This Saturday was wonderful! My host family and I left the house at 12:30 and hit the highway to Basel. Basel is one of the larger cities of Switzerland, the third largest after Zürich and Geneva, it has a Population about 165,000. It took us around an hour and a half to drive there, on the way my host sister and I did her English homework. She must read the novel 1984, she finds it quite disturbing, whereas I find it mind-twisting with an intelligent plot. We finished chapter 6 right before we pulled into the parking garage... perfect timing! Our first stop in Basel was the theater, it turned out to be quite crowded because we had chosen the exact same day as Switzerland's largest comic-con. The streets were filled with superhero, villains, jokers, and everything else imaginable. We left the fantasy filled streets and entered the theater. The musical we were going to see is the famous "Cats" based on a book of poetry written by T.S. Elliot. Cats is famous for dancing, costumes, and the beautiful song memory. The plot introduces different types of cats in this "clan" on the one night a year where they all meet. On this night on of the cats is chosen to go to cat heaven. I didn't understand the story completely, it might have needed some background information, however I very much enjoyed the costumes and dancing. It was well preformed. We exited the theater covering our eyes for the blinding sun, and weaved our way back through the swarms of cosplayers. After entering the automobile and driving a mile or two, we arrived at our next parking garage (side note: Switzerland has a lot more parking garages than Bend... then again Bend only had one parking garage)(second side note: I think Gretchen has at least 4 parking garages and it only has a population of 16,000 in comparison to Bend's 85,000)(third side note: I think Bend might need another parking garage). Back to the story, sorry for all of the side notes... So our adventure continued with waiting. We arrived at our restaurant too early, so in order to pass the time we went into a second restaurant and ordered drinks. The clock ticked and slowly our reservation was upon us... it was time to walk into the "Blind Cow". The blind cow is a resturant, which provides jobs for blind people as waiters of waitresses. In order to make you understand how it feels to be blind, you are led into a completely dark room, you would not even be able to see your hand in front of your face. Our waitresses name was Julia, she guided us into the resturant via shoulder train (holding onto the sholders of the person in front of you). She guided us to our table, pulled the chairs out, and proceeded to take our order. She had a mind map of the whole resturant, she new exactly where each chair was, where to put the glasses no plates down, where to talk and face. I had no idea that a blind person would be able to be a waiter. We chose the sunrise menu for dinner and had to guess the whole night what we were eating. I am still not positive what I had, so I will just leave that description out. All in all it was a great day with lovely people.
