Trouble on the train

 Today was the day to travel from Luzern to Basel to meet up with our river cruise. Not many pictures today.

While we were in Luzern we would use this arch as a meeting point with our guides. The arch is on a plaza in front of the train station. The back story on the arch is it originally was the entrance to the train station until the station burned down. This arch was still standing and was taken down and rebuilt on the plaza allowing for the construction of the new train station.

So I had booked our tickets a few weeks ago for the trip to Basel and thought we would want to take the early train to Basel to spend the day and see the sights before leaving town. On Wednesday the weather forecast looked like rain all day so I mentioned our dilemma about going early to our guide. She said it doesn’t matter… you can go anytime as long as you have bought a ticket. We thought great.. We can take a bit more time in the morning and catch a train an hour later. We were comfortably sitting on the train when they came to scan our tickets. The train people looked funny and asked why we were on this train and not the one booked. We told them what we had been told and they told us no that was not correct…We had purchased a ticket that was only valid on the train that we purchased. Read suddenly feeling quite awkward… the penalty for taking the wrong train was you would have to purchase new tickets and pay a ninety dollar fine each…(the tickets were only 30 dollars to start with) Fortunately they let us off with a promise we would never do it again…which in many ways is true as I am not sure I will ever be in Switzerland again…at least for many years. 

Well for a rather uncomfortable last hour of the train ride we made it to Basel and walked the two miles to the boat. As a tip for people traveling where you can’t have cell service or where you might not due to poor signal you can download google maps to your phone and use it for directions like you have cell service. That is how we have been getting around in Europe with out getting lost. 

We dropped off our luggage at the boat and looked for something interesting to do. We found the Museum of Pharmacy to go to. All I can say is I am soooo glad that we live when we do as the remedies of old were quite unusual at best…

This is a typical first aid kit for the 1800s that a physician might carry with them. The medicines all by today’s standards seem quite crazy… some examples:

• Rendered Human fat.. was supposed to have special healing properties. They could not use fat from people dying from illness but instead would harvest it from executed people.
• It was thought that similar things would give healing. So to treat a scorpion sting you would use ground up scorpions.
• Arsenic was considered to be great medicine and had strong healing properties. Well some didn’t make it after receiving the treatments. It is thought half died for the illness half from the treatment.
• Evidently there developed an entire specialty in treating people with Feces (animal and human) I guess it was one of the early cost saving methods in medicine because supplies were quite available.
• Lots of ways to draw out blood to correct bad humors
• two display cases of examples of various dirt mixed with clay that were sold as treatments. You would grind them up and drink in water. Highly effective I am sure.

It was in the later part of the 1800s with the advent of chemicals used for other purposes that actual medicines started to come about. Interesting for Basel a city of 175,000 one company that originally developed dyes for silk ribbons and found that the chemicals developed could be used for other purposes has become Novartis a large pharmaceutical company… another company that started with one manufactured drug that became a hit went on to become Roche… makers of Valium and many other medications. 

Well we are floating down the Rhine on a comfortable boat for the next while. More to come on our adventures. For today we did get into some trouble but we were Never Quite Lost!