Basel is located in the northwest of Switzerland in the border triangle between Germany, France and Switzerland. Basel is Switzerland’s third most populous city. The city on the Rhine is considered the country’s art and culture capital. Basel is a city with three official languages: French, German, and Italian.

Basel’s old town is filled with picturesque alleyways and over 200 fountains.

Highlights include the town hall and the cathedral. Basel Minster is a religious building in the Swiss city of Basel, originally a Roman Catholic cathedral and today a Reformed Protestant church.

The original cathedral was built between 1019 and 1500 in Romanesque and Gothic styles.

The Basel Town Hall is a 500-year-old building dominating the Marketplace. The Town Hall houses the meetings of the Cantonal Parliament as well as the Cantonal Government of the canton of Basel-Stadt.

Daniel Bernoulli, a famous mathematician and physicist was a native son of Basel. Bernoulli’s principle is a key concept in fluid dynamics that relates pressure, speed and height. The resulting Bernoulli Equation is often written as:

P + 1/2ρv² + ρgh = constant, where

Pressure (P): The force exerted by the fluid per unit area.

Velocity (v): The speed of the fluid.

Density (ρ): The mass of the fluid per unit volume.

Elevation (h): The height of the fluid above a reference point.

Gravity (g): The acceleration due to gravity. 

The majority of my graduate work in engineering involved Bernoulli’s principle.

We spent our “downtime” in a small plaza, Basel’s Petersplatz, watching cultural dances and children riding on the beautifully decorated, illuminated Frankfurt horse carousel. The antique carousel has a “horse” made by Peter Philip Schneider in Frankfurt, Germany, around the late 19th century. The horse is a rare, hand-carved and painted example from the golden age of carousels. It is a standing style carousel horse, intricately detailed and professionally restored.