March 11 - Museumsmeille Exhibition

Well I don’t know about you but I had a pretty good weekend.
Obviously, if you’re on the east coast of Australia, you’re in the throes of a 3-day weekend so you’re coming off a superior base but I had a good time nonetheless.
Anyway, after the standard Saturday morning routine (run – wash clothes – clean house – shop for food) that left me having some lunch and then heading down to the Starbucks to access their Wifi; still no connection here at home which is becoming more frustrating as each weekend goes by.
But I had read about a bar downtown (called Sonja’s) which has a series of jazz offerings and Saturday afternoons from 4pm has a free entry. How could I go wrong?
Well in a couple of ways actually! I found my way there easily enough as the place is just around the corner from the Beethoven Haus but it was packed. I guess free entry drags all the folks out in Bonn! I did manage to squeeze into a corner of the bar and get eine bier (look at how fluent I’m becoming) and the band started playing …

… Dixieland jazz. Now for all you Dixie aficionados, apologies but I do struggle with Dixieland; it seems to have the special skill of making every song sound identical. I’m glad Rap came along because Dixieland jazz is no longer my most hated form of music.
And you’ve never heard ‘Down by the River Side’ in its most sonorous completeness until you’ve heard it sung with a German accent.
Sorry if that sounds a bit whiny (and I’ve just read it back and it is pretty whiny!) but the venue is terrific and there is a jazz quartet coming up on Wednesday night so I think I might drop in there on the way home from work, have my weekly dinner out there and see how the evening goes.
So a slow Saturday afternoon but a potential venue to follow; I’ll keep you up to speed.

Sunday was tiring but good fun. For those unaware, Melbourne has a big fun run coming up on April 1. The ‘Run for the Kids’ or R4K for short is 14.4km of running thru tunnels and over the bridges of Melbourne’s CityLink. From Alexandra Gardens and back again, those running will enjoy some amazing views around town; it’s one of the more picturesque runs on the calendar.
Since I can’t be there for this year’s run, I was checking out a similar distance run here in Bonn. The basic idea being that I can run 14.4km on my April 1 thereby celebrating the race and feeling like crap on April 2. Just like being there, really! Having scoped it on-line, today was the chance to walk it and see if it actually works.
Mike G. has been critical of the Blackberry compared to the iPhone but the one big strength of the Blackberry is that it’s on board camera is 5MByte compared to the iPhone’s puny 1MByte; the photos here should have better definition than those I’ve shared previously and all of them came from the Blackberry. For example, here is a picture of the start for my Bonn R4K; heading up Poppelsdorferallee to the Poppelsdorf Castle at the end; built back in the 1700’s it now serves as part of Bonn University – Faculties of Zoology, Mineralogy and some Otherology I can’t seem to recall.

Nice – right! The grounds of the castle are now Bonn’s botanic gardens. In the below image you can see the original moat looking back to a church. Now that the ice has melted, the ducks and geese are happier in the water and there is a feeling that spring may actually arrive at some stage in Bonn.

