Rochester Museum & Science Center

Until now, the only reason I’d been to the Rochester Museum & Science Center was for the holiday bazaar arts & crafts sale.  I decided it was time to visit the museum for its own sake, and pay attention to the exhibits, rather than being on a shopping mission.  I met my friend Gwen there at 10:30, expecting to cruise through the museum in time for an early lunch.  You know what they say about best-laid plans…  This combination natural history and science museum has quite a lot to take in, from the obligatory dioramas of current and historical animals to the interactive exhibits that are mostly geared to kids, but which we also enjoyed.  

The first one we encountered was an introduction to robotics, and we spent nearly 15 minutes there trying to master the machine (I gave up easily, but Gwen persisted, and finally succeeded in grasping a pyramid – forget about the goal of stacking the objects!).  I also convinced her to have a go at the climbing wall, which was much harder than it looked…

There were lots of school groups in the museum – the perfect place to kill time on the last day before Christmas break.  They were all different ages, and they all seemed to be enjoying the experience (or just being out of class?).  We pretty much had the exhibit on Rochester’s Underground Railroad to ourselves, as well as the vast collection of Indian artifacts.  We played with the hands-on (and in one case, legs-on) exhibits demonstrating the generation of electricity, and tried to figure out one light-based exhibit that made absolutely no sense to us – we must have been too old to understand the instructions!  

I got some weight-bearing exercise on one of the pulleys, and climbed through some sort of maze in the Adventure-Zone that I thought at one point I might need to be rescued from.

Since it was already 1:00 and we were hungry, we didn’t have time to take in the Strasenburgh Planetarium as well, so I’ll have to go back at some point over the holidays, because I’ve always wanted to see some of the movies they show there, and both of the current advertised films sound interesting: Grand Canyon and Coral Reef (although frustratingly, the latter movie has no scheduled shows???).

(But how can this be, if the earth is no more than 10,000 years old?!?!?!)