I’ve never seen so many museums. History museums, art museums, museums dedicated to musicians, famous people, science and kids. It was hard to choose. The Museum Quartier was where Justin’s orientation was located so we naturally gravitated to that part of Vienna and chose the Natural History Museum as a first pass. As coincidences have it, there is another Fulbright family in Innsbruck with two boys the exact same ages as ours. So they joined us for the museum and lunch as well. It was fun. I’ll let the boys tell you about what they saw there.

Patrick: I was particularly fascinated by the architecture of this huge, historical building. I thought it was a cool thing too with an ancient building like this one.

I’ve been to plenty of natural history museums in my life and I’ve noticed that they have their strong parts, and their weak parts. This natural history museum’s strong part was definitely the geology section.

The geology section had like five different rooms and each room were filled with crystals, jewels, diamonds, and lots more.

Aeneas: Down below there is a picture of me standing in front of a huge bird. It was the largest predator of it’s time and was called the “Terror Bird.” All of the dinosaurs got wiped out and the little creatures survived and soon this bird evolved to get bigger and bigger. The era is called the “bird age.”

Patrick: To get to the up stairs, there was a huge stair case and marble carvings were every where. You might could find some pictures of us sitting on the stairs and see just how far up the roof went!

We ate lunch upstairs and afterwords, we decided to stick around for more of the museum up stairs. The primate section was upstairs. The primate section was another one of the museum’s strong parts (again, several rooms just centered on that particular section).

I never knew that Lucy the Australapithicus was in Vienna! If you don’t know who she is, she is one of the most preserved early humans. You can see a picture of me next to her some where in the pictures.

At the very bottom of the pictures, there will be a few pictures of models of skulls from different species of early humans. I thought that was pretty cool.

Even though we were in the museum for at least three hours, we still only did two-thirds of the whole museum! That will give you a sense of how huge this building was. Any way, I at least got my fix, the museum was awesome!!!

Aeneas: In my opinion, I thought the museum was really cool. I could go there again with my kids sometime and it would be really fun.We found pictures of our ancient McBrayer ancestors. Look closely! Can you see the resemblance?

Better than the mineral collection there was an awesome bug collection. I bet it had thousands and thousands of different bugs. My favorite was the goliath beetles and the flower preying mantises. Flower preying mantises had a collar around their necks that could change color to match the flower they are on to better hide them. Watch out bees!!!

Anna: The cases that all of the insects and minerals were displayed in were made of beautiful hard wood and a sight to see in itself. The insects looked like a collection of jewels with all of their colorful irridescent colors. Those two collections were the best I’ve ever seen. We all loved it.

Aeneas: They had a shark exhibit that was pretty darn cool too.

Anna: I wanted to hit an art museum at some point so even though we could have spent days in the Natural History Museum we had reached our saturation level of what we could take in and needed to meet back up with Justin. I picked out the Leopold museum which is a modern art museum that features Egon Shiele and Gustav Klimt. They both painted some pretty weird stuff but what drew me to this museum was their technique of painting and drawing. Even though JP and the kids only thought it was ok, it was pretty much everything I could have wanted in an art museum experience. Incendentally, Patrick was most impressed with architecture. It’s becoming his “thing.” His biggest interest in every place that we visit. I was so excited all day thinking about this museum. It was like anticipating Christmas. Kind of funny. I was able to take my time to walk through a beautifully modern and well planned building with perfectly placed panoramic vistas of the city, learning a great deal about two artists that were virtually unknown to me and finding a few pieces that were really inspiring. It was perfect.

#art #history #culture #museums #naturalhistory