Anyway, back to the run and the main challenge was to find some steep areas to compare with the bridge over the Yarra and the docklands are in Melbourne’s R4K. Well, I have and it will be challenging! Those who’ve run Melbourne’s Tan track will know the perils of Anderson Street or ‘Heart Attack Hill’ as some have called it. The rise from the lowlands of Bonn to take you up to the forests and the main hospital is steady and long as it rises 130m above the river levels in downtown Bonn. It’s like a 2km long Anderson Street. But the view from the top is phenomenal.
Once the road makes it to the top of the hill, it seems to settle on to a plateau and the area is heavily treed and well laid out with tracks for walkers, runners and mountain bikers; and I saw plenty of all three folks today. Right now, we’re just coming out of winter so the trees are all bare but there is a hint of spring in the air and these forests in spring will be magnificent! There are plenty of places to sit, walk, ride and gather for picnics; once the trees get their foliage, the whole thing will be screened off to make the clearings feel like outdoor rooms. This will be something to see from May or June.
At the top of the hill, one of the DHL guys sent me a text seeing what I was doing. This guy is visiting Bonn; a New Zealander working out of Singapore, we met up at last week’s global meetings. I suggested we meet at the Museumsmeille since I was heading there anyway! We could choose the Kunst Museum (or Art Gallery) or one of the exhibitions at the Art and Exhibition Halls. I just had to get down off the hill.
This is where the run home got interesting. I followed my map which was the tourist map I picked up down town, so it was hardly a map issued by the Geological Survey or its equivalent! Coming down, the bitumen track became a gravel track that became a muddy path that became a goat track then a game trail and eventually a one metre wide piece of land trapped between backyards on the outskirts of the local village. If anything, it then got worse until I had to go under a tape saying ‘Entritt Verboten’; if challenged I was going with ‘Nicht Sprechen Sie Deutsche’ and I’d see how far I’d get. Amazingly, I came out into the street I wanted to but the steep, narrow muddy track is designed for slipping and sliding; not running! I may need a different way down come April 1.
Earlier in the walk and from the top of the hill, I could hear lots of yelling; from a distance, exhortations on a sporting field all sound the same regardless of language. I’d dropped into the tiny hamlet of Friesdorf and found my way to where the soccer match was underway. Like any small town, the football team has few but dedicated supporters. So it was apparent (from the many looks I was getting) that I was not a regular! But it was fun; the ground was on fake turf and that seemed to help the ball roll well and evenly. I’m assuming the Blues were Friesdorf as they scored twice and the vast majority of supporters were happy with the result.
I was a little peckish and bought a hot dog with mustard; as good or as bad as any other hot dog at any other football game at any other venue in the world.
Charged with the energy of the hot dog and the enthusiasm of 2 goals in 15 minutes, I had the energy to make it to the museum.
Nick and I decided to check out ‘Art and Design for All’; an exhibition of items from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Wow! It is interesting how the German psyche is open to the Victoria/Albert connection, given that Albert was German and Victoria was so besotted with him. Her devastation at his death was never really resolved; she wore dark mourning clothes basically for the rest of her very long life.
This exhibition celebrated Albert’s vision for a museum that would educate everyone, not just academia. It all began with the Great Exhibition held in London in 1851; the creation of the Crystal Palace to hold the exhibition was one thing. But the fact that everyone came to the exhibition; they came from more than 40 countries with thousands of exhibits and then the people came to marvel at the Crystal Palace and then the exhibits within. Albert then had his vision realized in 1857 with the opening of the South Kensington Museum that became the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The purpose of the museum was to work as a place of learning art and its design and art could be realized in the manufacture of furniture, pottery, jewelry, fabric and clothing, textiles, sculpture and objets d’art. It celebrated new methods of manufacture of beautiful things in a way that could be afforded by more people; plaster models instead of marble statues; papier-mâché lacquered objects to replace gold and sliver inlaid devices; Wedgewood’s marvelous porcelain to replace the ancient’s glass and pottery combinations. The museum had teachers and students to learn how these marvelous things could be done.
This did bring some interesting Victorian English views on what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ design; the museum had no concerns about publically announcing what was good and what was bad. Indeed, there were some exhibits today that purported to demonstrate bad design (whether it be function or simply aesthetics). For example, there was an exhibition of 68 items that the museum had judged as ‘bad’. One of them was there today; a gas lamp in the shape of a lily. The lamp light was set up to glow from the centre of the lily. The folks at the V&A decided that this imitation of nature was cheapening nature and should be ignored. Interestingly, people loved the lily lamps and they sold like hot cakes. I guess there’s no accounting for taste.
But the exhibits were amazing and the idea of an institution to assist with the teaching of design back in the 1850’s seems prescient to the point of Albert having vision of the future. He also made sure that the museum was opened for free admission 3 days a week so that anyone and everyone could go and simple look and learn.
There were 400 items on loan here today and we slowly toddled around them for almost 3 hours. The V&A Museum in London has over a million; I think this might be a place to visit if I’m ever in London.
The exhibit finishes in mid April so I’m glad we got the chance to check it out.
Like I said, a pretty good weekend.