RM in Basel: Notes from Semi-Locals
As we live just an hour away from Basel, imagine our emotional devastation upon finding out that RM visited this city and our country. After losing our minds over his Swiss insta posts, we’re now analyzing his vlog.
First of all, Basel is a city that we’ve visited many times and which is very close to our hearts. When we were kids, Basel was our metropolitan escape from our rural purgatory. Clearly, this was RM’s rural escape from his metropolitan purgatory.
We are sure that coming from Seoul, Basel feels like a rural town. Within Switzerland, Basel is actually one of the main cities. It’s a center of culture and a university town. It’s also an international hub (by Swiss standards) as it lies on the border between Switzerland, France, and Germany. Additionally, it has one of Switzerland’s three airports (it’s the smallest of the three).
Art Basel is extremely famous and attracts a huge artsy crowd. We’re very disappointed in ourselves for having mis-foreseen Tae at the Montreux Jazz Festival and not RM at Art Basel.
When we watched RM’s vlog, we recognized a lot of the places, and on our latest shopping trip to Basel, we looked for the café he is at in this bf pic:
Not only did we find it (turned out to be a v random Italian restaurant), but we also accidentally ended up stumbling on a lot of places that appear in the vlog (minus the museums, lol, not into that) just because Basel is so small.
For reference, here is a handy (and totally not unhinged) map of some places RM went to in central Basel:
Just to give you an idea of how small Basel is, walking from the Kunstmuseum (bottom of the map) to Art Basel (top right) takes about 17 minutes.
You might notice that RM seemed to have kept a pretty short radius for his activities (as represented in the vlog -- we don’t know what he was up to after hours 😏). We actually recognized the hotel he was staying in, and funnily enough, it’s on the same street as Art Basel as well as the ramen bar, which he visits twice, and The Pub, which he also visits twice in the vlog.
Not on this map are the SBB train station, the Beyeler Foundation, the Tinguely Museum, the Vitra Design Museum (which is fuckin France) as they are further out. To go to these places, he took the tram, a quintessential feature of the Basel landscape.
He easily could have taken the taxi, and it warms our heart that he chose instead to take public transport, which can be difficult to navigate (especially in German).
As for the food, we can’t believe this is what the hotel serves for breakfast.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with this, we were just surprised that the restaurant would serve such non-Swiss breakfast foods (also, that croissant looks janky as hell) (no hate tho). The only Swiss things about this breakfast are the orange juice coupled with the coffee.
From what we can see in the rest of the vlog, it doesn’t seem like RM had the opportunity of eating the Swiss national dishes of raclette (melted cheese on potatoes) and fondue (bread dipped in melted cheese). We do think this merits another trip to Switzerland, if only for the culinary cheese journey (P.S. we happen to have mastered these dishes perfectly; come visit us, Namjoon).
We thought a lot about how RM must have been feeling, as he was here only a day or two after the Festa 2022 video dropped and Hybe lost 1 million in stocks. We hope it was a peaceful refuge from the deluge and that he found comfort in this rural town that doesn’t stock any k-pop albums apart from two copies of BE in the biggest CD shop in town.
To conclude, seeing RM casually stroll through the streets of our land, in one of our favorite cities, was incredibly surreal and astoundingly heartbreaking. Basel, of all places, was the last city we were expecting him in. We have never been the same since.
