Lange Nacht der Kölner Museen

That's the long night of museums in Cologne, an event in which museums are open until 3 a.m. Munich had a similar event last week, but it was on the same night that my friend Jay's girls basketball team was playing against a transgender basketball team, and there was no way I was going to miss that. 

There are shuttles between around forty or so museums, and you can go to all of them if you want. But how many museums can one enjoy? Jeremy and I found that the answer is five.

We started at the Schokoladenmuseum where you can see the whole process of chocolate making in big Willie Wonka like machines. I wouldn't have gone had I not anticipated free samples. Here's a lady getting us some.

We visited the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum next which has exhibits of everyday life from Köln. There is fun stuff like the history of their beer, the perfume history that gave the place its name, puppets, war history, and I learned that the internal combustion engine was invented here.

Our next stop was the Nazi Documentation Center. This building was used by the Gestapo, and the cells they used to torture prisoners in the basement are still fully intact. You can even read what prisoners scratched on the wall. This is a little blurry, but you can see someone counting off days. 

I'm a little fuzzy on the next one, but there was a lot of Egypt stuff.

Museum Ludwig has an extensive collection of Picassos and some seriously racy ones at that. That might have been my imagination; I was pretty tired. I didn't have a good picture for this museum though, just these people setting their beers on the art display.