day at the museum

Mar 1, 2012

In Balboa park San Diego has the largest concentration of Museums in the USA outside of Washington DC. The park is huge, kind of like the Phoenix park in Dublin, Ireland. Our destination today was intended to be the science museum, but the GPS threw us off by suggesting we take a non-existent “turn right”. We found the natural history museum beside the San Diego Zoo and settled for that instead.

The museum is much smaller than its equivalents in Melbourne or Dublin, but the exhibits are very good. The same Titanic artefact exhibition that came to Melbourne recently is running here now. They have cut-away dinosaurs showing both the skeleton and skin, there were several really good animations of how plate tectonics have moved over the last few million years, a gem display and a Foucault pendulum which I found fascinating. I had read Umberto Eco’s book of the same title years ago but had never seen one previously. Museum admission includes entry to the 3d theatre where we watched a programme on sharks. The kids found a chalk board on the third floor which kept them occupied for a lot longer than IrishMum or I were expecting. We had lunch in the park and returned to finish the museum. We learned an interesting fact about how horses first evolved in North America, then spread to the rest of the world but died out in North America, to be re-introduced by the Europeans. After the museum we found a shopping mall in the city centre to get some coffee (the coffee at the museum was luke warm milk…I asked the girl to heat it up but she said the machine is set to only heat to that temperature so I got a refund but no coffee). San Diego has a population of 1.3 million making it slightly bigger than Dublin but smaller than Melbourne. The city is pleasant but not as nice as either Dublin or Melbourne, its roads are better than both. On the way home IrishDoom got his first hair cut’n’style at an actual hairdresser… the Justin Bieber look is in fashion these days.