The Chocolate Museum was the one exception in my day of museum misadventure. It’s owned by the Barcelona guild of pastrymakers. I’m not sure it would be worth going on a day when you had to pay full price, but it was free today, and this is the ticket they gave me:

I haven’t tried it yet, but I have no reason to argue with free chocolate.

The museum gives a bit of an overview of how chocolate works (it grows on trees and you have to mush it and stuff) and some cultural significance (people like it). I didn’t feel like I learned a lot, but maybe I know more about chocolate than most people. I did learn that chocolate, which grows in central America, supposedly came to the Old World through Barcelona.

The main source of entertainment is dioramas made of chocolate.They had Smurfs, SpongeBob, a creepy all-white monk, Asterix and Obelix (each in his own scene, with Romans) and my favorite, Tintin:

In case you for some reason have not memorized the Tintin oeuvre, that’s Tintin and Captain Haddock seeing the rocket for the first time in Destination Moon.

One room showed what I think was some of the winners of a pastry contest. I have never seen so much chocolate Picasso in one place, or perhaps any chocolate Picasso. I found the multiple representations of Guernica particularly incongruous.

Because nothing says “chocolate” like horrific air raids on villages full of civilians.

It wasn’t all Picasso; that room also had a chocolate version of one of the facades of La Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudí’s delightfully kooky church. Chocolate version:

Real version:

I think the chocolatier did a pretty good job of capturing it.

But the more impressive thing about this museum is what’s below it. Barcelona, like a lot of cities in Europe, was once a Roman settlement. You can see bits of the Roman walls around town and the city stands on layer after layer of older buildings. From the ground level of the museum, you take an elevator down to this fantastic subterranean world of Roman ruins. Raised walkways go along Roman walls, into a sentry tower, through a dye shop, past a pool from a public bath, over a garum factory (more on garum later), past the remains of early Christian buildings, and through a huge winery.

This is a storefront along a real Roman road. Behind it is the dye factory, where the Romans did, oh, laundry and stuff. And dying fabric. The museum had a great audio tour, which was excellent at the time but means I couldn’t take pictures of wall text to remind myself what I was seeing. (Could I have taken notes? Yes. Did I? No.)

Here’s one thing I do remember: They used urine in the dye process, so they would have had big jars to collect contributions from passersby. I know, ew. Roman cities must have smelled awful. I just read something that pointed out how little bathing would have helped, too–I mean, it’s not like they had chlorination then. Everybody brought whatever bodily fluids, dirt, and bugs they had encountered since their last bath and shared them with the whole town through the excellent dispersal medium of nice warm water.

Speaking of things that are smelly, Roman food depended on something called garum. Garum is what happens when you mush up fish and let them ferment in these tanks.

Garum is required if you’re going to pull off any ancient Roman recipes. Imagine if you were 2000 years in the future and trying to make a recipe that called for ketchup or Worcestershire sauce. I mean, where would you start? Garum is like that.

One more thing from that museum. They had mounted a series of funeral portraits, dug up when archaeologists were excavating the Roman walls in the 1960s and 1970s. The whole point of these portraits was to make sure the memory of these people lives on forever, and, as the label points out, they did it! Here they are, 2000 years later, looking you right in the eye.

Way to go, citizens.

The other day I visited Casa Batlló. I wasn’t planning to blog about it. But then the audio tour was so annoying that I couldn’t keep it to myself.

If you were visiting an apartment building designed by a famous architect, and you were listening to the audio tour, which is the only source of information – there’s no wall text – wouldn’t you think that one of the first things you’d want to know was that it’s an apartment building? Somehow, that piece of information didn’t make it into the audio tour until pretty late, when they sort of mentioned the apartments in passing. If you, like me, didn’t already know that this wasn’t just the Batlló family’s house, you would be very confused about why the tour of their house wrapped up after one floor.

You might also be interested in learning things like where the Batlló family got their money, or why they thought it was a good idea to hire this architect, or the fact that it wasn’t new construction but actually a renovation of an older building, or what the neighbors thought about the absolutely insane facade.

See what I mean about the insane facade? I wonder what the neighbors thought about this on Barcelona’s most fashionable street in the first decade of the 1900′s.

Anyway, if you’re looking to the audio guide to tell you these things, you’d be looking at the wrong place. It started with a defense of the extremely high entrance fee and kind of went downhill from there, with a lot of description of what we’re looking at–which, you know, I can see for myself–and very little context.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing that made me roll my eyes. In one room, the guide told me: “In this part of the attic…, there is an unforgettable experience waiting for you. Once this commentary has finished, why not let yourself be carried away by the music and projected images.” That’s some overblown silliness for you right there, especially considering that the thing that was supposed to carry you away was video clips of bits of Gaudí buildings accompanied by excitable piano music. Forgive me for not being transported. The guide kept doing that, telling me what to feel and what opinions I should have.

