR." Altogether, quite the spectacle!

I wasn't sure what his angle was yet. He was just standing there at first. Eventually he started to do 'warm ups'. For a good fifteen-twenty minutes I was confronted with moves like this:

Finally a couple of daring kids, who seemed to be around twelve-years-old, saw the juggling balls on the ground and asked to see some action. He picked up three of them, tossed one up in the air and covered his eyes with the other two as he dramatically "watched" the single ball fall to the ground. He got one of the kids to give it a try too, and he awkwardly did so. You could see by the look of satisfaction on his face that he was completely chuffed by their interest and finally started to toss a few balls around. Once he got going, he was pretty entertaining! Other passers-by stopped to watch as well. The arrival of each new small child inspired him further and he pulled out his whole bag of tricks for them.

After a while I realised: I was smiling.

A little boy, about three-years-old, walked up to him, and instead of putting his coin in the case, he boldly held it up to him and didn't move until he stopped juggling to take it. The Street Performer stooped down to receive it with a heart-warming smile and placed his hand on his heart to express his gratitude... All the difficulties of recent weeks disappeared in that one beautiful moment. I know you're going to think I am just a big girl, but a couple of tears may have welled up at that point. This random guy, who at first seemed to be missing from the local psychiatric ward, was so full of love and warmth to those around him.

With my hot chocolate well and truly drunk, it was nearly time to walk down to the cinema. I grabbed a few Swiss franks and headed downstairs where the little crowd had dispersed and the juggler was now on his own.

I crossed the street and went over to him. He stopped what he was doing and said, "Thank you!" as I dropped the coins into his case. I had a little speech ready, but thankfully he saved me from having to use my rusty German by speaking very good English himself. When I told him where I was sitting he said, "Oh you were the one up there!" I told him that I had been sad but he made me smile and I wanted to say thank you. He gave me a big hug and told me to stay positive and not give up! He was a "gypsy traveller" (as he put it) from Hungary who moved around a lot. I don't know what his story is, but he smelled homeless and obviously made his living by doing this sort of thing. It still amazes me when I think of how bright his smile was, how open his heart was.

If he could be like that in his situation, then I could certainly find a way to be so in mine.

Basel

Apologies for my absence from the blogging world! I realise it has been a couple of weeks since I promised you an account of Basel – the city I loved best during my visit to Switzerland – and I am very sorry for the delay.

Well… where do I start? I spent my last day in Switzerland with my friend Shadi – a truly magnificent person. I arrived Saturday morning and departed Sunday morning, but it was a 24-hour period I will never forget! Loving a place comes easy when you are there with an awesome person and when the place itself has some kind of intrigue about it.

The ability to intrigue is a quality I rate very highly in life. It’s the reason I’m into notebooks with squares instead of lines, Humphrey Bogart movies, little Melbourne laneways, Antoine De Saint-Exupèry, fresco paintings, anything with pistachios, and of course…

Basel.

It helped that I had a ‘tour guide’ who knew all the interesting stories. Let me tell you how the day went and hopefully I can adequately convey some of the fascination I felt.

Shadi picked me up from the station and took me to her home in Basel-land. That’s a half-canton. Why? Because the two halves of the Basel canton couldn’t get along, so they split into half-cantons, called Basel-Stadt and Basel-land. More on that later…

When Shadi and I are together, the priority is always chocolate. Our first stop was therefore a little café that produces a chocolate chip pastry to remember! We got chatting about Sandy’s notion that adding an ‘os’ to an Italian word is close enough to speaking Spanish. So we gave this language a crack and laughed away all the calories endowed by the pastry.

From time to time, everyone needs to laugh ‘till their abdominal muscles hurt. It’s good for you. The only trouble is that once you reach that point of hysteria, you are no longer any good to society. A little boy at a table near us fell off his chair, causing two tables in his path of destruction to fall like dominoes. I watched it all happen as if in slow motion. I could have stopped the dominoes, but alas, Shadi and I were too busy laughing and expressing our worthless sympathy for the boy in Sanshatanos – our version of Spanish – which just made us laugh all the more.

After the hysteria, we went for a little walk around the city. It was pouring rain and my shoes were completely saturated. So saturated, in fact, that the next morning when I packed them they were still wet. By the time I unpacked them back in Siena, thousands of tiny mildew communities had sprung up all over. It was disgusting. Of course, they are now part of Siena’s landscape – or should I say, landfill.

