All that was promised for day two was accomplished! The Communications Museum was great, and the architectural museum was awesome, especially since every descriptive tag had a German and English side. When we got to the top floor, the museum itself got a massive descriptive tag — all very meta. Sadly no photos of either, owing to silly museum policies.
Just try to imagine a herd of sheep created from old-fashioned rotary telephone handsets and coil wire. And, far to the side, a black sheep similarly composed. And a wall of mailboxes spanning the last 200 years. And an exhibit about the internet! (I hear it’s going to be big.) And a mail sorting train car you can go inside! And fax machines!
The architectural museum was all about architectural models, dioramas, and other design artifacts. There was an exhibit about utopian architecture that was sort of scary, and a nice history of human architecture tour, with a few digs at the end against American over-consumption. My favorite designs were amazing tensile structures by Frei Otto.
We also toured the entire Städel art museum in less than an hour; I most enjoyed their new underground contemporary wing, but by this point we were getting a bit museumed out.
We stumbled upon a delicious Turkish place for lunch and got our best service experience so far (the German restaurants we’ve tried have had terrible service), and then walked 2 km to the botanical gardens. We hung out there for a while, seeing some wonderful sights, and got to the tram stop just in time to beat the oncoming rain. I’ve updated the Facebook photo album, linked below, with pictures from day 2. Sorry non-Facebook friends, but 500px doesn’t support mobile uploads, and this trip is exclusively iPad.
Tomorrow we are off to Copenhagen!
Thanks for the updates! I’m glad to hear you’re having such a great time. 🙂