This is Museumtastic!

"Museumtastic": The art of being as fantastic as a museum, which is pretty darn fantastic.

Over the most recent weekend, my flatmate, Austin, and myself were left alone in the flat and decided to go back to the Pitt River Museum in downtown Oxford since we did not get very far last time. (You can read about our last visit at my previous post, Holy Introverts, Batman!.) At the museum this time, we investigated the other two floors of the museum as we only got to the first one last time.

As we walked around the first floor, second for non-British readers, we looked through lots of cases full of mirrors, jewelry  and other things that people have used to try and alter their appearance over the years. Such as , how some tribes in African would attempt to make women's necks longer because they found that beautiful or how some cultures would put disks in their mouths that made their lower lip stick out further. There was a picture of a woman wearing almost fifteen rings around her throat and he neck was probably twice the length of a normal person's. It was insane.

And the further down the cases you went the creepier and more disturbing it got. There were cases on people making designs and tattoos on themselves, and ways they would make their ear lobes bigger. But the king of the ways to distort your own body was what Chinese people used to do to young girls. They would bind their feet, nearly from birth, until adulthood, in an attempt to keep their feet small. Small feet were seen as good luck. The shoes are display for what an adult Chinese woman would wear were literally the size of a baby's shoe. WHAT? Wh-what? I just... I did not even know what to say. And as i kept reading, apparently they were likely to get infected and cause serious pain and sometimes cripple the women. Oh, really? I never would have guessed that a 115 pound person walking around on baby feet would cause pain or the inability to walk... Oh wait, yeah it would.

Luckily they do not do that any more, but I literally felt sick to my stomach after reading that and seeing the pictures and had to skip the entire section on human sacrifices. Instead, I looked at cases full of things made from bird feathers and packs made specifically for carrying babies. There was even a case completely full of different umbrellas! And right before going to the next floor, there was a small section of painted eggs, which I found very interesting. My grandmother who's family was from Russia and Ukraine had lots of painted eggs, so it reminded me of her.

The floor after that one was full of weapons and armor that has been used through the ages. I have forgotten most the information I learned about weapons, except that the rifle was really tricky to make apparently. But it was neat seeing all the different types of swords from different cultures and learning how and why they were made the way they were.

But my roommates and I actually go to a lot of museums. Almost every city we visit we try to find at least one free museum to visit. This is because museums are fun and you can learn a lot, and because they are sometimes free and we have little money.

There is another museum in Oxford called the Ashmolean, which is also free. We visited there quite a few weeks ago with our friend Beth and had a good time wandering around looking at sculptures and paintings. We actually ended up finding a painting by John William Waterhouse, one of Austin's favorite artists while we were there. It was really neat to see a famous artist's piece in person.

We also got tired a ways into the museum, as it was pretty much a maze of corridors and hallways that wove in and around each other. And we decided to play a fun game where you sit and look at a painting while you rest and try to guess what it is about, without reading the placard.

The best instance was when we were viewing a painting of a young with long blonde hair who was standing in the middle of a building's front steps, while lots of older men surrounded her. Some of the men looked happy, some sad, some quisitive  and one man who had darker skin and was peering from behind a pillar on the far left of the scene looked extremely angry. She wore a pink robe with a long blue sash, similar to what Mary usually wears but without her head wrapped.

The young woman was sitting on a sort of box and had an angelic glowing halo around her head, so we knew she was some sort of biblical character, or possibly a saint. Her one hand was raised as if to say 'Shhhhh' while the other was out stretched as if reaching for something. There was also a woman and man on the far right side with a normal circular halo each, which really confused us.

Why did this girl get a different halo? Why were some saints listening to this girl talk? Why is that one guy so angry? We started making up possible scenarios that could be happening inside the picture.

'Maybe she rose from the dead, and that box she is on was her coffin.'
'I think only Jesus and Lazarus were raised from the dead. Maybe it's Jesus's mom, Mary, when she was younger.'
'What is she doing talking to a bunch of old men? It looks like she has her hand up to tell that angry, yelling guy to shut up.'
'Maybe she is talking about controversial issues and that guy disagrees.'

Finally we could not take it and looked at what was happening. It turned out that the 'girl' was Jesus preaching to the teachers in the Temple, like in the biblical story and the man and woman on the right were Mary and Joseph. It did not say who the angry guy was, but we suspect Satan, although who knows. We are so bad at this game it could easily have been John the Baptist or Shakespeare, making a guest appearance, for all we know.

Until next time...

Embrace the Odd,
Caitlin

"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." -Logan Pearsall Smith