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Aug. 11th, 2007 12:15 pmMoe and I visited The Pompeii exhibit at the Science Museum. The accompanying Imax movie Greece, Secrets of the Past was pretty much skippable. It was 50% bio on some dude-- one of my college buddies is an archeologist so most of the A Day In the Life Of-stuff I was already familiar with, and Imax really isn't the ideal medium for personal pieces. The rest of movie was okay. 40% dealt with an unusual island culture off Greece's main-- interesting because it wasn't a usual suspect. 10% showed non-expected ways archeologists figure out stuff. In this case, they figure the date of a volcano eruption by presence of its ash buried in ice in Greenland. I like clever solutions like that.
The trailer for Alps otoh, looked awesome. Tons of sweeping shots and tumbly turns. I felt like I was sliding off a mountain.
Before heading into the Pompeii rooms, we went a did all the hands-on kids stuff in the rest of the museum. We bounced on musical steps, we hoisted giant fish out of "the river", we fiddled with the floodplain-o-meter. We rolled the genetic dice and produced 5 healthy offspring and one with cystic fibrosis. We took the scent test. Out of 4, I got one technically right (the answer was wood smoke, I guessed "campfire"), and three close, but wrong (one was rose, and I guess lilac, mint I guessed as "something we eat, maybe tea", and cinnamon I guessed bread-- okay maybe the cinnamon one wasn't so close)
The Pompeii rooms were CROWDED. And because everyone had acoustiguide headphones, the flow tended to clump. One of things I really liked about the acoustiguide was that it had two settings. Adult and family. I listened to both. The Adult one had professors yammering away (One was named Professor Growcock. hehehehe); the kids one had actors protraying a Cleaver-esque Roman family. The family audio did a very good job of explaining stuff within a story context.
The exhibit was small. Which was disappointing. 50 bucks is a lot to drop for 5 small rooms, a few of which had lots of non-time period filler. Interesting filler, though. I will give them that. WWII era footage of volcanos erupted, complete with weird sounding narrator and a "Buy War Bonds" message. A giant floor map of the world showing active volcanos (stay away from the west coast of South America). A giant timeline of the Pompeii tragedy.
What little they had was cool. Lots of personal, everyday objects: mirrors, jewelry, knick-knacks, paintings-- the stuff that makes you go "wow, someone owned this, and likely died horrifically." It's so interesting to me how little aesthetics have changed over the course of thousands of years. The paintings there were beautiful because they were beautiful, not because they were old. The color schemes and decorating choices would look just as lovely in a modern house. A lot of the jewelry looked exactly like stuff worn today.
My favorite items were little brass statues of the gods used for household worship. Baccus was a favorite, which says something about Pompeii. Every piece of sculpture was lovely. Man, the Romans had grace of form DOWN. All that implied movement, implied emotion. Wow.
The trailer for Alps otoh, looked awesome. Tons of sweeping shots and tumbly turns. I felt like I was sliding off a mountain.
Before heading into the Pompeii rooms, we went a did all the hands-on kids stuff in the rest of the museum. We bounced on musical steps, we hoisted giant fish out of "the river", we fiddled with the floodplain-o-meter. We rolled the genetic dice and produced 5 healthy offspring and one with cystic fibrosis. We took the scent test. Out of 4, I got one technically right (the answer was wood smoke, I guessed "campfire"), and three close, but wrong (one was rose, and I guess lilac, mint I guessed as "something we eat, maybe tea", and cinnamon I guessed bread-- okay maybe the cinnamon one wasn't so close)
The Pompeii rooms were CROWDED. And because everyone had acoustiguide headphones, the flow tended to clump. One of things I really liked about the acoustiguide was that it had two settings. Adult and family. I listened to both. The Adult one had professors yammering away (One was named Professor Growcock. hehehehe); the kids one had actors protraying a Cleaver-esque Roman family. The family audio did a very good job of explaining stuff within a story context.
The exhibit was small. Which was disappointing. 50 bucks is a lot to drop for 5 small rooms, a few of which had lots of non-time period filler. Interesting filler, though. I will give them that. WWII era footage of volcanos erupted, complete with weird sounding narrator and a "Buy War Bonds" message. A giant floor map of the world showing active volcanos (stay away from the west coast of South America). A giant timeline of the Pompeii tragedy.
What little they had was cool. Lots of personal, everyday objects: mirrors, jewelry, knick-knacks, paintings-- the stuff that makes you go "wow, someone owned this, and likely died horrifically." It's so interesting to me how little aesthetics have changed over the course of thousands of years. The paintings there were beautiful because they were beautiful, not because they were old. The color schemes and decorating choices would look just as lovely in a modern house. A lot of the jewelry looked exactly like stuff worn today.
My favorite items were little brass statues of the gods used for household worship. Baccus was a favorite, which says something about Pompeii. Every piece of sculpture was lovely. Man, the Romans had grace of form DOWN. All that implied movement, implied emotion. Wow.
