Art Museums

The theme of the weekend was fabulous art museums.  Jarrett (another American assistant in the area) and I headed to Hamburg Friday afternoon after classes.  We basically spent the whole time eating – there were so many food options compared to tiny Detmold! –  and going to museums.  One was for art, one was for art and design/industry, and both were absolutely fabulous as well as the perfect freezing-cold-weather activities.  We did, however, still make ourselves walk around a bit.  Hamburg has the biggest Rathaus (city hall) I’ve ever seen, an absolutely impressive and imposing building, and the most beautiful church I’ve ever seen.  It’s St. Michaelis, a baroque-style church that was so light and airy and beautiful I didn’t want to leave!

Hamburg is also Germany’s largest port city (and Europe’s third-largest) so we spent a bit of time walking around the harbor area – or rather, rushing through it late, on the way to a dinner reservation – and it was pretty cool to see the grungy harbor parts mixing in with what are clearly very new, gentrified parts. 

Monday morning we caught a 6:46 train out of Hamburg to Düsseldorf.  All foreign language assistants in my state (NRW, North-Rhine Westfalia) were invited to Düsseldorf for a three-day long conference; my group from the Detmold area went with the people in the Köln/Cologne area.  Looking back, it seems the point of the whole thing was just “look at how cool our state is!”  Düsseldorf is the capitol of NRW, so we visited their Landtag, state parliament, on the first day.  We spent the second day in Essen, where we visited a museum about the Ruhrgebiet, and then the Folkwang art museum, where I saw the best exhibit I’ve ever seen: “Im Farbenrausch: Munch, Matisse, and the Expressionists.”  Look it up, it was amazing and definitely the highlight of the trip for me…if I were an art thief, I totally would have wanted to steal some stuff.  The last day, we toured Düsseldorf, learning a little more about the city’s history and the rivalry between Köln and Düsseldorf, and then saw a puppet-play (totally weird).

Add to all that excitement and touring the fact that Düsseldorf has the “längste Theka der Welt” (longest bar in the world), and you’ve got six day’s straight of travelling, touring, drinking, and not sleeping.  My state of exhaustion has me pretty sure I won’t be doing any more travelling before Christmas break (home to Cleveland yayyyyyyy!!!), but the plan is to spend weekends going on day-trips to see various Christmas markets!