Saturday, February 28, 2015

Rabbits and the History of Science

One of my favorite things to do while walking around the city is to pick a person and try to imagine how I would describe them if they were a character in a book.

I learned in creative writing class that the best way to do this is to pick the 2 or 3 most descriptive and memorable features about a person, because your readers will get bored with any more description than that.

This game is easiest when someone has a very distinctive facial feature or article of clothing.


Then sometimes there's a  man standing outside of the shops wearing a giant stuffed rabbits head and riding a bicycle while using a bubble blowing gun and your job is done for you.

I would have taken a photo, but i'm doing my best not to look like a tourist. I do great until I need to speak and am betrayed by my accent.


***

This week I visited the Museum of the History of Science, another one of the small cozy little museums here in Oxford.

I'm still not used to the freedom they give you to wander around wherever you please in British museums. I walked in and looked at the docent to see if he was going to tell me where to go or something. Because they also don't believe in keeping everything locked up and so some of the stuff was just sitting out and I wasn't sure how close I was allowed to get. And the docent just looked back at me like:

"what the hell are you looking at ME for?"

So I took that as my cue to wander around wherever I wanted.

There were docents wandering around making sure I didn't touch stuff but they were kinda scary because they never spoke and just walked around quietly watching you like name badge wearing ghosts in sensible footwear.

 Moon Globe! 
 The fanboys at Oxford saved a chalkboard that Einstein wrote on.
 Lawrence of Arabia's camera 

Photography supplies belonging to Lewis Carroll, who wrote Alice in Wonderland



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