“The best zoo in all of the world
O that’s right, you’re from New York; so maybe the Bronx Zoo is better” The pitch was appealing enough, and so Ben and I decided to spend our afternoon at the Basel Zoo while we waited for our Lea, our Swiss friend, whom we met in Nice, to come to town with her friend Eileen.
The zoo here is fantastic, featuring all sorts of really big, really cool looking animals. Spent a good few hours there just cruising around and laughing at the animals’ wacky antics. The monkeys were fascinating. They had these puzzles in their cages composed of multi-leveled boxes with holes in the floor of each level as well as hey and apples. They had to use their fingers or reeds that they picked up from around the cage to scoop from holes in the sides and fronts of the puzzles to eventually drop the fruit through the holes on the bottom of each level to the bottom level in to which they could reach and grab their reward.
Ben left earlier than I to make our appointment with Lea and Eileen, because I didn’t want to miss out on the rhinos. Eventually I left the zoo and got superlost meeting up with them. But when I finally made it to them I saw Ben sitting with the two blonds and some sort of ice cream sundae which I was informed was actually an ice coffee. In Switzerland, ice coffee can be as much as 12 franks and is much closer to a coffee ice cream shake than an actual coffee on ice.
We enjoyed one another’s company a while then split up with plans to go to a cool beach bar that night. Ben and I headed back to the hostel then grabbed dinner at the painfully redolent of home “City Liner” kebap joint. For those who don’t know, there was a point in 10th grade where getting [mozzarella] sticks” or “[chicken] tenders” at City Diner was a biweekly event.
Back at the YMCAHQ we changed then went back to Barfüssenplatz to meet them, where we found a men’s beach volleyball tournament was taking place. Though the age old beach volleyball adage goes “bump, set, spike,” this game had some real flare to it, including a number of blocked spikes, fake-out spikes that turned in to lofters, and outlandish saves. Very exciting, and free.
We got a text that they were there and we found them talking to two Swiss dudes, one of whom was named Timur. After five minutes of listening to their Swiss-German banter, we were relieved to find that they had their own plans for the night, and so we four began to walk over to the beach bar.
At the bar we heard from one of the bouncers that a Thai Boxing competition was taking place nearby. I couldn’t resist. Convinced the rest of the group, and we even got in for free. The place was a caricature of machismo, a giant tent with a gaudy purple light on top, featuring a bar, a car exhibit, and then the red, white and blue ring in the middle.
We noticed near the cars a cretin of a man that looked like he belonged in Harry Potter. His face looked as if it were sagging forward off of his skull a little bit and his ears pointed out perpendicular to his head, no doubt a condition of the almost daily beatings that his face takes. His massive body was shirtless and dripping. We got a picture of us with him, me in a headlock and Ben with his arm around the guy. My shirt will have to be laundered more than once to rid it of the man-juices that it’s absorbed off of him.
When we finally took our seats with our drinks and the show began, the lights dimmed and firedancers atop giant archways at either end of the tent began an elaborate dance. Out of the far archway came a German fighter, short, stocky, blonde, 1m 7dm and 167 kg. His opponent was a taller, darker, Swiss at 1m 9dm and 167 kg of unchecked agression. Naturally, the Swiss was the crowd favorite.
As they squared off, you could see that the Swiss was hungrier, slamming his gloves against the German’s in an attempt to intimidate him. The fight was fairly one-sided in all three rounds. The German audaciously swallowed a slew of punches and roundhouse kicks to his head and body, looking worse with each strike. When the decision finally came in, the Swiss stood up on the ropes and elicited a response from his fans.
From the fight we went back to the beach bar, where we ordered some drinks and sat down talking for a long time about many subjects. I was given an absured personality test by Lea:
“You’re walking in the forest. You come to a strawberry field, but there’s a fence. How high is it?” (Lea)
“sorry?” (Ari)
“how high is the fence? (Lea)
“Don’t touch it, it might be electric” (Ben)
“I would imagine a couple of metres would be necessary to protect from most woodland animals.” (Ari)
“OK, so do you climb it?” (lea)
“no problem. (Ari)
“how much strawberries do you take?” (lea)
“I could only eat like a kg before I get sick”(Ari)
“ok. a kg. and then a farmer comes and yells at you, what do you do?” (lea)
“I pretend not to speak his language.” (Ari)
“would you come back and do it again?” (lea)
“yes.” (Ari)
So I was told that the gate is my inhibitions, and they’re high because of how high the gate is. Strawberries are my sex drive and it’s low because I only took a kg. The farmer is my conscience, and I’m out of touch with it. Or maybe, I countered, the fucking gate has to keep animals out, the strawberries make you sick if you eat too many, and fuck the farmer. It’s a good thing those girls are studying art history and not psychology.
At the end of the night we all went back to the YMCA to play guitar and sing for a while, which devolved in to lying in laps and chilling in the late morning. Despite how well Eileen and I were vibing off of one another, despite how eminent a consumation of our attraction seemed if only for a second of privacy, we were torn apart by Lea, who called a cab on the sly. In a desperate attempt as Eileen is literally walking out the door, I call after her “i have something for you in my room.” lame-
