I was surprised to learn, from looking at my Frankfurt map, that the Senckenberg Naturmuseum was barely a five-minute walk from my hotel. Well, you have to go then, I told myself, and hurry up ! The museum closed at 6, along with every other establishment in Germany*.
*Shopping malls close a little later, at 9 pm .. but there is not much open on Sunday (convenience stores at gas stations are). I think that’s a good thing .. even with the Saturday evening rush that I got caught in at a grocery store just trying to buy a yogurt and bananas.
Here is the entrance to the Senckenberg Naturmuseum (museum of natural history) here in Frankfurt.This is the main exhibition hall. One the left is an Iguanodon, and on the right a complete Diplodocus skeleton, gifted from the American Museum of Natural History in 1907. Diplodocuses roamed around on earth 156-147 million years ago.Ready for your close-up (encounter with a 5-ton iguanodon?) Lucky for humans the beasts died out 110 million years ago.These are two woolly mammoth skeletons : on the left the ‘Mühldorfer mammoth’, a complete skeleton found east of Munich. On the right the American woolly mammoth, found in Little Britain in the New York State area. Most woolly mammoth populations disappeared between 14,000 to 10,000 years ago.Saber-toothed cats lived for 42 million years until about 11,000 years ago. This specimen’s bones were found in California.Open wide! Lucky for us this big fin whale does not eat humans! A close relative of the bigger blue whale, this skeleton lines the entire wall in the big exhibition room.Here’s the Coelacanth, the famous ‘dino-fish’ with bones and all, and a lung. A live fish was caught in a net off the South African coast in 1938, a sensational find for the archaeologist community, and today methods have been put in place to try to prevent catching the rare fish in fish nets.
I like the pictures and the tailors’ tapes on this tailor shop and offices for the sharply dressed man (and woman)., on Bleichstraße.The old and the new : in front Eschenheimer Tower (built in 1810) that guarded the old city’s Gothic walls, behind it the Jumeirah Frankfurt Hotel that opened in 2011.This is the Alte Oper, the old opera house. The original building was badly damaged in a World War II night raid, and only the facade remained. It took several decades before the building was restored.The early evening view from my hotel window. The little red aircraft warning lights are already lit up. The building with the pyramid is the Messeturm (offices); the silvery stepped building in the middle the West End Tower; the black building two more to the left of it is the Frankfurter Büro Center, home of my German namesake company, PwC.
