Boston Science Museum

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MATTHEW

When we woke up I was suffering from extreme jet lag. I woke up at three in the morning and couldn't get back to sleep. It was a down pour outside so we couldn't really do anything outdoors in Boston so we went to the Science Museum. We had an amazing entry after we bought our tickets because there was a giant marble contraption which had all of these pull balls and marbles running everywhere activating little bells and other thingys.

Later we moved on and we went to see an electrical show using the first and biggest air insulated Van de Graaf generator spark - this was used to create lightning bolts indoors. The lightning was really loud, like cover your ears loud. The lady who was showing us the lightning put herself in a cage and let the bolts strike around her in the cage. She wasn't electrocuted because she was insulated and to prove her point she even ran her hands around the edge of the cage while the lightning was hitting it. Of course it would have been a different story if she had stuck her fingers outside the cage.

We saw the dead animal shack which was called the Colby Gun and Trophy Room. There were all kinds of things that had been poached in there and it was a copy of a room own by Colonel Colby in Massachusetts. It made me feel sick to see all of the rare animals that were dead. We moved onto the bird area and tried a test to see if you could sneak up on a bird of some sort. I tried the easy and the hard test, both fit their names, and I beat both of the tests. We also saw a gecko exhibition - there were the geckos you get in Australia in QLD which were small and green and then there were the ones you get in SE Asia and Africa which were the size of your forearm. We then saw the animal show each ranger had a different type of species. One had a lizard (as if I hadn't seen enough of those) and another had an owl and the other lady had an oppossum. in the face of danger oppossums explode from both ends and kind of creep out the predator.

After the Musuem we walked around in the rain and I nearly fell asleep a dozen times and I just wanted to get back to the apartment but no, instead Dad had other plans. We met up with my Dad's friends Terri and Barry who are Australians but live in Boston. We went to a club and had dinner and watched the baseball on TV which isn't that different to watching cricket. We went home and went to sleep FINALLY!!!!

CHRIS

At the Science Museum there was a big marble machine that had two separate parts. The top bit was with a big heavy ball made of metal which went around in circles with all of these mechanical twists, turns, jerks, being hit by hammers, rolling down a hill, being picked up by a windmill and so on. And the bottom bit was with pull balls and they went around in a fan, did a circle, jumped up a trampoline, ran around the outside of a bowl and a lot more things. We also saw next to it the Leonardo da Vinci water mill machine and there was also a metal thing which looks like two thin waves made out of metal and you walked through with your hands tracing inside and that was the same action a bird makes when it flies.

Then we went to an area where lots of stuffed birds were kept and there was a machine where there was a bird on a TV screen and you had to tip toe and get as close as you could to the bird and when you got close enough it said you passed. There was an easy version and a hard version with a graph which changed when you moved forward and you had to stay inside the lines. If you went above a red bar you failed as the bird heard you. I passed both the hard and easy version.

Next we went to a hut of dead animals that a man shot a long time ago and there were 112 animals mounted on the walls. There were bears, black rhinos, snake giraffe head, moose, squirrel, hippo and leopard skins. The guy who shot the animals and gave his collection to the museum never actually went there to see what the display looked like.

Then we went to a lightning show and it was really loud and I had an earache after it. The lightning was pretty good, at the end the demonstrator formed a musical show because the lightning made a different sound depending on how you projected it.

After that we saw an animal show with live animals, gecko possum and a owl. At the end of the show I went up the lady who was running it and I told her I am from Australia and asked what sort of possum would be stomping on our roofs back in Melbourne. She didn't know but said you must see a lot of geckos, lizards and kangaroos and I said when we were in QLD we saw lots of geckos crawling on the walls of our house we rented in QLD

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Photos

space shuttle
We were allowed to go inside a replica space shuttle and play with the buttons

John F Kennedy
JFK went to Harvard University

Dinner at the Club
We went with a friend of Dad's to the Harvard Club for dinner. Dad had the seafood chowder