Lucy goes around the world in 88 days: Day 23 & 24

Day 23: Sunday 20th July
Today Miss Hannaford and I caught the subway train to the Museum of Natural History. The film Night at the Museum was based on this museum especially the Easter Island Moai head, the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the special dioramas. Some of the scenes were filmed in the actual museum! You walk into the museum and the main entry hall is full of real dinosaur skeletons!

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We decided to go on a free tour of the building because the Museum of Natural History is made up of 27 buildings and can be very difficult to find the places you want to go. The first stop on the tour was the 2 huge Dinosaur halls where we got to touch a real Tyrannosaurus Rex tooth and one of the plates of a Stegosaurus!

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The next stop was the hall of African Mammals where we saw the special dioramas that were in the movie including the elephants! The animals on display are real animals that were once alive, but now their skins have been taxidermied so that they can be displayed forever.

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After our tour, Miss Hannaford and I went looking for the big Moai head that says Dum Dum want Gum Gum! The Moai head from Easter Island is in the Hall of Pacific People along with artefacts from Indigenous Australians and puppets from Indonesia!

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http://youtu.be/Bub_EJnG9Kw

After the Museum of Natural History, Miss Hannaford and I walked down the street to find a building made famous in the film Ghostbusters. It is 55 Central Park West and in the movie it was called Spook Central. We then went for a walk through the park which is bigger than any park in Sydney to find 2 special park benches. All the park benches in Central Park have little plaques dedicated to the memory of people and the bench that Miss Hannaford was looking for in particular was the bench dedicated to the Joyful life of Jim Henson.

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One of the special things you can do in the park is go for a ride in horse drawn carriage! It was lots of fun and we got to feed carrots to the horse at the end of the ride!
http://youtu.be/kqTzDmYNahU

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Day 24: Monday 21st July
Our first stop of the day was the Guggenheim Museum! This building was designed by the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the building is an art gallery. The round part of the building is one long spiralling ramp and all of the artwork faces the ramp so they are hung on a slope too! Being a famous art gallery, you are not allowed to take pictures of the artwork above the ground floor but you are allowed to take pictures of the building looking up from the ground floor so you can see the spiral of the building.

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After the seeing all the artwork at the Guggenheim museum, we walked down the street to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This museum has one of the largest collections of Ancient Egyptian artefacts outside of Egypt. It even has a real Egyptian temple that takes up a huge hall and it has a real pond around it!

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Our next activity was to visit the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park. Children are encouraged to climb on this sculpture and sit with Alice on the mushroom or to sit with the Mad Hatter or the Door mouse with his silly poem.

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Right next to the sculpture is a really big pond where there are lots of little yachts that you can have a go at sailing using a remote control. The yachts are powered by the wind so the trick was to get the rudder of the yacht and the sail in the right place to catch the wind and move the boat. Miss Hannaford did ok- she managed to get her boat to move sometimes fast and sometimes not at all. It is really important to keep trying and be patient!

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So much fun and I am really looking forward to tommorow! – Lucy

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