Technological Museum

On Friday it was supposed to rain, so I had my plan: go to the Technology Museum which is humungous and could take a few days to finish. On our way to the museum, we walked by this set full of mannequins.

With artful sticks and flowers.

And a hip retro bus full of clothes. We remembered seeing a poster about Berlin's fashion week. In fact we'd asked our friends about it when we went to a concert on Saturday (Phooey! I forgot all about it! We went to an Evening of French Music and we had extra tickets so we invited our friends Horst and Dani who have helped us out repeatedly in Berlin. I talked all about the Konzerthaus where we heard it here). When we asked about Fashion Week, they snorted and rolled their eyes. It's an attempt to be fashionable, but H & D don't think Berlin has what it takes.
We made it to the museum. This building had a lot more planes and a lot more boats in it than before, but strangely, the kids found less to do here than they had in 2006. I don't know if they're getting too old for the exhibits here or if they were just out of sorts.

They did want to tie knots and play on the sailboats as they had before, and they remembered this exhibit, showing how child miners had to push full carts of rocks on these awful rails. They loved doing it. Once.

But then we took the kids across the street to the hands-on science section called Spectrum. It was a lot like the Exploratorium and they went wild playing with light and optical illusions and physics and we had a hard time rounding them up for lunch. Finally we did and we ate downstairs in the cafe. Here they are sharing their raspberry torte, and it was such a rare moment of peace that we took a picture.

Then we went next door to the auto exhibit which Rob had previewed. He said it was small and wouldn't take us more than 10-15 minutes. We loved it and I think we stayed more than half an hour.

Joss and the "Wee Herbie" as it says on the side. Joss has loved Herbie for about a year now, having watched the old Disney movies obsessively. He points them out whenever we are driving around, and I have to stop myself from pointing them out to whomever I'm driving with. So you can imagine that it took all of his willpower not to climb up on the exhibit and take the Wee Herbie out for a spin. We also loved watching a clip from a German remake that had a yellow VW Bug who could do kung fu and moonlight as a houseboat.

Sebi and Joss in a Trabant or "Trabi". These were the (only) cars of East Germany. They came in four colors: grey, blue, green and brown. This one was later bought up by a road maintenance crew hence its paint job. It was known for its distinctive two-stroke engine. Getting into a piece of history like this was worth the visit alone.

And this was an Aquacar, in the Ahead-Of-Its-Time section. It has propellers mounted down low, comes with a safety light and a set of oars. Can you top that? I don't think so!