Long(ish) night at the museum

Each year, on one fine evening, some thirty museums of Zürich open their doors at 7:00 PM, and they don't close them until 8:00 AM the next day. This is the Lange Nacht der Museen: the Long Night of the Museums.  I've been anticipating it for months: I planned to use it as an opportunity to make a blitz attack on all of the museums that I wouldn't otherwise get to see this year, things that I would find interesting but might not necessarily be fun for the kids.

However, this past Wednesday, while we were walking downtown, Ella gestured to one of the signs for the event. "Mom, can we please go to that? [Noch]Ella says it's going to be the best day of the year! I really think it would be fun!"

NochElla's father is head of one of the museums participating in the event, the Medizinhistorisches Museum. So she and her mother and brother were planning on visiting him, and some of the more kid-friendly museums, and then ending the night at the Zürich Zoo, to see how the animals behave at night.

My partner in crime

I thought about it, and decided it would be just as much fun to have a night out with my best girl, so we made our plans to have ourselves a fine little evening: a dinner together, followed by a few hours at the museums.  Although I made it clear to her that I'd be the one picking the museums, and they wouldn't all necessarily have things for kids.  This was a night to be grown-up.

That being the case, Ella dressed appropriately for the evening, putting on what she meant to be a very sophisticated outfit. Dennis suggested that maybe she'd be more comfortable without the extra t-shirt, but Ella disagreed. "This makes me feel pretty," she explained.  Good for her.

That led to a sort of long conversation on the train ride downtown, with Ella pontificating about the importance of dressing to please yourself. Ella's a very firm believer, and she sticks to her funky clothing combinations even though some of the kids make fun of them.  The only time I've ever seen her change her clothes to suit someone else was when her teacher (shame on her!), when pressed by girls who were debating Ella's outfit ("gently," Ella insists...but still!) suggested that yes, Ella's outfit would look prettier without an extra skirt layered on top of her dress. So Ella took off the skirt.

"It's like this, mom," she explained, "Pretend I'm a villager. All of the other villagers laugh at me for wearing a dress that I think is pretty, but I can hold my head up high and ignore them. But then, imagine that the queen comes to the village and tells me that she doesn't like my dress. I can't hold my head high in front of the queen! She's too powerful! I was embarrassed about taking off my skirt, because I felt like I wasn't being true to myself. But most of the time, I want to wear the clothes that please me, and not clothes that please others. Especially not boys. I don't ever want to dress to please boys." My! So earnest!

"It's not bad at all, really.
Maybe it just needs a little love." 

At that point, we walked by two drag queens, all shiny and made up with wigs and sparkles.  "Like that, mom." she said, nodding at them. "Those girls are definitely dressing to please boys."

Our conversation took many other tangents throughout the night, but the other one that I remember most clearly had to do with Christmas. "You know," said Ella, "We don't really have any Christmas decorations here....I know! We could use one of the cardboard trees I made for our Christmas tree! We could decorate it with paper ornaments!"  There is nothing, but nothing, that this family can't make out of cardboard.

And, while we weren't talking, we saw a few museums...

Nordamerika Native Museum
I've been wanting to see this place for ages. I've mentioned before that we've noticed an interesting Swiss fascination with Native Americans: we've seen teepee vacation villages, and curio shops, and summer camps devoted to them. And this museum. I was really curious to see what the European's perspective on our nation's history might be.

Reminds me of home

I explained this to Ella, and she got it.  "Yeah. Huh. I wonder what they'll say about the European explorers."  Hey! Kid knows her history.

Apparently they do have an English translation of all of the signage in the museum, a booklet available behind the front desk, but unfortunately I didn't find that out until we were leaving the museum.  So I don't have much to say about the collection other than to say that it was very extensive. Ella loved looking at the art, and looking for turtles, especially.


But I did think that this quote, from the museum's website, which illustrates the variety of the tribes in North America, was rather interesting:

"If we use the blanket term “Indian” to describe all the different tribes, groups, bands, and nations of America, it is just about as unrepresentative and misleading as if we were to exclusively apply the term “European” to denote our own background. In reality, North American cultures display an immense range of cultural diversity, just as Europe does. Or, do you wish to claim that there is no difference between, let’s say, Swedes and Spaniards?"

No, no, I assure you! I wish no such thing!

Special for the night, the museum had a few demonstrations: a man outside was trying to start a fire by hand (but he had no success in the half-hour that we were there) and someone else was fashioning obsidian arrowheads. And, as we'd find at each of the museums, they had a themed buffet spread for sale.  Here it was all forms of salmon: it made me a little homesick for the Pacific Northwest.

Mühlerama
I've heard more than I'd expect about this museum. It's housed in a mill that was built in the early 1900s and which operated, full-scale, until 1983.  The machinery still works, and they still run it for tours and to produce flour that is sold in the museum shop, along with baked goods.

