Travelogue: Museum Edition.
Jul. 4th, 2012 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matt_doyle While in Virginia, I visited the Mariner's Museum and the Virginia Living Museum, and I'm trying to think of decently interesting ways of recapping the experience. It's tough, because the point of a museum is that being there is a different, deeper sort of experience than talking about it. If that wasn't true, there would be no point in visiting museums.
The Mariner's Museum trip has a specific purpose: we went to see the exhibit on the Monitor, the Civil War ironclad that first duked it out with the Virginia, which us northerners call the Merrimack, as that was the original name given to the hull before the Confederacy rebuilt her as an ironclad of their own. It was very educational, very immersive, and it took three and a half hours to walk through all their material, which meant I only got a brief look at the rest of the museum. It was very well done, if interest-specific -- if you like ships and the history of seafaring, I'd recommend it.
One of the more interesting things I learned is that, up north, schoolchildren are more likely to learn that the Monitor won the battle. Down south, they're more likely to learn the Virginia won. In truth... well, truth is tricky. Neither sank the other or did much damage, so the faceoff between ironclads was a tie. The Virginia certainly sank more Union ships, which is kind of a win... but it didn't break the blockade of the Hampton Roads, so it's kind of a loss.
Interesting.
While I greatly enjoyed the Mariner's Museum, the Living Museum was more my kind of thing -- it was essentially a small zoo, filled with local wildlife, and with a museum's worth of educational detail presented to the visitor. I stared at a lot of fish, which is way more fun than it sounds, and is in fact one of my favorite things to do -- I used to want to be a marine biologist, and when I went swimming as a kid I'd spend as much time as I could underwater, pretending that I was a submarine. There was an aviary, with a great many interesting species of bird, including a nesting pair of...hmm, I forget what they were, I'll ask Megan.... a pair of ducks swimming the fence, one inside and one out, clearly pining for one another... and at least one off-species duck that had snuck in. There was also a tree shaped like a moose.
There was an outdoor walk which took us past beavers (busily damming the artificial trickle of a stream feeding into their pond -- holy cow can they move impressive amounts of material), otters (sleeping), wolves (sleeping underground), skunks (present but not visible), a bobcat sunning on a rock, a pair of red foxes sleeping like the dead, a lazy coyote, a stag pretending to be a brushpile, and a lot of rather loud children demanding that the animals be more interesting.
The animals were very interesting.
Besides the aquatic exhibits indoors, they also had an underground exhibit, which was a fantastically fun recreation of a cave. There was a very busy beehive with a glass window on the side, busily overflowing. There was an exhibit with animatronic dinosaurs, which resulted in some pictures I will have to share with you later on. Basically, it was a blast.
The Mariner's Museum trip has a specific purpose: we went to see the exhibit on the Monitor, the Civil War ironclad that first duked it out with the Virginia, which us northerners call the Merrimack, as that was the original name given to the hull before the Confederacy rebuilt her as an ironclad of their own. It was very educational, very immersive, and it took three and a half hours to walk through all their material, which meant I only got a brief look at the rest of the museum. It was very well done, if interest-specific -- if you like ships and the history of seafaring, I'd recommend it.
One of the more interesting things I learned is that, up north, schoolchildren are more likely to learn that the Monitor won the battle. Down south, they're more likely to learn the Virginia won. In truth... well, truth is tricky. Neither sank the other or did much damage, so the faceoff between ironclads was a tie. The Virginia certainly sank more Union ships, which is kind of a win... but it didn't break the blockade of the Hampton Roads, so it's kind of a loss.
Interesting.
While I greatly enjoyed the Mariner's Museum, the Living Museum was more my kind of thing -- it was essentially a small zoo, filled with local wildlife, and with a museum's worth of educational detail presented to the visitor. I stared at a lot of fish, which is way more fun than it sounds, and is in fact one of my favorite things to do -- I used to want to be a marine biologist, and when I went swimming as a kid I'd spend as much time as I could underwater, pretending that I was a submarine. There was an aviary, with a great many interesting species of bird, including a nesting pair of...hmm, I forget what they were, I'll ask Megan.... a pair of ducks swimming the fence, one inside and one out, clearly pining for one another... and at least one off-species duck that had snuck in. There was also a tree shaped like a moose.
There was an outdoor walk which took us past beavers (busily damming the artificial trickle of a stream feeding into their pond -- holy cow can they move impressive amounts of material), otters (sleeping), wolves (sleeping underground), skunks (present but not visible), a bobcat sunning on a rock, a pair of red foxes sleeping like the dead, a lazy coyote, a stag pretending to be a brushpile, and a lot of rather loud children demanding that the animals be more interesting.
The animals were very interesting.
Besides the aquatic exhibits indoors, they also had an underground exhibit, which was a fantastically fun recreation of a cave. There was a very busy beehive with a glass window on the side, busily overflowing. There was an exhibit with animatronic dinosaurs, which resulted in some pictures I will have to share with you later on. Basically, it was a blast.
