Museum Pieces

[mbarrick]

Elaine and I went over to Victoria yesterday to see the "Eternal Egypt" display at the Royal Museum (great stuff, by the way - shame I couldn't take pictures in the exhibit). After going through the Egypt display I had to go look at the rest of the museum. When I lived in Victorian in 1985/86 the museum was still free and being broke I spent a lot of time in there. I wanted to see what had changed and what had stayed the same. The mammoth display is being reworked, but the rest of the roadkill in the natural history section is pretty much the same as it was twenty years ago. Same with the nautical history, mining history and native indian sections... except for the "first contact" slideshow that they used to have in the indian section is gone and their collection of carvings is a bit larger. The old turn-of-the-(last)-century streetscape is exactly the same (and I would love to have some of the artifacts for the apartment!) except there is this new "Century Hall" exhibit leading into the streetscape, where I was both amused and slightly horrified to see this:

A Commodore PET: the first computer I ever used

along side things like these:

A stereoscope viewer

A cylinder player

And just a few shots of Victoria

The provincial legislature as seen from the museum.

The Empress Hotel from the same window as above.

The cool deco visitor's centre town by the Inner Harbour that I've always liked (also posted to art_deco_style)

The old Goodwill building, supposedly haunted. Currently for sale. More about this one in a later post.

just of the hell of it.

Comments

[sovietnimrod.livejournal.com]

I never thought that I'd see a Chilliwack eight-track as part of a museum exhibit!

The old indian exhibits were some of my favourites but no doubt political correctness mamby-pambyism of the 1990s has censored out all the old "distasteful" exhibits.

I assume you'ved checked out the Maritime Museum located more towards the bridge to Esquimalt. I got there during our last visit to Victoria in 2001 and I could spend hours there.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Last time I was in the Maritime Museum in Victoria was about twenty years ago.

Actually the indian section was almost identical to how it was in 1986... except for the slide-show being gone and the addition of some artifacts. They reworked that area in 1986 so it likely wasn't in the budget to "sanitize" it in the 1990's. I really miss the old pre-1986 display case they had the model villages in. The glass was angled out to prevent glare and it was amusing to sit and watch tourists hit their heads on the glass. The glass on the "new" case is straight up-and-down.

The other thing that was gone that I miss was the old plastic-tube fountain thing in the lobby that looked like streams of water running up.