Anatomy

Yesterday I was at the Natural History Museum. They have a great bookshop, so whenever I am in Leiden I try to go and have a look. This time I went to the museum itself again, I was tempted by the "Extremes" exhibition, all about extreme heat, cold, wet, dry. That was pretty good, a lot of things to do for children, like there are everywhere in the museum. You could test the wind chill factor, for example, which was quite funny to do. And they showed an Antarctic Ice Fish, which I found interesting.

I hadn't been to the museum for about a year or so, and you always forget so much. Like the three whale skeletons, or part whale skeletons right at the back. After being back in Antarctica and at the whale museum in Harberton I noticed these again particularly, a Sperm Whale, a Southern Right Whale and a Sei Whale.

I also ended up in the other temporary exhibition on human anatomy. I don't think I saw all of it, it felt a little strange walking round there. They showed a lot of samples from the anatomical museum of Leiden University Hospital, so you get to see a lot of things that can go wrong, and these aren't models. And to see a cross section of a human head is fascinating, but it also is pretty disconcerting. I wasn't really prepared for this, because I didn't know the exhibition was on. The images stay with me though, they did make an impression.