29th April 2010 (afternoon) - Central Europe – Basal and Paris

This is a small town which sits on the border of three countries, Switzerland, Germany and France. In fact we were never sure which country we were in at any time. If you bought anything i.e. eating challenges somewhere in Francs you realized you were in Switzerland and if you paid for something in Euro you knew you were in Germany and this all happened on the same street. In Basal we had to split the teams with Rainey and Zoe because of the new 3 scavenge rule but Basal is so small that we were constantly running into them or bumping into each other no matter how hard we tried to be separate. At one point we had to move our bags from the German train station and move them across town by tram to the out of the Swiss/ French station so they were in the correct place for us to catch our train to Paris. These bags are such a trial, at some point you want to literally give them to the next person you see on the street because you are so fed up with lifting and pulling them.

In Basal we only had six things to do. We had to find 2 museums in 2 separate parts of town, in fact the foundation Basal Museum was 15 minutes out of town by tram;' there were suppose to find a Rothko painting, a Monet and identify a picture he had given us. Our luck was that Henri Rosseau was on display and all the Rothkos were on loan to another museum. The unidentified painting was also out on loan so we were only able to see the Monet. This was a huge 3 canvas/one piece painting of Water Lilies. I usually like Monet's water lilies but this one was very dark and dreary. It was displayed in a huge room by itself. There was a large white sofa placed across from the work of art and the end of the room was a huge glass window which bought in lots of natural light. The view out through the window was quite spectacular as well.
We were not allowed to take photos in the museum, infact they took away our cameras.

We then had to head back to Basal and had to find the Picasso room in the KunstMuseum. This was challenge turned out to be interesting to me, even though I am not an art enthuses. At the Kunst there were many pieces of Picasso on display. On the third floor there were about 6 pieces of his work on display , then on the second floor there was 1 piece and on the first floor there was an entire room devoted to Picasso. I had only ever seen the more radical works of art that Picasso had painted. In this display I realized that Picasso's first works were quite normal, for example one of his earlier pieces was a "loaf of bread on a cutting board", he repeatedly painted this piece and you could see the "deterioration" in his work as he got older. The older work of " loaf of bread" was very unrecognizable compare to the first one. I also could not believe that I could stand in a room with a dozen pieces of Picasso's collection. It was kind of cool. I also never knew that Picasso had done so many different works of art.
We were not allowed to take photos here either but I sneeked one.

We also had to find :- the clue stated " In Munster Church one of my favorite humanist lies; to paraphrase him --- intolerance is a bummer. Find his tomb. The man was Erasmus von Rotterdam who died in 1536. We found a large marble plaque inscribed in gold in the church in remembrance of him. Munster church had a neat sundial clock on the side. If you look carefully you can see it on the side above the patterened roof.

Then it was off to the Marketplatz where, we had to buy something in the market, we bought a huge pretzel to eat on the train.

We also had to find something that represented the FC Basal Football Team. There colours are red and blue. I don't think that Basal is so proud of their team because it was very difficult to find anything from the team. We finally found a shirt but it cost $125.00 Euros so we decided to let Lily take a photo wearing it. We caught a tram back to the train station to collect our bags out of storage and get on the train to Paris.
We managed it all and caught the train again with minutes to spare. In fact Rainey stopped to go to the bathroom and we were sure he was not going to make it. In fact he would not have made it if the train did not sit for 10 minutes. We are off to Paris – that is many hours from now - but we are on our way. We are getting much closer to the end of this leg.

