Abenteuer Fünfzehn: Museumsnacht

Ok, another short post: Museumsnacht.

Museumsnacht was genuinely cool.

One night a year, you can blow 25 francs on a special pass and get into all of the museums in Bern until 2 in the morning. This may not sound cool in itself; however, the Bernese have taken this opportunity and turned it into possibly the largest city-wide party after Carnival.

On museum night, stages, food tents, and drink tents are set up all around towns. Bright colored lights illuminate and project symbols onto all the local buildings. Various local bands perform every kind of music you can think of, anywhere they feel like it (including, as it turns out, inside of the museums themselves). A giant antique car taxi service is set up in front of the Bundeshaus--patrons can, for a fee, get themselves transported to any of the local museums. There were also Shetland pony-drawn carriages for the kids (I was jealous).


I wound up visiting 3 museums during the evening--the Bern History Museum/Einstein Museum, the Kunsthalle, and the Alpine museum. I also got to all the important historical buildings lit up (which was beautiful!) and check out the awesome old cars. Unfortunately, most of my pictures didn't turn out very well (again, my camera doesn't work especially well at night.)

Here are a few of the photos I did take:

A cool old car

The Bundeshaus, all lit up

The History/Einstein museum

I also saw some really cool things inside the museums--for example, the Alpine Museum featured an exhibit on Swiss exploration of the Himalayas  and the Kunsthalle featured several galleries of modern art.

The Einstein museum featured a host of information about Jewish culture, American culture, and the World Wars, as well as information about (get this) Einstein. My favorite museum, however, was the history museum. It featured things from all over the world.

World's largest hookah

This is the sort of map Pacific islanders used to travel between islands

Chinese shadow puppets

A Hawaiian cloak made entirely out of feathers

To me, the most interesting thing in the museum was the tapestry section. The natural history museum features a vast display of medieval tapestries. Being rather immersed in medieval illumination lately (due to classes), this section fascinated me. No wonder I didn't get home until after three in the morning!