Museumsuferfest!!!

Yesterday was the start of the three day long Museumsuferfest. This is a festival along the Museum Embankment (Museumsufer) that includes stalls up and down both sides of the Main, special events at many of the museums, late hours for all the museums, 4€ entrance for ALL the museums, and fireworks on Sunday night. One of my TA friends and I left school early and went down at about 3:30. We walked past some of the stalls on the way to the big art gallery, the Städel Museum. However when we got there it was closed! It is under construction and will be closed until November. Later on, I also found out that the Historiches Museum is also closed! No surprise there if I had known that the building we saw demolished had been the museum. So two of the museums I really wanted to see will have to wait.

Some of the sights we saw on the way:

All the stalls up and down the Main, I've never seen so many!

One of the stalls selling champagne-like punch. It looked beautiful.

One of the many stages. I even saw competing stages: two stages set up facing each other only about 100 m apart. On this stage they had children dancing in German traditional costume.

As we were in desperate need of an air conditioned building (it was 33, super sunny and super humid), we went into the next museum, the Communications Museum. It was great. It was the history of communication from early post (circa 1700s) to modern cell phones and internet. Here are some of my highlights:

- Old letters. They had letters from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. I loved looking at the handwriting. I wish I could write like some of the old calligraphy. They also had drawings and paintings of the first mail carriers.

- The collection of Deutsche Post vehicles and post boxes:

The "Kaiserliche Post"

A post van from the 1920s or 30s. It said that this van went 18 km/h

A post VW bug, from the 1950s

Post boxes through time. It was interesting reading what they said. Some had a day of the week and a time, some had multiple days and times, others had places as well. Some just said the day of the week. Now, the post boxes look like the one of the very bottom right (of the right picture).

- Telegrams sent to and from the Titanic. Some were telling people when and where to meet them when they arrived. Others were to and from other ships about the Titanic hitting an iceberg. It was quite something walking around reading all the telegrams. 

- mail sorting machine. They had a working machine that sorts all of the letters. We even got to watch it working! The lady first told us to move back because it moves very quickly and can be dangerous. The letters are lined up in the trough at the very front of the photo (you can see a few there), and then they shoot through the computer part and into the sorting chamber. The sorting chamber then spews them out into the various black cubbies. 

Mail sorting machine

- Telephones! They had a set of rotary phones where you could phone between them and watch the machine connecting them. We had some fun trying those out:

Cara trying out the phones

- The collection of various machines. Old phones, radios, morse code transmitters, etc. 

After the Communications Museum we wandered back through the stalls and to the Römer. By the time we got there we had to sit down. So we sat on the steps of the city hall, ate chocolate covered popcorn and people watched. That revived us enough to check out the Schirn art gallery. It is not a gallery with permanent collections, but an exhibit gallery. We went into the "Secret Society" exhibit. It was weird. We couldn't really figure out the connection to secret societies for most of the works. And being all modern art, I wasn't too much of a fan. Some of it was interesting to wander round, but we didn't go to the other modern art exhibit. 

Instead, we headed to the Dom Museum inside the cathedral. This was a small collection of church related objects. Unfortunately it was all in German, so I'm not sure exactly what the relation was. They might have all come from the various churches that have stood on that site, though there were also some that did not. There was a Jewush headstone from the 14th C. They had many robes worn by priests or bishops, all the way back to the 14th C. Unfortunately I didn't take any photos of the amazing embroidery. There were also ornate alterpieces and decorations for the altar. There were items that must have come from chapels. The last object was a large model of what the cathedral looked like in 1942. 

The one object I took a picture of was the replica crown from the Holy Roman Emperors. It must have weighed a ton with all those huge gem stones on it!

After that we met up with some other friends for dinner, drinks and watching the amazing thunderstorm. We were sitting on a patio under cover and it was really nice watching and listening to the rain, lightning and thunder. Luckily it paused for us to leave. By the time I got home though it had started again - good thing I had an umbrella. 

This afternoon I am going to head back into Frankfurt, check out some more museums. This evening a big group of teachers are meeting up to go on the Beer Bike :)