Thursday was a rainy day but we felt like going somewhere and taking pictures, so we drove into Bonn to check out the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn (Rhineland Regional Museum). It was FAN-TASTIC.
The museum is in a very modern, brightly-lit building (opened in 2003) and focuses exclusively on local exhibits from all time periods, which are divided into themes.
One nice surprise is that their most extensive collection was in the religious-history theme! Hooray! There were ancient Germanic burial monuments, bunches of Roman altars and gravestones, several Early Christian gravestones carved with the Chi Rho, wonderful Romanesque carvings from Cologne churches, paintings... I was in heaven. David also enjoyed the stuff, but especially had a great time taking lots of pictures!
I spent a couple days after our visit attempting to translate the German museum labels in order to caption our photos. It was a bit of a tedious process, but of course I was interested to learn about all the great stuff anyway. I still have a good hundred more photos to work through!
Some highlights:
A rare (in Germany) and wonderful depiction of the signs of the zodiac, which decorated a lot of medieval churches in France. Above are Aquarius and Cancer. Note that Cancer doesn't look much like a crab - medieval Scorpios rarely look realistic either. Both tend to look more like lobsters.
After the museum we stopped briefly in the Bonn Münster to try out the new lens in its very dark interior.
Then we picked up some groceries in our new favorite store in the Galeria basement, and I took a picture of sausages.
I also got a better picture of a Frauenplatz sign in the parking garage:
For dinner that night we had fresh seafood cooked in our heart-shaped pie pan. The scallops were especially divine! I never knew I liked those until I met David.
It was a really good day.