#68 Museums I've Never Been To: Madame Tussaud's

Not like I didn't already suspect this, but now it's confirmed: wax museums = uber creepy.

But still pretty cool.  Seeing Morgan Freeman scare the crap out of my husband was worth every wax figure that scared the crap out of me. It's weird to be walking around, apologize for almost running into someone, and then turn to find that you've just apologized to a wax figurine.  And then you feel like an idiot.

The museum wasn't quite as big as I was expecting, to be honest, although it did have a lot of stars within it, for some reason I was expecting more.

Considering the size of it, I was glad that I got our tickets off of a LivingSocial deal and that we didn't pay full price. But we had a good time. Took us about an hour to run through the whole museum, despite my penchant for taking constant pictures. =)

#68 Museums: The Newseum

Goal #68 is to visit 5 museums I've never been to before, but after re-visiting the Newseum this weekend I decided that it counts. Mainly because it's completely different from the last time I was there. This might have been, in part, because I only spent a few hours there the last time I visited, but many of the exhibits that I remembered were no longer around.

The Newseum is (unsurprisingly) mostly about the news. How the news is told, famous news stories, famous headlines and popular topics. As you walk up to the Newseum, along the street outside, you can read the current day's headlines from newspapers all around the U.S. When you first walk in, you're struck by how incredibly large it is, the lobby is big enough that a news chopper hanging from the ceiling looks kind of small.

Upon entering, we were invited to have a picture taken of our group, which we picked up (for free!) before leaving that day.

The backdrop was a surprise for us, as they took the picture in front of a green screen (which was a nice little show and tell of technology utilized in the news room!)

First stop was downstairs where we watched a quick 2 minute video that told us all about the Newseum and suggested the best way to see all of the exhibits. It also informed us that our tickets were good not just for the day we were there, but the next day as well. This is because there is so much to see in the Newseum that unless you get there when it opens, or unless you move through museums very quickly, it's impossible to see everything in one day.

Almost every exhibit has some kind of video going, most of them have multiple vidoes. They are a combination of news reports from the past and commentary by the reporters and others who lived through the events being reported. We not only got to see part of the Berlin Wall and one of the guard towers, but we were given the history of the wall, the towers and the politics from several different televisions. One television showed the news reports that happened when the wall first went up, and another showed the live coverage of the night the border was opened and people celebrated atop the wall and began tearing it down.

Inside the tower are inscriptions and you can hear voices above you, giving orders and passwords back and forth. Several floors up in the museum, along a walk way, you can finally get a closer view of the top of the very tall guard tower.

We watched a 4-D movie about the history of reporting. It told the story of three different reporters, all of whom made their mark on the way the news was reported - from a written first hand account of the revolutionary war, to the first woman investigative reporter who committed herself to a mental institution to report on how people were treated there, to the first reporter to ever bring a European war into American houses over the radio waves as bombs rained down on London. It was a fun and silly movie with a fairly serious message.

We were obviously more silly than serious.
There are a lot of exhibits, most of them geared towards some kind of education. It's surprising how few people know the rights granted to them by the first amendment - I remembered freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech, but didn't get freedom of petition. In that exhibit there was a video feed of someone walking around DC and asking people on the street if they knew their freedoms. It was shocking how many of them couldn't name more than two, and sad how many couldn't even name one.

I played a video game designed to test my knowledge on my rights.

I am proud to say I only got one wrong and "won" the race, despite the incorrect advice given to me by some of my fellow museum goers =)

Perhaps the most moving of the permanent exhibits is the 9-11 exhibit, centered around the radio antenna from the top of one of the World Trade Center buildings.

Behind that wall is a televised memorial to a photo journalist who died in the line of duty, running towards the towers and taking photographers the entire way. The last hour and a half of his life is documented, up to the moment when the tower fell and debris filled the streets, killing him.

If that's not enough to bring the tears, off to the left, behind the wall covered with the front pages of newspapers about 9-11, is a small room where you can watch the news coverage from that day. Reporters tell their stories, talk about their struggle to report the news as they tried to cope with what was happening around and in front of them. One of them caught the fall of the first tower on video by accident before having to run for his life. Another snuck onto Ground Zero after being kicked out once, and he took the famous picture of firemen raising the American Flag over the debris. Fortunately there are boxes of tissues at the entranceways to the room.

There are far too many exhibits to talk about. Fortunately a lot of them are fun and happy, balancing out the sadder stories. The gallery filled with Pulitzer Prize winning photos has a lot of horror and a lot of joy just in that small space.

