Body World

Going to see corpses on Valentine's Day seems really weird... Our friend Jereme asked us to go and the date just worked out. Kenny and I don't usually do anything in particular on Valentine's Day and I have been wanted to see this exhibit for years, so we excepted. If you haven't heard of Body World it is an enormous exhibit that display the human body in extraordinary ways... using real human volunteers.

What a trip! I don't really know what I was expecting, but the exhibit was more than I bargained for... It was like a bad car accident, you don't want to look, but can't help it. I had a sick feeling in my stomach through the entire exhibit. Poor Kenny didn't like it much and couldn't get through the exhibit quick enough. It was marvelous and horrifying at the same time. Many of the exhibits still had the eyes, eyebrows, nose, lips, ears, belly button etc. but the rest of the skin was gone, exposing the muscular system. Also, this is not a G rated exhibit and I was really surprised at number of children there. Each room focused on a different system in the body. For example, the digestive system. You could see the system in a body (with no skin), then just the system (no body) and then it was dissected further and further until it was the inside of the small intestines, etc. We saw things like diseased lungs, brains, kidney stones etc etc. Also, there were many artificial body parts shown in the 'bodies' which I found pretty interesting since I have a friend with an artificial hip. I think the most fascinating part was the baby room... They showed babies from a spec of dirt size to a full term baby. They also showed a placenta and a pregnant women about 5 months along. It was clearly the most fascinating room and was a bottleneck in the tour as everyone seemed to want to linger there. It was one of the weirdest things I have ever seen in my life. I don't think I will ever go back, but I am glad we did it once. I asked Kenny if he was glad we went and he said, "Yeah, I am glad its over". 

After the exhibit we checked out some of the other parts of the museum... it was good for kids, but not really us. Although, we did like trying out the bed of nails, which felt oddly good.