I'm just back from a trip to the United States where I was visiting friends and relatives. It was a wonderful trip and one of the best parts of it was seeing a museum that I used to visit when I was little. The museum is at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In it are rooms and rooms filled with stuffed animals. I found some of these quite scary when I was a kid and there were parts of the museum I used to tiptoe through for fear that animals would suddenly come to life and attack me. But it was a delicious kind of scariness like the kind you get from reading a scary story that isn't too too scary.
In another wing of the museum there are floors of exhibits about the Indigenous peoples of North and South America: American Indians and Eskimos. My favourites were the little models of villages with tiny people in them.
There was one in particular that I loved - a diorama of Native Americans from the American West, doing a dance. I remember pressing my face to the glass and trying to imagine what life must have been like for them. On my visit I found this diorama again and relived a bit of my childhood.
Another favourite part of the museum is the glass flower collection. It may sound boring but they are most fascinating and real-looking flowers all made from glass. Years ago before photography, science students used these to study plants. Glass-makers in Germany made these life-like models for Harvard University. You can see from the photos how fine the work is and how real the flowers look.
In it are rooms and rooms filled with stuffed animals. I found some of these quite scary when I was a kid and there were parts of the museum I used to tiptoe through for fear that animals would suddenly come to life and attack me. But it was a delicious kind of scariness like the kind you get from reading a scary story that isn't too too scary.In another wing of the museum there are floors of exhibits about the Indigenous peoples of North and South America: American Indians and Eskimos. My favourites were the little models of villages with tiny people in them.
There was one in particular that I loved - a diorama of Native Americans from the American West, doing a dance. I remember pressing my face to the glass and trying to imagine what life must have been like for them. On my visit I found this diorama again and relived a bit of my childhood.Another favourite part of the museum is the glass flower collection. It may sound boring but they are most fascinating and real-looking flowers all made from glass. Years ago before photography, science students used these to study plants. Glass-makers in Germany made these life-like models for Harvard University. You can see from the photos how fine the work is and how real the flowers look.
Here's a link to the Glass Flowers collection at Harvard, and the Wikipedia entry on them.
