Samantha Ling

One of the many things that we did in DC was go to the museums. Most of the museums had extended holiday hours and the Natural History museum was one of those. So we went after lunch. (I think we went to Hard Times Cafe, which had delicious chili. Wish we had one here!)

The place is huge. We were there for about 7 hours and we still didn’t see everything. But to be fair, there was also a bajillion people there.

Here we are standing next to a giant squid. I’d always imagined that those things would be much much bigger, but I think that it’s the tentacles that make the length and not the body. Still, I was pretty excited to see it. (BTW, it was freezing there and we all wore scarves and jackets. But by the time we got inside the museum, it was hellaciously hot from the number of bodies. By the end of the day, when everyone else had left, the museum was actually pretty cold.)

There is like an ancient societies section in the museum. It goes from like the dawn of civilization to now and how tall you’d be on average. As you can see, Mr. J hasn’t quite reached adulthood yet.

The one thing that everybody seemed to be crowded around was the Hope Diamond. Now it’s not even all that big. From how everybody talks about it, I thought it’d be like as big as my head. But really, it’s like the size of a baby’s fist. It’s no bigger than that big sapphire Celine Dion wore for her Titanic song way back in the day. Still, it’s a pretty big rock, just not the overexaggerated size that I thought it was.

People were crowded around that thing like it was some magical thing. But I guess I’m just not that into that particular diamond. I wandered off to see the myriad of other gems that they had displayed. I especially like the totally ancient pieces from (I think) Marie Antoinette.

I enclose this with Chris being chomped on by a great white shark. He’s almost as big!

Crossposted to Samantha Ling, Dreamwidth and Livejournal