The train was so full that we couldn't find our seats so we sat where ever we could find some empty seats but a few stops later some people came and tossed us out of our seat. We realized that it was time to find our purchased seats. There is no none to help you, no conductor to show you where your seats are, the cars have no numbers on them. We knew we had 2^nd class tickets and when we walked all the way through the train we could only find first class cars. We were really lost. Finally someone told us that the very first car, the one 3 cars down through 1^st class was the last 2^nd class car. Who figures, so we struggled down the entire length of the train through hundreds of people to our seats and when we finally made it to our seats they were full of another family, two grandparents, their daughter and a sleeping baby. They were real spread out with their suitcases, maps, newspaper, baby pram and food everywhere. They had made themselves very comfortable and they were very disgruntled when we had the "audacity" to request OUR reserved seat. Here is a familar picture of Lily as she tried to bring her blog up to date.
When we finally made it to Paris hauling our luggage, we stopped and asked directions to our hotel by the local metro. We had to change trains four different times, each time we had to haul our suitcases, backpacks and handbags – out the train up flights of stairs down the next flight of stairs to the next train platform. When we finally got to the closest train station to our hotel and we struggled up the ""final" set of steps, we were dreaming of showers and clean clothes and an end to this suitcase nightmare, when we found ourselves in an enclosed park with a chain link fence 6 feet tall encircling it and no way out. I thought that Zoe was going to start crying because she was so frustrated but we had no other choice but to head back to the station and try another exit. This entailed carrying those miserable bags back down the steps. I had had enough, I was tired and miserable so I stood on the top step and I pushed my suitcase down the stairs, much to all the passerby's amazement. We then trundled through the station again. We finally limped into the hotel, looking very bedraggled and sorry for ourselves. We had one more surprise coming our way - we lined up at the reception to check- in to discover that there are 2 hotels of the same name in Paris and the one we really needed was close to the first train stop, four stations ago. I was so disappointed I wanted to cry. We were all at the end of our nerves, we were all ready to just throw the game and quit. While we stood there looking at each other we realized that 2 of the challenges in Paris were close by, so we checked our luggage with the bag check and headed back to the train station. The one good thing was that both the restaurant that we had to do an eating challenge at was next door and 1 train stop away was the Arc de Defense that was 50 points.

We visited the arch, took the train back and did the mandatory eating at St. Georges, had dinner and then called a taxi to carry us to the right hotel. $150.00 euro later we had driven through the whole of Paris on our way to the right hotel but it gave Lily the opportunity to see some of the famous sights as they whizzed by. We finally got to our correct hotel at 8.00pm.
We had arranged to go to the Moulin Rouge Show for 10.30 pm and to meet up with Zoe and Rainey there. Lily and I were suppose to go out and scavenge. Scavenge what! Lily and I had long hot showers and she spent an hour getting ready for the show. She was so excited that she could hardly sit down. She did her hair, put on a pretty dress and we set off looking like humans instead of bums for the show, feeling quite proud of ourselves. We arrived at 10.30 and watched the show. It was an experience to watch Lily's face, she was so enthralled with the costumes and dancers that she was more fun to watch than the real show.

After the show was finished she did a Moulin Rouge dance on the steps which I videoed for points. It was about midnight at this point and we had plotted that there was a weird or different sculpture very close to Moulin Rouge in the Montmatre Square. We found a statue of a man climbing out of the wall. Someone had even painted his fingernails red. Lily discovered that there was an air vent in the ground and if she stood on it we could take a Marilyn Monroe photo.

It was very dark and a little scary as there was a tent in the corner of the square where people were living. I was praying that I would find a TAXI in this remote part of town, as the metro closes at 12.00a and as luck had it, one minute later a taxi cruised by and we jumped in and set off to do 2 mre scavenges. We ran around the Paris until 1.30 collecting some points, we drove through the famous fashion district with all the Dior and Channel etc stores. She was in her element and kept wishing that Savannah was present to see all the high fashion.

We visited the Flame de Liberty which sits above the tunnel where Princess Diana met her demise. People are still leaving her flowers as tributes. We had a spectacular view of the Eiffel Tower all lit up at night from that bridge. Then we headed back to the hotel where we ordered room service and had "dinner"

We are meeting Zoe at 6.00am in the lobby so again it was a night of 3 hours of sleep. Our bodies are getting so accustomed to little sleep that we will have to relearn normal sleep patterns when we get back home.