Anyway, there are three things I saw during this soggy walk that particularly captured my attention and quickly took up permanent lodgings in the old heart…

SOMETHING UNUSUAL

“I’m going to show you something that even most people in Basel don’t know about,” said Shadi with a hint of mystery.

As we crossed the street, I thought she might have been talking about the revolving disc built into the asphalt (used for turning cars around when there are lots of vehicles parked curb-side). Apparently the Swiss will do anything to get out of a three-point turn. But that wasn’t it. On the other side of the street we entered an undercover walkway, between two uninspiring buildings. I peered toward the light at the end of the tunnel expecting to see something interesting on the other side, but when we were no more than two steps into the walkway, Shadi said, “Stop. Do you notice anything strange?” (I should mention at this point that I only talk to Shadi in Italian so nothing is exactly what she said).

I scanned the area dubiously, realising that this concrete passage was the spectacle I had satched my shoes for. At first it seemed like any other city thoroughfare – practical and consequently ugly. However when I looked closer I realised that the posters were upside down and there were black and white panels on the roof resembling a pedestrian crossing. Where the heck am I? I thought to myself.

Shadi explained that the zebra crossing was on the roof and the posters upside-down because, for the minute you are walking through this passage, you are ostensibly walking on Heaven. It was so random, clandestine and unexpected that I loved it straight away. I can’t explain the irony, the paradox, of having such a poetic and chimerical concept portrayed in such a dank and insignificant passageway. To me, that kind of contradictory juxtaposition is so lovable. Does anyone know what I mean?

SOMETHING MOVING

Next we stopped in at St. Martin’s Church, which, besides having an awesome medieval sun-clock, told a beautiful story from the life of Saint Martin of Tours.

Shadi pointed to a statue on the outer wall that represented St. Martin on a horse, cutting his cloak with a dagger. I didn’t know anything about Martin at the time so, for all I knew, he could have been a masochist like Saint Catherine of Siena whose head and thumb are a short walk from where I am sitting right now, just by the way. Martin was not inclined to torture himself, however.

This guy was a Roman soldier in the 4^th century A.D. who, during a snowstorm, cut his cloak in half to share it with a beggar in the street. That night he had a dream in which he saw Jesus wearing the cloak and saying to the angles, “Here is Martin, the Roman soldier who is not baptised; he has clothed me.” Martin then left the military, converted to Christianity and became a monk.*

I love it because he lived what it says in James 2:15-17,

“If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,’ but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have [deeds], is dead.”

It still gives me shivers when I remember the moment I looked up at that statue and realised for the first time that there had existed a person who, 1600 years later, was still talked about for showing kindness to someone in need. Imagine that was the thing that everybody through the ages remembered about your life. How beautiful.

SOMETHING HILARIOUS

Now to close out this mammoth blog, I will return to the story I touched on last time about the Lällekönig (‘the tongue king’). Oh dear… I can barely contain myself even now! Just to get you all on the same page as me, here is a picture:

The Rhine River divides the city of Basel into two parts, Grossbasel and Klienbasel (or Greater and Lesser Basel respectively). It’s pretty fair to say that these two communities are not the best of friends. To support this statement, I submit Exhibit A: the Lällekönig; and Exhibit B: the Vogel Gryff Carnival.**

The Lällekönig is mounted on a Grossbasel building overlooking the river, and as you can see in the picture, he spends his days poking his tongue in and out at Kleinbasel.

How does Kleinbasel respond? With an annual festival, of which the high point is three costumed Kleinbasel citizens floating down the river, doing a little dance for the sole purpose of wiggling their butts at the Lällekönig, and consequently at the side he represents. The bit that cracked me up the most is that this tradition is hundreds of years old! I thought they had more class back then! More decorum! Nope. They were just like any other mob of Mexican-waving fans at the MCG.

In January, I HAVE TO find a way to get back to Switzerland to see this spectacle!

As for the rest of the day… we had fondue for lunch (for you Australians who think that’s a bowl full of chocolate into which you dunk your fruit, cake and marshmallows: it’s melted cheese with bread for dipping, not chocolate, unless otherwise specified). After that, we did a little shopping, stopped for a hot chocolate and went home to watch DVD’s. It was a fantastic day – thanks Shadi!

Well, I will leave it there. For those of you who have just given up the three years it takes to read this entry, thanks :)

* http://www.users.csbsju.edu/~eknuth/npnf2-11/sulpitiu/lifeofst.html#tp

** http://www.swissworld.org/en/geography/towns/basel/