This museum sucks!
This opinion both saddens and surprises me. I love museums of natural history, even crappy ones, like the one in Vina.... but I found this one just outright traumatizing.
The outside of the building is pretty enough, isn't it? Overly ornate, yet much smaller than the buildings surrounding it, it looks kind of like a miniature version of something that was imagined to be over sized, grand, dreadfully important.
I went Sunday morning, by myself. I walked in. It was free. That was nice.
A room to the left held an exhibit on boats. Boats aren't natural history. Strike one. They could have at least taken the anthropological angle with a study of boats of indigenous people throughout time and region... but no, it was just the same crappy modern history of boats that you find in every museum in this country. Strike one.
I walked into the main portion of the museum, hoping for something better. I turned to my right and noticed... wait for it.... a dead human infant in a glass case! Not only that, but the corpse had two heads and was kind of propped up, legs spread wide open no less, next to jars of deformed domesticated animal species and stuffed monkeys. The "exhibit" was on deformities, but it was just some dead stuff poorly preserved and displayed in a way that was actually nauseating. A small plaque identified the specimens. The only information about the kid was that she was born in 1915 in a Valparaiso hospital. From the looks of her, she was too big to be a new born. I would probably guess that the kid (kids?) lived to be at least 2 or 3 months, either that or the preservation technique was so bad that she swelled considerably with whatever liquid she was sitting in. The preservation technique was certainly bad. That is for sure. Uck. I can't talk about it anymore.
I was going to take a picture but at the last moment I pulled my camera away. I generally have no problem with death on display. Things die, human and otherwise. Its natural. We study them, thats how we know shit. It happens. But for some reason, something deep within me felt that this had crossed a line.
Here is the picture I took when I pulled the camera away. There was a puppy with 8 legs, saimese twin goats, a pig without a face, and... something else.... without a face.
Well, this all got me thinking about natural history museums and how they are really just death museums. Its so interesting that people don't really admit that. I love them and visit them as often as I can and I had not fully realized it until that moment. It kind of tainted the rest of my experience. It didn't help that the museum is completely random. Dead something next to dead something else. All pretty poorly preserved... death museum. It wouldn't be so bad if they were able to make it pretty. As I said, death is natural, but decay is just unpleasant. Part of science, part of history, but still... unpleasant.
There were some other exhibits on oceans and stuff, but they were pretty uninteresting. Nothing more than oodles of information uninterestingly posted on the walls. Nothing interactive besides an exhibit on algae where you got to press buttons that light up light bulbs next to said algae industrial uses. I made better science projects in middle school. Like that 8th grade electricity project where Mmmbop would play when you gave correct answers for pointless trivia questions about Hanson. As embarrassed as I am for creating that, trust me, in wins compared to Valparaiso's Museum of Natural History.
Sighh....
Besos,
Allie
9 comments:
If I recall correctly, everything you did in 8th grade was in someway Hanson related. Most museums are about death and decay. Dead people, dead animals, dead cultures, dead ideologies. I know Hanson is still at it somewhat, but they are also dead in many ways. You could be a pop music curator!
Yeah, that was a dark period of my life...
you were a hanson fan?
oh dear.
Haha... I knew I would get a comment from you on that.
I don't really think the abbreviation is adequate, fanatic is a much more truthful term.
Don't worry, I had a little band with two other girls when I was young and the first song they insisted we learn was MMbop. Yes, it's very easy. But good practice!
Now I'm really glad I didn't bother to make it to that museum. I'm sad I didn't make it to Museo Fonck, though. I wanted to see the mummy(dead person).
I don't remember the dead person in Museo Fonck.... but there are shrunken heads... which I guess at least equates to parts of dead people. Is that what you mean?
There are also shrunken heads in the Valpo museum... I guess that would have been worth mentioning as well.... death! mish!
if the guide books say there's a mummy in the museo fonck they're probably out of date. in the museum in san pedro de atacama they removed the mummies from view about a year ago after years of protests from the local atacameños. i'd expect they removed mummies from exhibits in museums all over the country at the same time.
shrunken heads? now that sounds interesting.
not as interesting as your hanson fanaticism though. or nearly as terrifying.
yes and yes
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