Beethoven's House

This Sunday was a special holiday in Germany, so the Christmas Market was unfortunately not open. It was, however, a pretty nice day - fairly blue skies and high 50's - so we still spent most of the day outside.

From the number of people that were in downtown Bonn yesterday, it seems like a lot of people were expecting the Christmas Market to be open. It was almost as crowded as it is on Saturday's, except there was no place for all the people to go.

Thankfully, museums are one of the few things open on Sundays so we decided to finally visit the museum of Bonn's favorite son, Beethoven. On the way to the museum, we stopped to enjoy some great music being played on glassware. It seemed like a fitting prelude.



Sadly, the Beethoven museum is much like many many little museums we've seen that are in famous people's houses. It's a creaky old house, with little in it except for some family paintings of the Beethoven family, some original sheet music, a display case of instruments, and an old piano that I assume Beethoven once played on. I say assumed, because everything in the museum is only labelled in German.



However, it does appear that the Beethoven museum is making an attempt at trying to spice things up a bit. They have a modern exhibit that is in a building attached to the museum that looks to visualize Beethoven's one and only opera. They have you go into a small room, with a large screen on one wall, and then they play the opera while depicting the voices as 3D objects (a spiral, circling balls, etc.). I give them points for trying, although I have to say that it wasn't really that impressive. SJ didn't care for it at all, so we had to leave in the middle of the performance. Instead, she enjoyed looking at the several busts of Beethoven they had in the courtyard.



On the way home, we passed by a few people that were walking around the MarktPlatz holding signs for "Free Hugs". What they were doing, I have no idea. I guess giving out free hugs.