Weil am Rhein

Weil am Rhein is a little city on the German corner of the Swiss-French-German border. It contains many contemporary architectural gems owned by Vitra, a world-renowned designer furniture company. They include masterworks of Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, Nicholas Grimmshaw, and Alvaro Siza. I forked over some money for the museum admission and to go on a walking tour through the buildings. It was so worth it! The buildings were everything but boring and the museum had a great feature exhibit on American artist and designer George Nelson. I was totally feeling the vibes of artistic expression and wasn't about to let it end. I flipped through my architectural book on Basel, which was given to me by a coworker, and found there was another building by Zaha Hadid just a bus ride away from the Vitra Museum. After greeting some people I recognized from the hostel, I invited the two strangers to come with me. When we arrived at our destination stop, we saw nothing but an empty parking lot. No building. No signage. No nothin. In a second wave of panic, I noticed something else was missing. No camera! My day of intellectual delight had instantly turned into a frustrating scavenger hunt and I dragged these two poor souls with me! First thing's first. I didn't want to bring these people there for nothing. I decided to trust my gut and lead them through the empty parking lot, hoping for something beyond. We found a pretty lame park with a pretty lame map, then eventually the pretty lame building (must have been maintained by public funds). Our mission was a half-success and one of the strangers said she'd email her pictures to me. As we made our way back to the bus stop, I couldn't think of anything but my camera, my first and only camera for six years...

No way!!! I am so lucky! I thought my camera was gone! I was already grieving the loss of those beautiful pictures of southern Germany, the interesting buildings I saw, the documented memories of my trip! I can't believe the SAME, EXACT bus driver came back on his route with my camera in his hand! I owe it all to the honest people on bus route 55.