Last weekend we made the trip back to Manhattan to check out a museum. Mind you, New York City has a lot of museums to choose from. But, since we’re still in the honeymoon stages of living in the city and very much tourists when it comes to discovering the sights in Manhattan, our initial plan was to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Then I found out that The American Museum of Natural History (on the other side of Central Park) has dinosaur bones.
I like art.
But I like dinosaurs more.
The museum has four floors of exhibits. And the floors are not cramped by any means. In fact, I’d venture to suggest that it would be possible to get lost. You can check out the floor plan on the museum’s website HERE.
The size of the exhibits was astounding, as well. There was a marine section with a “94-foot-long, 21,000-pound model of a blue whale suspended from the ceiling.” In the North American Forests section, there was a “slice of a 1,400-year-old sequoia tree” which I didn’t bother to photograph because a picture would only diminish the immensity of the exhibit. (www.amnh.org)
We arrived at the museum around late morning on Saturday, after taking the most packed subway train I’ve been on yet. There were quite a few people in the museum, but once we got through admissions, the crowd disbursed and we were able to mosey around and admire the exhibits at our leisure.
After lunchtime, though, the museum began to feel very crowded and we started to realize that there was no way we were going to make it through all of the exhibits, even if we picked up the pace considerably.
We didn’t make it to the Hall of Minerals, Meteorites, Gems, Human Origins (kicking myself especially for that one), and on and on. We barely skimmed through the Hall of New York State environment, North American Forests, Biodiversity, etc. We just peeked into the Hall of Ocean Life. Really, we pretty much missed everything on the first floor
We breezed through the second floor much more quickly than we would have liked, where exhibits displayed different early cultures of people around the world, featuring fabulous miniature dioramas and artifacts.
We spent much of our time on the third and fourth floors where modern and prehistoric life was the main attraction, including dinosaur bones, which I was pretty excited about. Though, even in these sections, we were rushed to see everything.
I can’t wait to go back since there is so much we didn’t see on this first visit.
Wanting to catch an express subway back to Brooklyn, we decided to cross through Central Park to access the station that was serviced by those express trains. We didn’t necessarily save any time by doing so, though, since we got caught up in the beauty and serenity that always seems to come with being in Central Park. Also, I think we got lost a little.
After a time, though, we made it to the other side and actually walked past the Metropolitan Museum of Art which, after seeing some advertisements for the exhibits inside, I’ve decided I also need to visit.
