July 15, 2006
Not Quite Gamera
We spent the day Friday in the Boston area.
First, we hit the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Harvard Museum of Natural History. It’s two, two, two museums in one!
Actually, they are two connected museums, and you can visit them both for one admission. We used library passes and got in for $1 each. Get in cheap and spend your money in the gift shop seems to be our motto, (have to work on the holdings of the Burke Museum of Natural and Not-So-Natural Curiosities dontchaknow).
In any case pictured here is an Incan turtle-man which reminded me of my favorite Kaiju monster, Gamera. This leads the museum patrons to deep thoughts such as “did the ancient Incan civilization have Creature Double Feature?”
The kids put up with us as we examined the Peabody’s anthropological artifacts (K actually enjoyed those, but M is not as interested in archaeology) . Both perked up when we took in the sights of the mineral room at the Harvard Natural History museum. Some amazing pieces there. Meteorites you can touch (K said they smelled like outer space) a giant gypsum crystal found in a Mexican cave, minerals in all shades of color and all imaginable shapes.
Also at the museum are amazing glass flowers. Maggie and I had expected some sort of artistic display. Indeed, these were works of art, but they were intended to be true representations of plants and flowers, not merely artistic impressions. Along with normal scale glass models there were also glass models of the reproductive parts of the plants, magnified 5 to 15 times or so. Even more in the case of some of the pollen models.
As if that weren’t enough, there is a huge gallery of mammals in the museum as well. Bones, stuffed mammals, and pictures. There are smaller sections for prehistoric megafauna and sharks and birds. M closed her eyes through much of the exhibits of larger animals after having been frightened by a large farm animal of some kind.
We left the museum when it closed at 5, and decided to stay in the city for a while. We made our way to the Boston Museum of Science, took advantage of our membership and a nearly empty museum, open late on Friday night. It was great fun for the kids , since the museum was really crowded the last time we went.
Check out more pictures from the trip (all phonecam, sorry) in my Flickr photostream.
Posted by James at July 15, 2006 1:54 AMGamera is really neat,
He is filled with turtle meat.
We're all eating Ga-me-ra...
Gojira to Jetto Jagā de Panchi Panchi Panchi!
Jetto Jagā!
Jetto Jagā!
