Twilight at the Museum

I think there must be 11 museums in Cambridge and that's too many to get round in one day. Most of them are run by the University and all of them are truly fascinating.

In the Sedgwick Museum.

On Wednesday evening, at least 8 of them participated in a single event that involved opening from 4.30 to 7.30 pm with the lights switched off. It was "Night at the Museum" for the tinies. Hundreds of the little guys toddled around cambridge with their torches on and with ernest grown-ups in tow.  It was snowing at the time, so every snowflake that was caught in a beam seemed to do a special dance for a little child holding a torch. Everything looked different.

For many of those kids, and probably some of the parents, this was a first visit to a museum. We went into four of them; three of them for the first time. If the torches made every-day objects seem special, just imagine creeping around old college buildings full of isles of glass cases containing surgical instruments, skeletons and weird machines.

Zoology Museum and whale.

Laura and Dan at Wagamamas.

We only managed four museums because there was so much to see and because we had to queue for 15 minutes at the Zoology Museum and a bit less at the new Hands-on Science museum. It was a really busy evening.

The best museum for us was the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, but the Whipple Museum of the History of Science came a close second. I really wanted to see the Aurora Borealis at the Scott Polar Institute, but we didn't get that far. Hanna wanted to go to the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology where there was a torch-lit treasure trail and we had planned to walk by the Fitzwilliam to see the outside all lit up with images from the collection. We just ran out of time.

To round the evening off we all had supper at Wagamamas and Dan was a super-star.