The first in a series of long overdue updates! We took a trip inspired by music history to St. Gall, home of some really old manuscripts showing some of the earliest forms of musical notation. The famous library is decorated in a ridiculously ornate baroque style, is filled with much older books, and is housed in a weirdly incongruous modern building. We couldn't take pictures inside the library, so we bought postcards, and then we took pictures of those to post on here! This is what the library looks like:
It's kind of surreal to be in there. To protect the floors from being scuffed, everyone has to wear these enormous gray fleece slippers over their shoes. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a picture of those! Because they're one-size-fits-all, they were ridiculously oversized on me, and I couldn't walk normally. I had to shuffle and slide around the floor.
They had one music manuscript on display that dates from ca. 900. Luckily, I was able to buy a postcard with the image of the same page that was displayed (the one on the right):
We also walked around the town, which was cute, and which features these ornately decorated bay windows called oriels:
We also stopped in a local brewery, which is our favorite type of tourism.
After leaving St. Gall, we stopped in Winterthur, which is a small, quaint town. It apparently has some nice museums, but seeing as we got there after 5 pm, everything was closed. They did have some interesting benches/street art:
Winterthur also, amazingly, had this place:
I got a bagel with cream cheese for the first time in almost three months!
On the way back to Basel we stopped in Zurich to watch the first USA game vs. England, so that was fun.
damn i wanna see that postcard!
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