Night of the Museums

First of all, I just wanted to apologise for being a bit rubbish at keeping up with all your wonderful blog posts lately.  SORRY!!!  We are having some really annoying computer problems.  The screen of our laptop has gone black, and the only way we can use it now is by hauling it upstairs and plugging it in to our ancient PC monitor.  Then, as the laptop is so far away from our little internet-box-thingy, connection is really weak and keeps disappearing altogether.  Grrrr! 

Hopefully, we'll be able to get it fixed soon, so that I can get back to freely roaming the blogosphere whenever – and from wherever – I want!  Fingers crossed!!!

For today’s post, I thought I’d tell you what we got up to last Saturday night.  It wasn’t really CRAFTY.....  But it was ARTY (in parts) – and LOTS OF FUN!!!

We went to the Düsseldorf Night of the Museums.

Once a year, 40 of the city’s museums and galleries are opened up for the night.  What an amazing concept!  It’s exciting enough being able to go into a museum in the middle of the night.  BUT there are also loads of extra events going on inside the venues.  Lots of them have live music or DJs, most have bars and food for sale, some have workshops or lectures.....

We went to the Film Museum first.  I love going there, because they have lots of beautiful shadow puppets (which I think are amazing), and lots of those old-fashioned optical illusion things to play with.  On the Night of the Museums, the sale of beer makes it even more fun!  Normally, there’s a brilliant big band on, playing movie theme tunes.  Unfortunately, they weren’t there this year – just a girl singing jazz-type stuff with her eyes closed.  Not so much fun!

After that, we popped to the Karneval Haus.  I find the carnival season over here quite odd all round, and this museum lived up to my expectations. There were rooms and rooms of cheesy photos of carnival kings and queens from years gone by, rooms with photos of carnival floats, a room (my favourite) with vegetable-themed costumes (a suit covered in plastic asparagus, for example, and another covered in radishes).  Another room had several thousand carnival medals hanging from the ceiling.  Only German Karneval would prompt that level of randomness!!!  Oh, and more random still (but lots of fun) was that there was a band in the garden, playing Status Quo tunes!!!

Next, we went to the K20 gallery (my favourite museum in Düsseldorf).  I love their Picasso and Klee collections!  And they have the most amazing (though probably the most expensive) museum shop EVER!!!  I made a secret list of things I wanted, then checked out their prices on Amazon the next day – shhhhhh!!!  The curators/security guards were having kittens, watching thousands of slightly tipsy folk wandering around at 1 o’clock in the morning!  There was a fun activity that all the visitors could join in with – making 3D clouds to add to an existing exhibit.  I was keen to get stuck in with the scissors and glue, but we were in a bit of a rush to get one more museum in before the end of the night.....

Our last stop was the Aquazoo.  What could be more fun than visiting an aquarium in the early hours of the morning?!?  There was a rock & roll band on there, and one of the penguins was dancing along (well, that’s what it looked like to me).  My favourite animals were the dancing penguin (of course), the seahorses, the octopus, and the jellyfish that looked like tiny disco lights.  Unfortunately, we got there too late to join in with the sea-creature-origami workshop.  Maybe next year.....   

I’m afraid to say that our photos turned out.... well, like the night-out photos that you want to delete straight away.  So, I’m afraid I'm having to be a bit boring here and show you some snaps of our guide book.  ;-)

Thank you for stopping by!

Carly

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