If you ever have an entire day free, or are lucky enough to have two days and a lot of energy, the Newseum is definitely a place to check out. You won't regret it.

#68 Visiting New Museums: The National Museum of Crime and Punishment

One of the many things I love about Day Zero Project list is how it pushes me to do a lot of things that I've been wanting to do for awhile but just haven't "gotten around to." A big one for me was going to the National Museum of Crime and Punishment, which I've been wanting to visit ever since they started advertising for it a couple of years ago. Yesterday Katieschmatie, our husbands and I took a double date to the museum, thanks to a great deal we got on LivingSocial.

The first part of our visit was to the CSI Crime Lab, a special little extra that the museum offers for an additional fee, where you get to go through evidence and try to solve a crime. It was a surprising amount of fun. We checked alibis and phone records, analyzed handwriting samples, compared fibers found on the victims and the suspects, our husbands volunteered to be lab technicians who tested different possible weapons and the kinds of blood spatter patterns they made:

We learned how to dust for fingerprints,

and (because we're super awesome, smart detectives) we were completely right about whodunnit!

After the fun in the CSI lab we headed out to explore the rest of the museum, which was just as interactive and interesting! In fact, the amount of interactivity was one of my favorite parts of this museum; there was plenty to read and see but there was even more than you could get your hands on, explore, and try for yourself.

The  Medieval exhibit was definitely the creepiest, with lots of morbid reading about the heinous tortures that people had inflicted on them, like this head cage which was used to hold people in place as they were branded or having their eyeballs taken out:

The gentler version was used by husbands on their quarrelsome wives, as it had attachments which could effectively gag a person. This wasn't even the worst or most horrific of the instruments of torture, used for punishment, in the Medieval section. The apparatuses on display here were so awful that there were no hands on exhibits, because you really would not have any fun with it.

When we reached Colonial times there were, of course, the stocks:

I found out that the stocks were not the gentle punishment I'd always thought - sure it was an uncomfortable position and people threw rotten fruit and vegetables at you, but life could be worse right? Just uncomfortable and humiliating, right? WRONG. They used to nail people's ears to either side of the head part, so that you couldn't dodge the rotten fruits and vegetables, and if you did dodge them you risked pulling your own ears off. Of course, even if you managed to get through the day without pulling your own ears off, they couldn't exactly take the nails out, so they just off your ears to get you out. EEK!

In the Wild West exhibit I went to jail (Yay jail! No more stocks for me!):

Katieschmatie and her hubby tried their hands at shooting guns from the Old West (They're probably the law-abiding sheriffs that put me in jail! Grrr...):

and in between in all we learned a lot about, not just the criminals and the crimes they perpetrated, but why they may have perpetrated them and the men who enforced the law and eventually caught them. Seriously, lots of education in between the playing around =)

We went through a lot of exhibits about the different time periods of crime, from the mafia to internet hackers. The serial killers, of course, had their own creep-tastic section. We got to see everything from the car Bonnie & Clyde died in (with bloodstains) to a lock of John Dillinger's hair, cut off by the mortician. Another fun section were the accounts of some of the dumbest criminals ever to perpetrate a crime. I could post tons of pictures, but you should really go see it for yourself.

The last part of the museum was about law enforcement, and this had some of the coolest interactive sections, in my opinion.

There was the jail cell that I got to break out of:

Through the hole in the wall and a tunnel and out into the next room of the museum!:

(Hubby and I escaped together).

Then I became a respectable enforcer of the law on my super sweet Harley Davidson cop-motorcycle:

But the coolest part came right after that, where you could go through "training" simulations. There was a driving course, which included screens to show you what was happening to the left and right of you - and you better pay attention or risk getting t-boned as your patrol car screams through an intersection!:

And a simulation where a video took you through various scenarios that had bad guys and innocents and your job was to shoot the bad guys:

It wasn't at all like a video game since it had real actors in the video, which was kind of shocking to me the first time I saw one of the bad guys "killed."

And then there was a section where you can see if you'd pass the test to get onto the police force:

In case you can't tell from the picture, I will give you a hint... Katieschmatie and I definitely would not have passed. =) But we had a lot of fun trying!

This was my favorite museum that I've visited. Even the Spy Museum didn't get this hands on. All the information was presented in a fun and exciting way and I learned a lot even though I felt like I was playing most of the time.

One downer... don't go in hungry or thirsty. There's no snack station and you won't want to have to cut your visit short because you're starving!