Spindle: Sunday is the quietest day, organs
bellowing behind wooden doors, shops
closed and birds flying, circling above...
except schoolfoals on field trips?

Parcly Taxel: That was indeed Lucerne on the Sunday when we checked out of our hotel – absent most of its tourists, wherever they might come from. Since our upcoming train ride was relatively short, we elected to take a little longer eating breakfast and packing our luggage.

InterRegio being the most frequently used train service type in Switzerland, most of that service's rolling stock is double-decker, and we went upstairs for the first time. There I saw a group of students wearing red and white Scout-like neckties, apparently heading for a more forwards car of the same train. Spindle's body wrapped like a scarf around my neck, I felt the acceleration but two minutes later.

Spindle: IR 27 to Basel SBB started out quiet on the upper deck too, but grew a bit louder and friendlier as more passengers travelling to one of the country's major rail hubs got on board. The city itself is still predominantly German-speaking, but its outer limits directly touch the international borders with France and Germany through the Rhine, so an appreciable number of signs in the city have French text too.

Further speaking to the cosmopolitan nature of Basel (Bâle) was the stylish interior of the hotel we had reserved for this day, the Hyperion Basel. Fitting its logo, a Diancie was the receptionist helping to carry our luggage up to our room, since check-in had to wait until 3pm.

Parcly: All public transport in Basel consists of buses or trams, but the network is very dense here. To fill sightseeing time we first went to the Marktplatz and Rathaus, still in use by the city government despite being centuries old and containing some Renaissance murals. Two buskers happened to be there playing various classical music pieces for visitors' enjoyment.

Spindle: More impressive was the next local landmark we came across, the centuries-old Spalentor – a 600-plus-year-old city gate now isolated and the only remaining example of its kind preserved. Its pyramidal roof sports a pattern shaped and coloured much like the scales on a kirin's back, albeit embedded in a hexagonal tiling and perfectly straight and angular. A tram line approaches it head-on at first, only swerving aside at the last opportunity.

Parcly: My first wish for Basel (a written-down list for my genie self to grant, not just something kept in my mind), however, was to visit the monument near the aforementioned Switzerland/France/Germany tripoint. To fulfill my wish I had to board a tram to the nearest station, then walk 30 minutes under mostly direct, sizzling sunlight, across plain truss bridges and multiple railway tracks.

Princess Celestia: Fortunately a good deal of trees and other shaded spots lie on the route eventually paralleling the Rhine, places where the genie could let her muscles and flailing cornflower blue tail rest. Little boars were moored on the waterway's edges, while a larger one had been repurposed as a floating restaurant complete with a disco wrecking ball. On the Rhine itself cruised a sleek semi-luxury ship and container traffic.

Parcly: Those ended up being dirty annoyances. I finally reached an outdoor restaurant at the tip of a mini-peninsula, with its sign reading

SANDOASE
Three Countries Corner
France - Switzerland - Germany

47° 35' 23.57'' N | 7° 35' 20.62'' E

The artificial peninsula points north of northwest; looking in that direction France owns all of the left bank and is joined by a rainbow-arched bridge to German land, itself lying beyond a customs post at the German/Swiss border running rightwards from the Rhine. The monument itself looks like a cross between a boat propeller and Celestia's horn, its three fins stickered with a corresponding flag.

Celestia: Of course, Parcly had to retrace her route under the same sizzling sun to get back to Basel's public transport network and from there a quite uneventful lunch.

Spindle: We then proceeded to grant Parcly's second wish at the Jean Tinguely Museum, but not before observing a good-sized trickle of ponies dunking in the fairly clean Rhine, swimming aids or otherwise. The Swiss namesake of this museum was a satirist in the Dada tradition – one proposed etymology regarding the Dada name is French slang for a hobby-horse. (Which I resemble somewhat, lacking hindlegs.)

With his overcomplicated and functionally useless kinetic sculptures he targeted excessive automation à la the Flim Flam Brothers while retaining a certain whimsicality and lightheartedness. Even though I could possess the machines, I would not have in any case done so...

Parcly: ...and because deep down I wanted to just curl up like a cat and stare at these contraptions whirring for nothing, for hours on end.

Tinguely's scrap metal sculptures were mostly made in the 1960s and 1970s, and now must be treated with great care to avoid their rusting parts from falling out. His largest work can only be run for a few minutes at a time, enforced using an electronic step-button on the floor.

Overall my experience was much less unnerving than at Kunstmuseum Zürich, if only because of my deep understanding of magical technology.

Spindle: Back outside the ponies were still swimming – or rather just floating downstream, holding onto floats. We decided to call it a day and return to the Hyperion and order the hotel's dinner of veal stew with rösti and carrots and bread slices. We gazed out the wide-open window, a surreal view of a staircase-shaped skyscraper and companions striving above an otherwise low-lying city, pondering our re-entry into Germany scheduled for tomorrow...