Bad communication really gets on my nerves. There are a lot of people who have thought about how best to communicate. They could all tell you that, say, if you have a room on a roof where the water tanks used to be installed, and you use sound effects and light projections to evoke the feeling of running water, you don’t have to also tell people that you are using sound and visuals to evoke the feeling of water. You let the experience stand on its own. On the other hand, here are some things that might be worth telling your visitors when they’re visiting the water tank room: Was running water new? What were the tanks made of? Where did the water come from?

Oh, and for a touch of commercialism, the last recording on the audio tour was about the exhibition of chairs designed by Gaudí, including some “exquisite flower-inspired carvings”–how about letting me decide if they’re exquisite or not–and how you should go into the shop and order one, which they would deliver to your house with the utmost of care.

My crankiness about the audio tour aside, the house is fantastic. Gaudí was a creative guy. But if you go, take a guidebook.

Entrance to this historic building is €18.15, which is $23, and it is full of visitors. Perhaps the owners of Casa Batlló should take some of that cash and give it to someone who knows how to write an audio tour.

I also resent a little bit the fact that I always have to look up the spelling. Hirschorn or Hirschhorn or Hirshorn just seem more likely to me.

I still haven’t broken my streak, but earlier this week I went down to the outside of the Hirshhorn to enjoy a moving piece of art. It’s “Song 1,” a multimedia installation by artist Doug Aitken. It’s a video, projected on all 360 degrees of the cylindrical museum’s exterior, with big speakers playing various people singing “I Only Have Eyes For You,” a song from the 30′s that I didn’t recognize but which has been drifting through my mind ever since Tuesday night.

It’s running every night from sunset to midnight, through May 13–definitely worth a visit. The closest metro is L’Enfant Plaza, but in this nice weather you could turn it into a walk from Gallery Place or just about anywhere downtown.

So on a trip to Ann Arbor recently, of course I had to check on the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, formerly–and less eloquently–known as the Exhibit Museum of Natural History, I suppose to emphasize that they were actually showing things off, instead of just doing research. Research is the point of university natural history museums (and is the reason I haven’t gotten around to blogging about Berkeley–they have hardly anything on display).

Let’s look at some rocks and bones.

Does that look like any old rock? Well, it’s not. For one thing, look how pretty! For another, it’s a piece of the Acasta Gneiss, a rock formation in northern Canada. That’s some of the oldest rock on Earth, about 4 billion years old. The Earth only started to form about 4.6 billion years ago. Of course, almost everything on Earth has been here for something like four and a half billion years. It’s just that most of it has been melted down and turned into something else in the last 4 billion years, and this rock hasn’t.

The museum’s main room is about the history of life, with old-fashioned display cases around the edges and some nicely redone skeletons in the middle. I particularly enjoyed the mastodons.

This old girl was found in the 1960′s on a farm in Michigan. Mastodon bones are pretty common in Michigan, and I like that the museum features local fossils so prominently. Like mammoths, mastodons are extinct elephant relatives. You can tell them apart by their teeth and the slope of their foreheads. (Learn more from the Field Museum’s online exhibit about mammoths and mastodons.)

Skeletons of animals from 10,000 years ago are rarely complete, and this one needed some filling in. But you don’t have to guess which bits are real and which aren’t. The museum lays it out for you.

Yes, the tusks are fake, but don’t worry, the museum didn’t make up this mastodon’s differently-sized tusks; she really did break one during her lifetime. The real pieces of ancient ivory are safe in the collection.

One last thing: a little section of the carving around the door to the museum.

Well, this time I checked it out, and I’ll tell you what’s inside the Henry Ford Museum: a whole lot of awesome. It’s heavy on the automobiles and engines, like you’d expect, with a few airplanes and trains, plus some random halls of jewelry and clockwork. (Who knows. Go with it.) Oh, and the chair Lincoln was sitting in when he was assassinated.

It probably helps if you visit in the company of a boyfriend with degrees in physics and enthusiasm, because the museum lacks some basic information (my, that is an impressively large piece of equipment Henry Ford had moved here–how does it work?) but in any case, it was great.

Our first stop was the Dymaxion House, a cheap house designed to be mass-produced in idle post-war airplane factories (they didn’t realize quite how big commercial aviation was going to be). It was designed by Buckminster Fuller, so you know it is going to be both wacky and awesome.

It’s made of aluminum and it’s round and shiny. I could see living in it, honestly, although I’d rather not look at the world through Plexiglas. And the kitchen sink wouldn’t hold a full-sized plate. And I can’t imagine how loud it would be inside during a rainstorm.

The Henry Ford Museum has the only Dymaxion House in the world. Only two prototypes were made before the company collapsed, and they ended up being cannibalized to make part of a house in Wichita. The family that owned that house eventually donated the whole shebang to the museum, which assembled one house out of them. Here’s the Dymaxion House online exhibit.

The museum has a large collection of engines and motors, including this gorgeous steam engine:

Why was it made with gothic arches? Nobody knows. What, a steam engine isn’t allowed to be pretty?

