pats Haze on shoulder because in Spain you don’t pat people on the head Good job!
About a year ago I joined this… “Society for Cultural and Gastronomic Exploration (nerds welcome; non-nerds even more, we don’t have enough)”. It happens to have a Basel branch; the Basel coordinator is the guy who finally gave me some information on Swiss medical insurance. I’d missed the December dinner (no room) and the January meeting (BC :o arrived and c’mon, I would have spent the whole dinner thinking about it, I stayed up until 3am looking at the gorgeous Outland skies), so I’d decided that I’d make it for February, which was at a Chinese restaurant and there’s a direct tram line, if we didn’t finish too late I could take the tram back.
Going out to dinner on Ash Wednesday feels weird, but in my case I reckon that the need to Kick Myself Off My Asocial Butt is greater than the Need To Keep The Calendar In Mind. I had fish and no dessert, though; I usually have a pretty light dinner so piling it up precisely on Ash Wednesday would have deserved a couple smacks.
We were 7: a Pole, myself and 5 locals. The coordinator, Urs, works for an IT company whose biggest client is my own client; the other woman, Martina, is one of our PWC auditors. Two others work for companies that work for ours, but they’re assigned to other clients ATM. There ain’t nobody in this town working for that company, nooooo, these are not the robots you are looking for either.
I work part of the time in our offices in Switzerland, but mostly for now in a German factory. Last Thursday at work, the only woman in our group (we’re 5 out of 200) who’s “from the factory” cut the ties of the two guys who were wearing one. When we asked, all we could obtain was that “it’s traditional”. Thanks to our Most Magnificent Straight Dope, I learned that it’s part of the Carnaval celebrations, called Fasching (but also Carnaval, this is relevant later). The German town celebrated Fasching last weekend, as should be 
but in Basel it lasts three days and it’s always M-W after Ash Wednesday. From the way the Basslers described it yesterday it sounded a lot like the Carnaval de Cádiz: people dressed up in groups, not necessarily “as anything” but necessarily colorful, and one of the high points for any group is some humoristic song and verse which would be completely unintelligible to an outsider, both because a lot of it’s about local stuff and because they crank up the accent.
They told me that whenever some German comes to town and at some point Fasching gets mentioned, they tell the German “oh, but it’s not like your Fasching!” “Isn’t it?” “No, no! Ours is in Lent already! It comes from a military tradition, very serious thing, it’s not a Carnaval.” “Oh, oh.”
Ain’t that what neighbors are for, pulling their leg, taking their money and (on occasion) throwing rocks at them? Oh, you’re also allowed to woo and even marry their daughters, that too.
The Basel office is off Monday and Wednesday, but I’m supposed to be at work in Germany. I’ve asked the German boss for a day off Monday, I want to take pics before everybody gets drunk. If he says “why” I may go and ask for three days 
I’m one of the few people on the team who are on schedule, but it’s kind of a cheat: I don’t so much have a schedule of my own as “lighten other people’s load”. In Spain that’s called “estar de comodín”, “be a Joker”, because you “count as any given card”.
Urs said he’s actually only seen it twice (locals who aren’t going to dress up get the heck out of Tucson if they can), but last year he saw some people who’d set up a table at a tram crossing. In one of the squares where many tram lines meet, there’s several spaces which are not raised, but are large enough for several people to stand in. So these four guys had set up a folding table in one of those spaces and were having their Fasching there.
ducks and runs {{{{{{HUGS}}}}} to Kaiwik. Uh BooFae, you’d best check the water in your office, with two pregnancies so far.