Thursday, January 10, 2013

A Plague Hat & Men in Tights

We’re almost at the end of our ‘must see’ list and today it was the Deutsches Historisches Museum.  Chronicling German history since the time of the Celts, this museum is amazing.  Here’s a list of some of the more unusual/special/bizarre/cool stuff that’s there:

A Statue of Charlemaine, a pocket calendar from 1397, Martin Luther’s bible ( 1522), the Edict of Worms (when Martin Luther got chucked out of the Catholic church) A cookbook from 1587, a full set of jousting armour (horse and knight) from the late 1500’s,  a plague mask 1600s (worn by a doctor, intended to keep the germs out), an anatomical model of a pregnant woman (just like the game ‘operation’), a surgical bullet remover (1800’s), Napoleon’s Bicorn Hat from the Battle of Waterloo, the first x-ray machine, WW1 helmets (complete with bullet holes) the Olympic torches from the 1936 Berlin & 1972 Munich games, a VW beetle & a Trabie.

I didn’t go through the WW2 years section having seen my fill in previous days.  Plenty of costume from the 1700’s onwards, and many many paintings of important people.  It truly is a spectacular museum and if you are a history nut, you could easily spend hours and hours here.

After another late lunch we headed for the West Berlin ‘shopping strip’ of Krufurstendamm (known to Berliners as K’damm) – you could do some serious damage to a credit card along this strip, and particularly at the uber expensive KaDeWe department store where your choices range from Vuitton to Prada to Bulgari to YSL … not exactly my kinda place!  We wandered round for a bit and headed home because Lauren & I were going to the theatre.

‘Show Me’ is a cabaret sort of show … no story to speak of, just a collection of dance/song numbers – I suppose that they are trying to make it easy for anyone to understand and without spoken language it is accessible to all regardless of what you speak.  It was amazing!  Fantastic costumes by Christian Lacroix, they ranged from something of a cross between can can dancers & pompoms, to  hip hip boys with thick gold chains, to girls in lycra hotpants,  and one amazing number with 50 dancers in white jumpsuits with LED light strips that ended up glowing all different colours. 

The second act had lots of water … the stage was both revolving and one that dropped and they dropped the middle bit and filled it with water so we had 4th row seats watching boys in pink & purple lycra break dancing in 6” water, and a fantastic aerial act working beside a 50’ waterfall.  Heart in mouth stuff was provided by a pair of aerial ‘tumblers’ (for want of a better word) that worked off a rig about 30’ up with NO safety wires.  Lots more … check out this trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJwFmT7vC_o

We had coffee & apple pie after the show. We got snowed on at intermission (woooo hoooooo) and Lauren picked up a hand-full from one of the cars parked in our street to bring home for Tony. 

No comments:

Post a Comment