What in the World?

Recently I was telling someone about our very own Funeral Museum here in North Houston and the Prison Museum up in Huntsville. Two very interesting and often thought provoking places to visit. This led to stories of other strange places I’ve visited. I am NOT talking Ripley’s Believe it or not. These are real Museums.

Paris. Think Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, running through the Paris sewers. Less Miserable, as I call it. Of course we would go there. In 1980, it was basically a hole in the ground and a small theatre with a French-only video playing. I used my high school French to ask if we could see the video again using the English headphones (as everyone else was hustled back out). In 2000 we took our kids there. The sewer museum is now a guided tour (albeit in French), a self explanatory video show, and a gift shop. Yes, you can see the sewage floating by as you lean over the railing to look. The smell is actually more of a disinfectant right there, but the theatre area still has an …aroma, that makes you wrinkle your nose.

Istanbul. It is only one room, but if you are a James Bond fan (as the man is) you will know that From Russia With Love has a famous sewer scene. Our personal tour guide probably thought we were nuts, but he took us there and paid the insignificant fee for us to enter. What you see is cavernous room, not the long and convoluted course the movie makes us think it is. I hear it is now big on the tourist map, but back then, pretty much unheard of.

Paris Cartacombs (the “municipal Ossuary”)

We went early on a Sunday. We passed 2 other visitors and one lone guard sitting deep inside. It was eerily quiet as we walked. The only sound was our feet crunching on the gravel path and our whispered words. The arranged bones were…creepy. As you leave they check you bag to make sure you didn’t take any souvenirs.

London. Soane Museum is the house and Museum of Sir John Soane’s collections. Admission is free to this packed house. If you are wearing a coat or backpack, they suggest you leave it hanging as there is little room to turn and frequent possibility of knocking into something. Many things are reproductions but the sheer number and variety is wonderful. No photos allowed. Oooops!

Cairo. A zoo might not be the highlight of your Egypt trip, but we like zoos. Our free time was not spent resting, but seeking out the more local attractions. The Giza Zoo opened on March 1, 1891. There were a few groups of people, mostly school girls, it seemed. They found ME interesting and touched my bare arms. This is not unusual in non-western parts of the world.

For a fee of about 10cents, we entered the Taxidermy Exhibit of Egyptian and foreign embalmed birds, reptiles, fish and animals as well as skeletons dating back to the 1800’s. Many were bagged before anyone thought about conservation. They were trophies. The rooms are dark and musty, the specimens a bit dusty, but awesome to see.

Cairo Museum Mummy Room. Opened to the public in 2006, these treasures were still hidden from visitors back in 1982. A museum guard, with gestures and limited English, indicated he would take us into closed off section. Hoping we would not be mummified ourselves, we followed him. There on glass enclosed shelves were dozens of royal mummies in various stages of preservation. We wandered and gazed as our “guide” pointed out specific items and rambled on in Arabic. We tipped him well and thanked him profusely when we slipped out of this forbidden area.

Seoul Seodaemun Prison Museum. Neat and pristine grounds and displays are juxtaposed with torture devices, enhanced with audio screams. Basically it is a museum of Japanese torture of the Korean people through the years. I was appalled at the visual and audio displays but we saw several families with young children who seemed to all have fun entering the various torture chambers to see how they worked for themselves!!

Smithsonian DC Insect Zoo. Check THAT one out if you want to touch the creepy crawlers.