I learned a lot about engines poking around in this part of the museum, but it was mostly because of the aforementioned boyfriend (and my own skills in figuring out mechanical things), not thanks to the museum. I mean, really, would it have killed them to have one sign explaining how a steam engine works? That’s the start of the whole industrial revolution, and if you don’t understand the mechanics, they’re kind of just big clunky pieces of metal. The biggest disappointment was this giant engine that Henry Ford was clearly very proud of–it had provided power to one of his factories. It is GIANT. They had a sign saying what it was and listing the technical specifications, but there was no way to tell how it worked or what all the bits were.

Another highlight: the world’s oldest surviving steam engine, a 1760-ish behemoth that was built to pump water out of mines. That’s what steam engines were originally for! Isn’t that amazing? It was only later that someone was like, heyyyy, I bet I could run machines off of this thing.

Here’s one of the more amazing automobiles in the museum. It’s a bus. But a bus with great historical significance. Look at it.

That is the bus–the actual bus–in which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man. You can get on the bus and even sit in the seat. The bus sat in a field in Alabama for 30 years; it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore it to its 1955 appearance. The museum built a nice little civil rights exhibit around it, and they also have an online exhibit about the bus.

I had my history on Rosa Parks a little mixed up, so here’s the correct version if anyone’s wondering: She was not the first black woman to be arrested for not giving up her seat in Montgomery; according to the museum website, she was the third. But civil rights leaders felt that a nice respectable lady like her was the right client to challenge the law with, because she would get white support. I wonder who those other two brave women were.

Now for something completely different: The one thing my brother could say with reasonable certainty was in the museum. It’s right at the entrance.

Actually, I say completely different, but this is from about the same era as the Montgomery bus; the bus was built in 1948 and this is the 1952 Wienermobile.

Even with inadequate signage, I feel that I got my 17 dollars’ worth of edification. The museum was hosting a temporary exhibit on the Titanic, and we were a little disappointed to find that it was sold out–until we realized how awesome everything else in the museum was, and also that one of the features of the exhibit was getting your picture taken standing at the front of the ship, Jack-and-Rose style, in front of a green screen. Gag.

I was in Bergen in 2007, but that was before I started systematically visiting natural history museums. Sigh. You can also read about the museum’s massive whale collection on their website.

One of the things about a lot of natural history museums that isn’t necessarily totally obvious to the visitor is how much more they have in storage than on display. The museum only displays a couple dozen full skeletons, but about 50 bazillion bones have come out of the ground.

The storage goes almost all the way around the museum–you can even look into it, with a mirror to show how long the row of shelves is.

Cool, huh?

I’ve been to New York several times since then, but you know, MoMA costs $20 now, and I feel like I have to be able to devote a good chunk of the day to Modern Art if I’m going to spend that kind of money. If you don’t want to spend that kind of money, I recommend befriending someone with a membership. You get in for five bucks and you get to leave your stuff in the special Members’ Cloakroom.

Since the last time I was at MoMA was probably, oh, 2001, I can’t really remember what the space was like before. Honestly, all I remembered was Starry Night and this, one of a set of super exciting Kandinsky paintings:

This painting is one of four that were commissioned in 1914 to hang in the foyer of the Park Avenue apartment of the guy who founded Chevrolet. The artist, Vasily Kandinsky, was into painting as a representation of music.

That 1945 Bell helicopter hangs near the design exhibits. And it really is quite pretty, for a helicopter.There are lots of odd places like this where you can see from one floor to another or into special exhibit halls. From the bottom level, you can see all the way up, past the column by Sanja Iveković (one of the special exhibits) to the start of the Cindy Sherman exhibit.

And, after reading the MoMA’s Wikipedia entry, I have a new ambition: To become the director. He lives above the shop, rent-free, in a $6-million apartment. Wait–now that I’ve read the New York Times article that was based on, I realize the directors of AMNH and the Met get similar deals. I’d be happy to accept any of these posts, or at least the apartments, if anyone’s offering.

While I was incapable of keeping up with RSS feeds through my computer’s web browser, I check the Google Reader app on my phone all the time.

One of the blogs I’ve come across is from the Field Book Project at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The museum owns a ton of field notes, and the project is about cataloging all those notebooks full of written observations and drawings. They’ve been posting pictures of interesting notebooks on their blog.

One recent entry was a set of drawings of fish in a Hawaiian fish market in the summer of 1901, with detailed notes on the colors. Fish colors change quickly, so you want to record them right away–and color photography wasn’t exactly an option.

And I loved reading about the different ways books can be flexible–I’d never thought about it, but bindings and papers have different amounts of bendiness, and you have to get the right combination if you want your book to open right. For the particular book in that blog post, they decided the pages were so brittle that it wasn’t worth trying to preserve it as a book, and now the pages live neatly stacked in a box (with the spine label and covers).

These books represent good old-fashioned natural history, where people go out in the field (dressed like this), look at things, describe them, and come up with hypotheses about how the world works. I love that kind of science.