Easter = Museums

Much to my surprise, Basel kept most of its museums open despite the Easter holiday! Apparently shutting down for the long weekend involves only shops and businesses - restaurants and museums remain open. And as a bonus, since it is the first Sunday of the month, many of the museums are free! I took advantage of that and visited three museums today, all of them part of the Basel Historical Museum, which has four (themed) locations. The only one I missed was the Coaches and Sleighs Museum, which sounds ridiculous, but I would have gone if only it was closer. I'm not ready to venture across the river just to see some old carriages, plus that one is free all the time.

Up first, the Music Museum (of course). This one is practically on my block but for some reason I forgot to take a picture of it. I'll have to update this with a picture soon. It's located in an old prison, with all the cells housing collections of musical instruments, so that was pretty cool. Overall it was OK, but if you've seen collections of old instruments before, it was nothing new. They advertise the fact that you can hear lots of different musical examples, but that was a little disappointing because it wasn't recordings of the actual instruments on display, just generic recordings of "flute" or "harpsichord."

Next up, the regular Basel History Museum, which apparently tells the story of Basel's history. I say apparently because all the information was in German, so I didn't learn much. There were some cool displays of reliquaries, but nothing too exciting. The best part was the building - the museum is housed in an old church:

Here's a side view:

Finally, the one I almost skipped, The House in the Cherry Orchard (or something like that). This is an 18th-century home that's been preserved and filled with furniture and other items from that time. Some of them were original to the home and some were taken from other places, but all in all, it was pretty cool. It  was greatly enhanced by the copious information provided in English, and it told about how each room would have been used and what different items of furniture were and where they came from. This was the best of the three, I would say. Plus, I met a super-friendly guard who wanted to tell me all about C.S. Lewis for some reason.

I didn't get a picture of the front of the museum, but here it is from the back garden:

This pagoda was in the garden:

And for some reason, this is what was displayed inside (sorry about the glare):

What are they? Why are they there? Who knows? There was no information about them, not even in German, and there was nothing else in the building. Pretty bizarre. Despite that, this was definitely the winning museum of today, and probably the only one I'll revisit at some point.