NEMO

We took the kids for an educational (and fun!) trip to the NEMO science museum. We have a membership to the Baltimore Science Center so it was neat to compare the exhibits.



This is the footbridge to the NEMO museum. It is also a drawbridge.



Jeff, Justice, Journey and Jagger in front of the "garbage fountain". There was a ton of litter in the fountain - soda bottles, cigarrett butts, candy wrappers - you name it.



The green boat shaped museum is built overtop of the IJ tunnel, part of the A-10 highway ring. The roof of the museum is a beach! There are large fences all around, along with a sand volleyball court, and a children's water sprinkler. I've heard that it gets pretty crowded there in the summer!



I think the bubble exhibit was probably the kids' favorite.



Journey in a bubble



Jagger giggled the whole time we played with bubbles!



Jeff had some fun pulling bubble tubes up over the kids' heads too!



Justice enjoyed a computerized card game sponsored by KPN, the telephone company. You used microphones to communicate with the other players and could even take pictures of yourself for the oter players to see.



Journey enjoyed the hands-on exhibits while Justice preferred the computerized ones.



Jeff enjoyed the water play. You can see him in the background in a white shirt. He and Journey spent about 1/2 hour building a bean bag dam in the water.

One of the most interesting exhibits was the embryonic exhibit. They had embryos from many different species in jars. They had common animals like a baby pig, monkey, rabbit, etc. But then they also had mutated animals such as siamese monkeys and a two-headed kitten.

The most moving was that of the human embryos.



The smallest jar showed the embryo when it was barely visible. The jars continued up until the baby was 5.5 months of age. I wasn't able to fit the whole display in this shot, just the last few containers. Justice and Journey seemed quite fascinated by this and Journey asked a number of questions.

I think that one of things about this museum, and Amsterdam in general, is the fact that they don't try to cover things up for kids. One display in this museum was about physical beauty. They showed pictures of different people around the world with different items/features/looks/styles that are popular in their culture. There were pictures of tatoos, body piercings, extremely long fingernails, etc. But then there were also pictures of the tribe that hollows out a hole in their lip and adds a circular object, and a group of people who put large objects in their earlobes as earrings so that the holes left are enormous. There were many more examples of this. In many of the pictures from other countries the people were barely clothed or had no clothing. There was even a picture from some sort of tribe where the men wear this long animal horn attached to animal skin overtop of their groin area! It was quite....uh...interesting? Anyway, I doubt a display like this would be allowed in a museum in the US. Too many parents would complain that the material was not suitable for children, blah, blah, blah...then there would be the threat of lawsuits, etc.

Another exhibit in the museum tested your emotional reaction to images. You had to put two fingers in a small slot and then sit still and look at a random collection of images on a computer screen. After viewing all of the images it told you which image you reacted to the most and then gave a chart of your reactions to all of the images. For instance, the image that I reacted to the most was a barred jail cell with hands reaching out of it, some with cups in them, waiting for food (you couldn't see the people's faces). But then I also reacted strongly to a picture of a cute little white kitten sitting in a tree. I hardly reacted at all to a picture of farm animals. I reacted somewhat strongly to a little girl on a wooden swing hanging from a tree (the swing was in motion). When Justice did the same test one of his images included a picture of a woman that was almost naked. Jeff's test had a picture of a mother nursing her baby (her breast was visible). My point here...and I do have one...is that the people here do not see the naked human body as being wrong. People here do not get all upset and cover their children's eyes because of a picture of a naked person. There were even school groups at the museum while we were there!