Today we visited our partner university Fachhochschule Ludwigshafen. Our host during the visit was Prof. Dr. Lieselotte Ihle-Schmidt. She gave a presentation about current political, social and economical issues in Germany. In the same time, Sven Rassl gave a lecturer for the German students about Finland, and in the same time marketing the double degree possibilities between the respective schools.
Worthwhile to mention that a Finnish, a European Union and a German flag were flew in front of the university. This was very kind and made us feel warmly welcome. An evening with friends
After the university we were invited to visit the home of the Rassl family. Were were served traditional German food and beverages. It was an enjoyable evening and we stayed almost until midnight.
After our visited to the town museum we took the underground, crossed the Rhein river and went to Mannheim. So our next destination was the castle in Mannheim.
The "Mannheimer Schloss" was renovated in 2007 for the 440 years anniversary of Mannheim. During the museum night, there were several attractions that could be visited.
We decided to start the visit with an exhibition in the south wing of the castle. This exhibition covered a creative clash of diverse art categories, progressive music, graffiti art and fashion design. In the first floor stood a 15 m a long table which was used as a catwalk for a fashion show.
On the second floor some guy built a little with about 10.000 kitchen sponges. We were not sure why he actually did this and what is was supposed to tell us, but it was certainly interesting to watch. Indeed the atmosphere in the building was filled with artistic spirit. Certainly an experience...
After a little break, during which we went to the city centre for a snack, we continued our tour in the castle. We thought we would visit the newly renovated baroque entrance hall, but since there was such a long queue, we continued in some other part of the castle.
The assembly hall was our next destination. In this part of the castle, a photographer showed portraits of famous DJs. The specialty of the photos were, that the showed the portraits focused on the most important body parts of a DJ: eyes, ears and hand.
Once we left the building we saw that the queue for the baroque entrance hall had disappeared. So we finally went there. In fact, after this tour it was almost two o'clock in the morning and the long night of the museum was about to close. Some of us went back to Heidelberg by train and some by car. We arrived at the hostel around half past two.
The long night of the museum on Saturday evening was supposed to be one of the highlights of the trip. And it was!
The concept of the evening was, that with one ticket you can enter more than one hundred different museums, art galleries and exhibitions in the Rhein-Neckar Region. At the same time, the ticket enables the holder to use all means of public transportation.
Based on the program booklet, we selected the events that we were most interested in, but we still left some room for acting spontaneously.
So for our first destination we went to see a dress rehearsal of the "Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz" in Ludwigshafen. The conductor of the orchestra is a Finn, Ari Rasilainen. Eventually we met him at the hall way and exchanged a couple of words. Ludwigshafen seems to have be an attractive place for Finnish conductors, as one of Ari predecessors was Leif Segerstam.
We attended two of their performances. First some people from the audience were given the opportunity to conduct the symphony orchestra. The "amateur conducting" displayed clearly how much influence and impact on the tempo a conductor actually can have.
Surprisingly, Ari Rasilainen even spoke Finnish during his moderation, which was of course well appreciated from some parts of the audience, namely us.
The second part of their performance was a a public dress rehearsal of Sergei Prokoviev's Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 100. As a special arrangement for the long night of the museums, the guest conductor Jac van Steen invited the audience to place their chairs within the orchestra, so the idea was that the listener could experience the play from a different perspective.
After the concert we went to the Wilhelm-Hack Art Museum. Three different video art works were displayed in this exhibition. One of them was especially inspiring. The video art work showed laughing people with different ethnic back ground. The laughter infected us and after a while we were laughing too. Still, the atmosphere in the museum, its black walls and the dim lights made this experience somewhat bizarre.
As our last station in Ludwigshafen we went to see a gig of a local R'n'B artist in the town museum. We listened to the performance for a while. On the upper floor of the museum an area of participation invited to perform all kinds of brain teasers activating spatial imagination, training sleight of hand or testing the knowledge of physical basics.
Our day started at 11:00 with a guided tour at BASF AG the world's largest integrated chemical production plant. After a watching a safety instruction video, our tour guided welcomed us to the plant. She told us that the tour would be in German language, because there were other people, mainly Germans, who wanted to see the site too.
The sheer size of the site is so huge that we actually had to take a bus to get around. The bus tour took about 45 minutes and we did not even see all parts of the plant.
After the bus tour we stayed for a while in the visitor centre. There is an interesting exhibition about the company BASF AG, their products and chemical reactions in general. The exhibitions is somewhat similar to Heureka! in Vantaa. It invites it vistors to experience the world of chemistry. For example, there are samples of different flavors and one had to determine whether they are natural fragrances or artificial ones.
