WORDS BY ADRIJANA HUSIC

Milo, how does one choose Basel as a birthday destination, you may wonder? In my case, you open the map, look at what flies direct from home, and find somewhere you have not been. Basel came up, and it was ‘’yes’’ in CAPS, because the first thing you think of when you think of Basel is art, museums, architecture, and summer must be more gentle up there in the mountains. And who am I to say no to the immediate Shibuya Crossing-style questions popping up at one airport serving three countries. You know me, and it will come as no surprise that I booked a hotel in France thinking it was Basel. I am sure someone had a good laugh when reading “Sorry, I booked the wrong city.”

And of course, if there had been a concert in Basel this weekend, you would be reading about that instead. But you will have to be as happy as I was with the stroll I took among Warhol, Miró, Kandinsky and others these three days.

Basel welcoming me with rain was not something I was hoping for on Friday morning. Raining not cats and dogs, but persistent enough, and cold enough that you stand there for a moment genuinely unsure what to do with the day ahead. So, the plan had to shift, and this autumn in August edition started with an early brunch at the Kunstmuseum Bistro. One can be happy with it, for sure.

I spent almost half of Friday in the Kunstmuseum Hauptbau and did not regret a single minute of it, walking past Van Gogh, Monet, Cézanne, Dalí and Picasso one after another, in striking, cold yet warm rooms that impose slowing down. In one of them, Albert Müller’s Two Girls stood in front of Franz Marc’s The Fate of the Animals, carved in wood and casually staring past me at nothing in particular, entirely unconcerned by the apocalypse happening on the wall behind them. As the day passed and the rain finally eased, I went out into the Old Town. I was wondering how a summer kid like me could be so happy with autumn coming so fast. But here, it made perfect sense. Marktplatz, the Rathaus, and all those streets that whisper Look left, look right. All those houses and doors from different centuries, colours and materials that have their own story, leaning on both sides of the Rhine. Standing there in the last of the wet afternoon light, with the river below and the city buzzing around it, I felt like I had been moved through several centuries and a few fairy tales at once. The architecture here keeps doing that to you, shifting from modern to traditional and back again without any warning, and by the end of the evening I was reassured that the whole city is essentially a museum built around a rather dense collection of actual museums.

Missing Japan more and more (ding-dong darling, this one comes soon, though not soon enough), I decided to have a Japanese dinner at Namamen. Pre-birthday wishes along with beef ramen with miso and kimchi on the side, good enough for coldish weather.

Pre-birthday wishes along with beef ramen with miso and kimchi on the side, good enough for coldish weather.

August 22nd was payback time for the 21st. The summer day you could only wish for, sunny but not super-hot. A bit of a breeze from time to time, and off to Vitra Campus. Which is where my birthday quietly became a two-country birthday. Switzerland in the morning, Germany by mid-morning, nobody stopping you or asking you anything along the way, and me spending most of the day genuinely uncertain about which country I was standing in at any given moment.

The Vitra Campus at Weil am Rhein was extraordinary, and despite reading about it, I was not prepared for its scale. Zaha Hadid’s Fire Station, her first completed building, was the whole reason I went, and it did not disappoint me for a second. But then you turn around, and there is Frank Gehry’s Design Museum, and Herzog & de Meuron’s Schaudepot and VitraHaus, and another reason I came here – Tadao Ando– all of them on one campus. While substantially different, they blended with the landscape they sat in. Design that is also applied art, functional and beautiful at the same time, which is a complete contrast to what I had been looking at the day before in the Kunstmuseum. Within the same trip (here within one hour actually), you will find yourself on opposite ends of what art is allowed to be. And when I come back, which I will, this is where I am going first, because you could easily spend more than a day there and I only had part of one.

The Vitra shops and their design books… Mama mia! I behaved reasonably well, all things considered. Have I told you I decided to put the Kindle back into use, aiming to manage the book pile? The Japanese have a word for it, tsundoku, buying books and letting them pile up unread, and having a word for something apparently does nothing to stop you doing it. So far the Kindle is simply being added to the pile of (for now) five new books coming home from this trip.

Back in Basel, a long walk along the Rhine, coffee on the bank, Kleinbasel doing its own quieter thing on the other side of the water. Thai dinner at Boo around Messeplatz, as perfect a choice for a birthday as it could be.

Fondation Beyeler on Sunday morning was pure bliss! Renzo Piano building out in Riehen, with the gardens and architecture arranged so precisely that the setting genuinely competes with what is hanging inside.

You know I have been wearing Mugler Alien for something like twenty years now. I walked into one of the rooms, amazed by the Warhol and Picasso collection on display, and the security guard stopped me very politely and asked which perfume I was wearing, because apparently the entire museum had started to smell like me. He was standing between a Picasso and Warhol’s self-portrait in blue, that untroubled expression looking past both of us at nothing at all.

We chatted, and as he asked where I was from, I braced myself for the usual routine of explaining where Montenegro is and why it should matter to anyone. Instead, he answered me in our language, and I was genuinely stunned. A Brazilian man working in a museum in Basel, who travelled our whole region fifteen years ago, not only Montenegro but the wider area, and who still remembers the cities he visited. He told me he loved it and that he wants to come back. Hearing our language from a non-Balkan person in a museum in Switzerland, because of a perfume, was the thing I did not see coming at all.

Which is, in a way, also the thing about Basel. Most of the time, people speak to you in three languages, switching between them without appearing to notice they are doing it, and it reminds you how connected everything actually is here, in a place where the borders exist on paper and essentially nowhere else. Three countries touching each other, cultures folding into one another, and nobody making any fuss about it.

I could not leave without going back to the Kunstmuseum and the Neubau, for Roy Lichtenstein: Sweet Dreams, Baby! Worth the wait and the second visit to the same museum, because this one is print focused rather than the broad retrospective I saw at the Albertina in Vienna three years ago. So not a repetition at all. Lichtenstein never leaves you with anything less than wow.

While walking, I passed the Cartoonmuseum that was on my optional list, and I fitted it in anyway, and I loved it mostly for the building itself and for the way the floors creak and crack under you, sounds that reverberated through the rooms and felt like part of the exhibition rather than a flaw in it.

St Alban, with the old Paper Mill, the canal and the whole mill quarter, all of it standing in complete opposition to the modern museums and pulling me back down the historical lane instead. Finishing with Spalenberg on the way back up.

On a practical side, public transport is free for visitors and completely effortless; you get a card, and you simply go, no thinking and no calculating. The city also has its distinct rhythm and refuses to be rushed, so most things open at ten or eleven and close by six, and restaurants work in shifts rather than all day.

The museum shops here are museums in their own right and dangerous with it, particularly the home decor sections, which present an entirely separate luggage problem that I have not solved.

This birthday reboot was just as right, full of art, architecture, and inspiration for taking a different angle on daily routines. Art and architecture are also the clearest reminder of where we have come from and how we keep developing, as a species and as individuals. You stand in front of a Cézanne on Friday and next to Hadid’s first building on Saturday, and you understand that both are the same impulse, separated by a century, still going.

Basel was all I was hoping for, and more. Put on Olivia Dean, Millionaire. You will know why.