Friday night was Museumsnacht in Basel. All the museums stayed open from 6pm until 2am!! Anyone under 26 could get in for free. I showed my ID at the first museum and got a yellow wrist band. That wrist band let me into all the museums PLUS the museum route busses. It was amazing to be able to see fascinating museums for free!
I went there with Amanda Kelly (it was her weekend off) and Manda Thompson.
We started at an art museum called Fondation Beyeler. It normally costs 25 Euros to get in there, so we were pretty excited to be going for free! We saw some original van Gough, Cezanne, Monet, and Picasso works. There were some very strange things there, too. There were human bones laid out on a table (I thought they were animal bones until Amanda, who majored in Biology, started naming them and said they were human). That was kind of disturbing. There were also some Jenny Holzer pieces, which are streams of LED words that make political statements.
After that, we took the bus to the Munster cathedral in the center of Basel. Small ensembles made up of members of the Basel Symphony orchestra played mini-concerts throughout the evening. While we were there, we heard flute and harp duets. The sound in the cathedral was amazing – I wished I could have brought my violin in there and played some Bach just to listen to the resonance!
The Munster Cathedral in Basel
Next, we walked to the Antikenmuseum. It was fascinating to see artifacts from ancient Near East, Greece, Rome, and Egypt. Amanda and I saw little clay things that were probably idols. To think – so many wars were fought over these false gods. We now easily recognize these as useless idols, but we depend on other idols these days without realizing how foolish it is.
We were going to take a bus to the next place, but it was too crowded, so we walked. It turned out to not be too far. The Musical Instrument museum (!!!) was located in a renovated jail. Each former cell had a small collection of instruments and a podium with information on the instruments in 3 languages (German, French, and English). One of the cells had different horns that everyone could try – everything from a brass horn, a glass bottle, animal horns, to an orange cone!
Multi-bell trumpet? I wish I could have tried this one or heard it played!
The final museum we visited (we were exhausted by that point) was the Puppenhausmuseum. It was a museum of puppets and dolls. It was fascinating! So much detail! There were carousels and teddy bears and miniature wine cellars and shoe makers…. we could have spent hours there if it hadn’t been midnight after a long school week!
I wish we had cool musical instrument museums here!!