A day in the museum

On Thursday, in order to get out of the house, but to stay indoors (with air conditioning) we visited The National Museum of Nature and Science. I went there a couple of months ago when my eldest and I were scouting it out for a scavenger hunt. At that time we rushed through it in a couple of hours. This time, however, we took our time and spent the whole day there.

David really enjoyed the bottom basement floor that was about behind the scenes of science, particularly physics, etc. the things he teaches on and knows most about. There was a lot of biology, zoology, astronomy etc. on other floors.

The mol, one of the base units in the SI
system. The international system of measurement
in the scientific world. Here David was
getting excited about looking up conversions
on his phone. He loved this floor!

Me trying hard to generate electricity, not very successfully,
might I add. 

The boys want me to ask you, if you think this is a real leg?

Our sons had fun with our "old" camera. It still works,
but sometimes has trouble focussing.

A cool interactive display about the universe.

Plenty of bones! We even saw a mammoth's skeleton.

And stacks of people.

After our giant Hokkaido bee encounters, we were
quite interested in the bee collection. 120+ different types
of bees, some of which were very tiny!

Throughout the museum were these screens that gave
you more information about the exhibits. The majority
of them had English (and Chinese and Korean) on them
and I enjoyed them a lot. It's not much fun to go to a
museum and not know what you're looking at. This isn't easy to read,
but it was about "Time Day" that Japan instituted in 1919 to
promote the concept of time and the sense of time for the general
public. Given Japan's strong sense of the importance of
punctuality these days, I'd say they did a good job of educating the masses!

This one is about the unique Japanese clock. Japan used to
measure time by dividing the hours of daylight into six
equal portions, and the same for the night. That meant
that the periods were always changing as the seasons
changed. The clock required changes every two weeks or
so to keep up with the changes!

We finished the excursion with ice cream, that had to be eaten quickly, or it melted all over you (so I didn't wait for a photo). David and I enjoyed the pineapple flavoured version!