When I spent a day in Vienna, I went to their big palace/museum complex. All the gold and jewels and fancy furniture was really cool, but nothing in my guidebook interested me as much as a visit to…
The Esperanto Museum!
So after I look at the regular museums, I went out in search of the Esperanto Museum. It was in the same beautiful complex as the other museums…but it was way off in a back corner. At the end of a dark hallway. Up four flights of stairs. Which were strewn with trash and old building materials. Finally, panting and covered in sweat, I reached the fabled Esperanto Museum.
I was a little saddened when I realzied that the Esperanto Museum really was behind that single plain white door on an unlighted landing. I was even more saddened when I managed to decipher the handwritten note on the door. The Esperanto Museum was closed- until next October.
I’ve been to the former “Confederama”, which has apparently for some years now borne the prosaic name “Battles for Chattanooga Museum”. No doubt a case of pandering in an attempt to bring in more damnyankee tourist dollars. It is indeed not especially weird, though it does have a very good “electric map” show detailing the campaigns in the area.
As a Philadelphia native, I’ve been to the Mutter Museum several times, and enjoy it greatly. If you go, don’t overlook the plain-looking card catalog-like metal cabinets on the lower level near the stairs. They contain the Collection of Swallowed Objects. Some will make you cringe. Others will make you scratch your head.
Philadelphia also has the Wagner Free Institute of Sciencehttp://www.fieldtrip.com/pa/57636529.htm which I have regrettably not yet visited, but hope to some day. It’s a natural history museum that, as the rather modest website puts it, is something of a “museum of a museum” – existing essentialy unchanged from the way it looked in the late 1800s.