Museums…
Make your jaw drop the first time.
Give you sensory overload.
Contain room after room, like the Never-ending Story.
And sometimes they begin to look all the same.
For example…
The Enlightenment Room at the British Museum is an endless hall of collectors bits.
I figured this out after a month and a half of an intensive university course trip experience which sent me and a group of fifteen other undergrads all over Greece and Turkey a couple of years ago.
I am being reminded of this once again, as I trek my way through the glorious freebies that are London museums.
How to Pick a Museum:
Which ones do you have to see?
Which ones could you skip?
What’s the point of going to any?
These were three questions I was asking myself about a week ago after I barreled through both the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Natural History Museum in the space of four hours. Yes, they are next door to each other, but that possibly was a bit quick. Then again, if you aren’t one for crowds or queues, you may as well skip the Natural History Museum. Same goes for the hordes of art students crowding the corners of the V&A, voraciously freezing the frozen stone of long dead humans or magically mythical individuals, onto paper.
What you need to do:
Go to a museum with friends.
Go to a museum for an exhibit or event.
The Science Museum of London
The Science Museum is nearly entirely a hands-on and experiential venue which, as such, is a top spot to take kids. Not the sort of place you want to go alone, especially if you would rather avoid crowds and howls.
That is, until some new friends of mine invited me to this fantastic and monthly Wednesday evening event called the Science Museum Lates.
It’s an adult only event (they serve alcohol among other snacks and goodies) which takes place after the Science Museum closes to the public at 6pm.
It’s still free.
The only catch you you’ll want to show up at least half an hour, if not more, before the museum reopens for the event as they tend to be very popular (particularly during the colder months).
At these events, which take on a particular theme (when I went it was all about engineering), you’ll find lecture-based talks, booth after booth of university, public or privately funded groups doing everything from creating robotic prosthetics which you can try out, to more advanced forms of Wii which allow you to control a robot or a race a digital penguin on a ski-hill.
At this particular event there was drop-in Lego building, a simulated crash site and collapsed Tube tunnels. It was as much as sensory overload as any museum ever is, except that you were not just looking. You were playing.
Yes, they won’t always have a whole room full of boxes of Lego but you can be sure they will have something to keep you laughing.
If you want a free and fun night out, what better way than to appeal to your inner child and go explore science like you never have before?
No more will you see just another Grecian urn. It’s time to be creative!
Happy experimenting!
Moony
