The Natural History Museum was fairly busy today...lots of families enjoying their Sunday with some educational entertainment. I started with the dinosaur exhibit (prompted by the large assembled skeleton in the main lobby), which featured a lot of hands-on information about excavation and preservation of fossils, as well as animatronic replications of the beasts. The grand finish is the T-rex that you have to wait in line to see...fun times and photo opportunities for all! I checked out the mammal exhibit next, and was pleased to see placards regarding the faded color quality of some of the stuffed animals (they were from the older collections, as the museum does not want to encourage killing endangered species even for research and educational purposes). The whole exhibit made me nostalgic for my visits to the zoo as a child (especially the elephants!). :) I zipped through the reptile exhibit, which was fortunately little more than a hallway leading back to the main atrium (like Indiana Jones, I don't like snakes). Finally, I checked out the human biology exhibit, which was awesome! Given, I already knew all of the information (yes, I've already had the talk about "where babies come from", thank you!), but there were so many hands-on aspects and the exhibit as a whole was well designed and colorful. One area that I found particularly cool was a low-lit chamber (with a giant, Matrix-esque fetus...ok, I wasn't crazy about that part of it) with inter-uterine audio playing. That will definitely calm you down after the rush of the city! :)
After I had seen all that I wanted to at the Natural History Museum, I hopped on the Tube over to the Imperial War Museum. As I said, I wasn't expecting to be particularly impacted by this museum (except for the Holocaust exhibit...my expectations were actually really high for that specific area), but I was definitely proven wrong. I started off in an exhibit called "The Children's War," which was about WWII through the perspectives of children, with some specific emphasis on the children who were shipped away from the cities for the duration of the war. It was heart-wrenching (of maybe I'm just overly sensitive from being away from home), and I felt tears welling up within the first hallway of the exhibit. I didn't actually cry until I read a letter to a little girl from her father, which he instructed to be given to her in the event of his death in service...she loaned it to the exhibit as an adult, so you can guess what happened to him. It was all about his hopes for her for the future, and it was one of the only really legible letters on display. Even from a non-sentimental perspective, the exhibit was great...in the very center, they had constructed a house that the visitors could wander through, complete with an indoor shelter in the kitchen. Another moment that made the tears well up a bit was a quote on the wall from a now-adult who was one of the children sent away from the city. When he returned, his neighborhood had been bombed, and he had no way of even telling where his family's house had been. He described his feelings that even now, as an adult, he still feels like he's waiting to go home.
Once I was thoroughly moved by the children's stories, I went upstairs to the WWI and WWII exhibits for the Trench and Blitz experiences. The Trench experience was particularly disturbing, although I was prepared for worse in terms of the smell (not that it was pleasant, mind you, but my friends who had visited before had warned me a bit more than necessary). As soon as I walked in, I felt uncomfortable and wanted to get out, and I didn't even have to worry about actual bombs! :) I actually followed closely behind a family that was visiting so that I would not be the first person to come across any surprises and shriek (as I am known to do...). The Blitz experience was interesting as well...you begin in an air-raid shelter, which is dark and crowded (featuring benches that shake violently when the bomb hits!), then go out into the destroyed street. The audio playing reveals that someone outside was wounded and there are fires to be put out, and the fact that only twenty visitors are let in at one time definitely makes it a moving experience.
Speaking of moving experiences, I hit up the Holocaust Exhibition last (both because it was on the top floor and because I predicted that I would be ready to leave by the time I finished digesting all of the information and images). It was incredibly thorough, beginning with post-WWI conditions in Germany and their influence upon Hitler's rise to power, to the origins of anti-Semitic tendencies from a variety of cultures. Throughout the exhibit, there were a variety of video clips from several interviews with different survivors, all of whom were very young during the war. I was alright until I got to the display case right before the actual ghetto/concentration camp sections, when the discussion of sterilization and murder of those deemed mentally or physically "unproductive" began to take place. Then I started to get angry...and I was on an emotional roller-coaster for most of the rest of the exhibit. The stories of the children particularly hit me (I knew that being in "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" would emotionally scar all of us...), as well as one specific story of a family that hid in the sewers to avoid being sent to the concentration camps (one of the women was pregnant, gave birth in the sewer, and smothered the baby so that it would not cry and give them away...I was trying not to cry again at that point). And, of course, I felt angry again at the end when I saw the display which revealed the fates of those in charge (Hitler was the last one, of course), as well as the final video clips of the survivors, all of whom have suffered even after being liberated because of the physical and psychological strains. It was difficult to describe...I had so much disappointment in my heart with no real outlet (although I sense a good cry sometime in the near future just to get all of that negative energy out of my system). The exhibition was incredibly respectful, however, and I felt as though it was tailored to those like me who would have strong emotional reactions. A great deal of emphasis was placed upon not forgetting these events and preventing this from ever happening again.
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