Settling in...

Tuesday August 7, 2007






View to the left of our balcony, temporary apartment.


Our first day here started out rainy, but cleared up by the time we headed out on our first foray into the city. We managed to find our way to the University where MrB will be working, and picked up the paperwork we needed to register to live in Basel. We headed to the immigration office and got that taken care of with no problems. It was 65chf each, and when we find our permanent apartment, the change of address fee is about 25chf. Seems you pay for everything here, though it is no big surprise.

We were able to find out about one health insurance option that the secretary recommended, as it was on the same street as the immigration office. We got a quote from them as well as all the paperwork we'll need to send in if we decide to sign up with them. The lady we spoke with didn't speak English very well, though her English was far better than our German. She asked us if we spoke French, but no luck there. Perhaps someday we will, but learning German is going to be our first priority. Or at least getting a basic command of it. At the end of the interview, we realized that she could have spoken to us in Spanish, as I believe it is her native language, and MrB studied it all through high school and knows it fairly well. I think it would have been much less awkward for her, but we managed, and all turned out fine in the end.

After that we wandered around in the Marktplatz area looking at the shops, and halfheartedly looking for a place to find me some better sandals to walk around in. At the beginning of last week I had an unfortunate incident with my ultra heavy suitcase and my toe which resulted in a rather nastily broken toenail on my big toe. I was able to wear sandals the whole week I was at my in-laws . Good thing, because those and my sneakers were the only shoes not packed in boxes to be shipped to Switzerland. However, they aren't very good to walk around all day in and were giving me blisters. I never found a good alternative, and gave up and started wearing my sneakers the next day.

It started raining again on the walk home. We stopped in at the pizza take out place that is the first floor of our apartment building and got dinner. Every time we go in the building we get to smell the pizza being made and it makes us hungry for pizza! They use some sort of salami rather than pepperoni, and their idea of olives on pizza was a whole TWO olives! but it was tasty pizza. It did drive home that eating out is expensive here. The cost of the pizza itself wasn't too bad, but since we didn't have much in the way of drink or anything, we got a Sprite and a beer with it, and two tiny cups of gelati, and that really added to the price.

That night we were treated to a major thunderstorm that kept us awake for some time. One lightning bolt was so close that the resulting crack of thunder about deafened us for a few minutes! Getting used to this time change is going to take a while...