For some unexplained reason, a good portion of the mill was taken up with a temporary exhibit about ghosts and the paranormal. If we had stayed longer, we could have heard some ghost stories in English, but I decided I wanted Ella to be able to sleep tonight, eventually.

But we did look at some of those exhibits, and I tried to translate some for Ella.  She soon realized something I've known for a while: she has a much better grasp of German than I. So she took a turn reading to me.

They turned on the millworks halfway through our visit, and it was really fun to climb up and up the stories of the mill and see the bands and gears churning.

We stopped for some house-made
bread

And then, at the top of the building, they had a wooden slide that we got to ride back down in old flour sacks.  It was to my great advantage that I'd brought Ella along: if I hadn't, I probably would have been too bashful to ride the slide more than once.

A kid-powered flour mill

Helmhaus Zürich

Perler bead tower

We took a tram back downtown, getting off in the middle of the city, near downtown, to transfer buses so that we could get up to Universität Zürich. But our transfer was right next to the Helmhaus, a gallery that exhibits work by Swiss artists.

It's been a while since we've been to an art museum, particularly a modern art museum, and it was fun to see Ella's shocked reaction to the paint spatters.  In one room, there was a statue, larger, than I, made entirely of the little perler beads that are Alex's favorite toy.  Ella looked at it, amazed: "This is...this is ridiculous!" Then she thought for a moment. "But Alex would love it."  So tonight Ella learned the first lesson of Art: it is in the eye of the beholder.

Archäologische Sammlung
I don't know that I would have visited this museum if not for Ella, but it was pretty fun. The museum itself is filled with original statues and castings, many of them stored in rows on industrial shelving in the basement of the museum.  Ella's reaction: "Artists are gross! They like private parts and cutting off heads and arms!"  They also had a mummy, which Ella stared at for a good long time.

The main reason we stopped here was that they were doing a little archeological dig for kids in the garden behind the museum.  Some university students had set up a planter box, about a meter square, and filled it with dirt and bones and pottery shards and replicas of coins.  The kids could dig to their heart's content, and if they found a coin, their parents could purchase it for 2 francs.

The rim of the box was crammed with kids when we got there, pawing through the dirt with lucre-maddened eyes.  Every once in a while the students would make them stop, turn around, and close their eyes, while they re-hid more treasure and artifacts.  So yeah, it was pretty much like an authentic dig.

Ella's been training for this her whole life, thing-finder that she is, and had quickly scooped up about ten coins.  I made her put most back, but I let her keep one for herself and each of her brothers. Treasure!

Zoologisches Museum
We've been to this museum before, and I don't think I would have returned tonight (although I do think I'll still take Joey here some time. He slept through our first visit, and I think he'd love seeing the collection of taxidermy animals.) but it was almost next door to the Archeology museum, and from the crowd of parents and kids pouring in, I guessed they were doing something special for children.

That something turned out to be the construction of a bee house: they'd provided tables flowing with wooden sticks and logs and straws and shells and rocks and clay, and the kids were meant to arrange these as they liked into little wooden boxes, to set in their gardens as a invitation to wild bees.

Ella wasn't sure that she wanted any more bees in her life, but she couldn't turn down a craft.  She even talked one of the museum workers into letting her use the drill, so that she could put her own holes in her log pieces. How often does a kid get to play with power tools at 10:00 PM on a Saturday night?





Paläontologisches Institute
At this point, it really was time to go home. Ella was a pendulum, swinging between between euphoria and exhaustion, and I was worried about getting her home conscious. The girl is almost as tall as I am, and I knew I couldn't carry her home. Especially not with her heavy new bee house.

But she did talk me into running through the adjacent Paleontology museum.  We didn't look long at the fossils, but Ella wanted to see the activity they were doing there: plaster casting of fossils.  She would have loved to make one, but at this point she was sleepy enough that even she realized it would be better to go home.

We noticed our tram coming up the hill and ran, flat out, across the slick and misty sidewalk, to catch it. Mercifully, the tram driver noticed us and waited.   I had to make up stories on the ride and sing songs on the walk home to keep Ella awake, but we made it.

Alex got to spend some quality time with Dennis today, too: a little more low-key, but the two of them needed new shoes, and so this afternoon they went to a nice restaurant for lunch and did a little shopping. And the two of them brought home a surprise for me, a cuckoo clock. My belated birthday present!  Dennis said that Alex had been so cute, helping him choose the perfect clock, and that he, too, had a lot of fun with his special little guy.

He also passed along a funny little conversation that the two of them shared.  Apropos of nothing, Alex confided in Dennis, "Daddy, pirate girls are beautiful.  Especially when they're quiet. Quiet pirate girls are so beautiful."

So Ella has her goblin king, and Alex has his pirate girls.  I actually was already sort of aware of Alex's thing for pirates.  There's this game that the kids play, The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore.  And whenever one particular picture appears in the story, Alex always sighs dreamily.

Beautiful.