Ireland Finale-- Stuffed and Peeling Animals, Great Bands, and Awkward Bodies

Our last day consisted of site seeing around Dublin! This time all the museums were actually open. Laura and Derek set off to see Trinity College, which I had already seen. I made the trek to the National Museum of Archaeology and the National Museum of Natural History. The archaeology museum was underwhelming, but had cool Viking objects.. like these:

The natural history museum was a whole other can of worms. When most people decide to go to a natural history museum most people expect dinosaurs and saber tooth tigers and mammoths. This is what I was expecting. This is not what I got. It was a museum of death. The ONLY cool thing was the gigantic deer skeleton that was literally 16 feet tall that stood in the doorway to the rest of the museum. It would make a moose look small. 

The rest of the animals were displayed in cases that obstructed their view. The animals in those cases were stuffed and had various goofy expressions on their faces. I'm pretty sure I made people uncomfortable by being surprised by a goofy looking beaver or platypus and bursting out laughing. 

Oh hellooooo there!

I threw in a cool hippo skeleton for good measure

Now you might be thinking hey this is not bad at all. Emma is exaggerating.  I now give you the icing on the cake... A LOT of the creatures in there were made of plastic in varying degrees of decay, melting, and peeling. Take this poor shark for example:

After this museum, which I have renamed The National Museum of Plastic and Stuffed Melting and Peeling Museum, all of us reunited once again! Laura and I went to what may be the coolest and most terrifying, but fascinating museum I have ever been to. 

This was the Human Body Exhibit. For those of you who have no idea what this is it is a museum dedicated to showing the human body, it's organs, muscles, veins, arteries, and everything else inside of us. The catch? They use REAL human bodies that were donated to science. It can't really be described by words so here are some pictures. 

Yes this is freaky, weird, but fascinating. I cannot believe how imaginative a museum could be. They had every single bodily system on display in ways you wouldn't think of. The even had the entire body sliced into thin pieces so you could see a cross section. The section with the lungs was horrendous. They showed a healthy lung versus a cancerous lung and a smoker's lung. The last two were disgustingly similar. 

You never think about veins being cool, but holy crap! They had an arm on display that had no skin, bones, tendons, ligaments, just veins and arteries. I had no idea it would retain the shape of the arm. I can now see why people become doctors. The human body is absolutely fascinating and slightly horrifying at the same time. If you ever get the chance go to see this exhibit!