Bal'more Day Trip

To celebrate Labor Day, we visited the beautiful Baltimore inner harbor. The city of Baltimore has obviously spent time and money refurbishing this downtown area, and there's a lovely walk around the harbor, which is lined with restaurants, science and art museums, historic ship museums, and of course the obligatory Duck tours. It's a great outdoor space.

For us, the main draw was the Maryland Science Center and the Body Worlds 2 exhibit: The Brain, Our Three Pound Gem. Many of you have probably seen this exhibit or one of the two others currently touring North America. The exhibit presents real dead bodies that have been preserved using "plastination" to instruct and inform laypeople about human anatomy. The bodies are donated for this purpose, and the bodies are preserved and dissected to display the muscles, arteries, organs, and nervous system. (Skin and fat tissues are generally not preserved, although most bodies had eyebrows, eyeballs, and ears -- to make them look more like people, we think. Check out the link above for pictures.)

The bodies are each dissected differently and posed differently -- the "yoga woman" was in a back bend, the baseball player was midswing, and the soccer player was midkick. As if the method of preservation and the fact that real bodies are being displayed before you wasn't enough, the way in which they were presented was fascinating. You could see how the muscles worked together within all of the athletic poses and how all of our organs, muscles, and nervous system fit together. There were also many other pieces of plastinized damaged anatomy -- including a black smoker's lung, tumors, different kinds of cancers, and hearts.

It was very similar to the Mutter Museum, the medical science museum a few blocks away from our apartment in Philly. As the museum's slogan says, they are both "disturbingly informative."

Before heading home, we lightened the mood by checking out the Science Center's Chesapeake Bay exhibit, which featured a giant mechanical blue crab. And as we all know, Russ is obsessed with blue crabs. Here he is learning to commune with the blue crab.