An Afternoon at the Museum

We had off from classes on Monday in honor of the Queen’s Birthday. (Apparently, it was not actually Her birthday, but I’m certainly not going to complain about this technicality since it gave us a day off!) I pretty much just hung around the apartment all morning. The most productive thing I accomplished was making myself breakfast, which was actually quite good if I might say so myself! (I had scrambled eggs with mushrooms and red pepper, and toast with avocado.)
Anyway, I was determined not to waste the day, and it seemed that a few of my friends felt the same way. So I went with James, Nick, Cate, Ed, and TK to the Auckland Museum. It’s about a 20 minute walk, through Auckland Domain (one of the city’s parks), but it’s an uphill walk and we certainly got our exercise! There is technically not an admission fee to the museum, just a suggested $5 donation. We all paid the $5, except for TK who only had $1.60 in his pocket. He did, however, give all of what he had, so good job TK! It was well worth it, in my opinion, because it provided a fun and even somewhat educational afternoon. See, we are learning things over here, we just choose to do most of it outside the classroom!
This was an interesting museum with quite a diverse display of exhibits. It reminded me somewhat of The Museum of Natural History. The bottom floor was all about Pacific History, and of course had a strong Maori focus. We saw some really cool (and lethal!) spears, lots of pottery and such, and many Maori carvings. They also had a really pretty marae that you could go inside. I can’t believe how many different marae I’ve had the opportunity to enter. Inside of the marae:

The next level was about Natural History, and had lots of stuffed animals and such. There was even a stuffed elephant, which took a taxidermist 7 months to complete!

There were also some dinosaur skeltons:

There was a whole section on volcanoes, but there was also this room that you could watch a video in. You walked in and it looked like a living room, with couches, a TV and a coffeetable. It was supposed to give you an idea of what it would be like if a volcano erupted in Auckland Harbour, and it was actually pretty cool! The TV screen showed the "news" and was describing the possibility of an eruption, when all of a sudden you could see it happening in the big "window." The cloud approached and the room started shaking and it was a neat little simulation.

The top floor was dedicated to New Zealand war history, and also had a war memorial. There was also some random modern art:

We spent about 2 hours walking around the museum and I have to say I’m quite glad I did it. It was nice to get out and just go do something different. We walked back home a different way than we had come – it’s always nice to mix it up. I don’t know if anyone else can say the same, but personally I really enjoyed our discussion on the walk back too! We were all reminiscing about our childhoods, and fighting with our siblings and getting punished or getting away with stuff when we were little. It was really interesting and amusing to hear everyone’s different stories. I know that might seem a weird thing to discuss in my blog, but I really feel like I’ve become close with all of the people here and have learned a lot about everyone individually in the four months we’ve been together. So it’s those simple little things, like specific conversations, that I’m going to remember from this whole experience, in addition to the amazing things we’ve seen and done.