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livI have had such a lovely week! hatam_soferet came to visit with her husband and 7-month-old daughter. And we had an idyllic few days: icecream in Milton Park, Friday night dinner for the whole polycule including baking challah, celebratory kiddush in synagogue for a member celebrating his 70th birthday, felafel and bagels at a charity fête held in my parents' garden, cream tea at the Orchard with Hatam Soferet's aunt. And talking and catching up, and everybody being incredibly charmed by the baby, including even a slightly older baby at shul.
I was inclined to be a bit sad whenhatam_soferet left; I absolutely want her to have a good life in Canada rather than here, but still. She's the only person apart from jack I've ever seriously contemplated living with and hosting her for a few days isn't at all the same but I wish it had somehow been possible.
Happily the next day we went to Frankfurt forghoti_mhic_uait's birthday, so I didn't really have time to be sad. Travel was utterly dire, getting in two hours late on the outward trip so we missed the last metro and had to walk from the central station to the hotel, and then the return flight on Wednesday afternoon was cancelled, we rebooked onto another flight from Cologne, dashed across Germany on the (expensive but lovely) express train to catch it, and then that flight was delayed by several hours too so we ended up getting home at 2 am after more than 11 hours of travelling. Bad enough but with young children, in a heat wave, and not enough food and drink because we did not plan for half that many hours in transit, it was sheer misery.
In spite of all that, the museum visit itself was wonderful: Ghoti picked the amazing Communication Museum. It's a really, really well put together museum, interesting to both adults and children, and covering a whole wide range of subjects though mostly focusing on the history of the German postal service (which also transports passengers) and national media. They had a bit about the invention of writing and the invention of printing, and various other bits and bobs that come under the heading of 'communication', something about radio communication on the Titanic and the Carpathia, just all sorts of things. The really exciting parts were the original diesel vehicle that formed the first German post-bus in 1905, and a working analogue telephone exchange with transparent walls so you could observe the effects of calling eachother. (Also 21st century kids working out how to use rotary dial phones...)
They took a really definite, uncompromising curatorial stance about state misuses of communication. Censorship, propaganda and surveillance were all absolutely front and centre in every part of the exhibits, not just a tacked on extra. There was a plaque saying, press the button to view to the first live broadcast television announcer, and you start the video and she says 'Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this broadcast and thank you for tuning in. I give you the traditional German greeting: Heil Hitler!' The exhibit about punchcards didn't start with automated looms like you'd see in an English musuem, it went straight in with showing how punchcards were used to automate record keeping at Buchenwald. It wasn't all surprise!Nazis, though, there was stuff about the DDR, a famous newspaper censorship case from the 70s, the use and suppression of Twitter during the Arab Spring, the issues around the Internet of Things, all kinds of stuff.
We also saw a temporary exhibit about night-time, which was loosely about the sweeping social change brought about by the invention of electric lighting, but it covered a whole range of different topics. Nocturnal animals, religious rituals around light and darkness (including a havdalah set inscribed in Yiddish), Goth culture, legends about creatures of the night, the history of nightclub culture, etc. But also lots of social commentary about people who are active at night: shift workers, graffiti artists, homeless people, sex workers.
I would like to spend more time in Frankfurt sometime, preferably not when it's high thirties temperatures and humid. But given we'd decided to take a slightly ridiculous day trip, the museum was well worth seeing.
hatam_soferet came to visit with her husband and 7-month-old daughter. And we had an idyllic few days: icecream in Milton Park, Friday night dinner for the whole polycule including baking challah, celebratory kiddush in synagogue for a member celebrating his 70th birthday, felafel and bagels at a charity fête held in my parents' garden, cream tea at the Orchard with Hatam Soferet's aunt. And talking and catching up, and everybody being incredibly charmed by the baby, including even a slightly older baby at shul. I was inclined to be a bit sad when
hatam_soferet left; I absolutely want her to have a good life in Canada rather than here, but still. She's the only person apart from jack I've ever seriously contemplated living with and hosting her for a few days isn't at all the same but I wish it had somehow been possible. Happily the next day we went to Frankfurt for
ghoti_mhic_uait's birthday, so I didn't really have time to be sad. Travel was utterly dire, getting in two hours late on the outward trip so we missed the last metro and had to walk from the central station to the hotel, and then the return flight on Wednesday afternoon was cancelled, we rebooked onto another flight from Cologne, dashed across Germany on the (expensive but lovely) express train to catch it, and then that flight was delayed by several hours too so we ended up getting home at 2 am after more than 11 hours of travelling. Bad enough but with young children, in a heat wave, and not enough food and drink because we did not plan for half that many hours in transit, it was sheer misery.In spite of all that, the museum visit itself was wonderful: Ghoti picked the amazing Communication Museum. It's a really, really well put together museum, interesting to both adults and children, and covering a whole wide range of subjects though mostly focusing on the history of the German postal service (which also transports passengers) and national media. They had a bit about the invention of writing and the invention of printing, and various other bits and bobs that come under the heading of 'communication', something about radio communication on the Titanic and the Carpathia, just all sorts of things. The really exciting parts were the original diesel vehicle that formed the first German post-bus in 1905, and a working analogue telephone exchange with transparent walls so you could observe the effects of calling eachother. (Also 21st century kids working out how to use rotary dial phones...)
They took a really definite, uncompromising curatorial stance about state misuses of communication. Censorship, propaganda and surveillance were all absolutely front and centre in every part of the exhibits, not just a tacked on extra. There was a plaque saying, press the button to view to the first live broadcast television announcer, and you start the video and she says 'Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this broadcast and thank you for tuning in. I give you the traditional German greeting: Heil Hitler!' The exhibit about punchcards didn't start with automated looms like you'd see in an English musuem, it went straight in with showing how punchcards were used to automate record keeping at Buchenwald. It wasn't all surprise!Nazis, though, there was stuff about the DDR, a famous newspaper censorship case from the 70s, the use and suppression of Twitter during the Arab Spring, the issues around the Internet of Things, all kinds of stuff.
We also saw a temporary exhibit about night-time, which was loosely about the sweeping social change brought about by the invention of electric lighting, but it covered a whole range of different topics. Nocturnal animals, religious rituals around light and darkness (including a havdalah set inscribed in Yiddish), Goth culture, legends about creatures of the night, the history of nightclub culture, etc. But also lots of social commentary about people who are active at night: shift workers, graffiti artists, homeless people, sex workers.
I would like to spend more time in Frankfurt sometime, preferably not when it's high thirties temperatures and humid. But given we'd decided to take a slightly ridiculous day trip, the museum was well worth seeing.
