Today, Tim and I woke up, got ready, and headed to the metro. We rode quite far on the metro, somehow managed to walk right past the biggest market in Shanghai without noticing it (can you tell we aren't shoppers?) and went to the Science and Technology Museum! The building was huge, with lots of windows, but it looked like most of it was unused space, which is always a little bit of a shock. We wandered in, purchased tickets, promptly got lost looking for the exhibits, and finally found the first exhibit. This exhibit started with a scene of a gazillion African "animals" (I'm not sure if they were fake, or real and stuffed, or what) and transformed into a rain forest and finally into a rock maze of some sort. The rain forest had fake lightning and really loud recorded thunder, so there were a few terrified children. There were very large (human child sized) models of praying mantises and other insects climbing the walls of the rock maze. There was a spider exhibit with an enormous spider that would raise and lower into the middle of the room. I'm not sure what they were doing with all of the over-sized insect/spider models but I'm pretty sure Chinese children have nightmares of huge spiders and praying mantises coming to eat them alive.
The rest of the exhibits were a lot more fun. We were pretty unimpressed with the first section of the museum, but the rest of the exhibits were very hands on or interesting. One exhibit had all sorts of sciency things including a guitar that was on the wall and you turned a strobe light on and when you strummed the string, you could see the string vibrations and the nodes very clearly. That was pretty cool. There was an exhibit where you got onto a bike that had a very large weight hanging from it, and because the center of mass was so low, you could bike out on a rope without falling. It was fun to watch people climb onto the bike because they were a little afraid that they would fall, but they never did. There was another part that had all these chairs set up to gearing systems. The first set of chairs was a 1:1 gearing system, so you had to pull really hard on the rope to lift all of your weight off the ground. The second was some other gearing system, maybe 4:1 or so, and when you went to pull the rope to lift yourself off the ground, it was a lot easier. The little kids seemed to like that exhibit. Behind that was this fun section where you would wind a corkscrew and use it to raise a ball to the top of a contraption and then watch it roll all the way down like those little marble ramp sets we all had as children. They included some pretty fun gizmos in the contraption so it was fun to watch. There were a lot of sound-related exhibits, so I was slightly left out, and I became bored far sooner than Tim did. Don't be fooled though, there were hundreds of these little exhibits, I just can't explain them all!
We walked through another exhibit and discovered a section where they had these little rides that were supposed to replicate things that astronauts encounter in space. They had this ride that spun you around while you were trying to shoot balls at a target, so Tim hopped on and gave it a try! They didn't spin it fast enough for you to be able to see the effect, so it was somewhat pathetic, and Tim got bored really fast. He signaled that they could stop the ride, but they ignored him and he got spun in circles for 5 minutes longer. He looked happy to get off the ride when they finally let him off! There was also a game where you had a soccer ball, and there was a video on the wall with a goalie that was supposed to be able to track your moves and the ball's motion and defend the goal. Tim took a few shots and the goalie had such a delayed response that Tim won by a million goals. He got bored and we played with some other virtual reality like games, including a game where you pedaled and steered a bike down a virtual trail on the wall in front of you. I think my bike was broken because it didn't go where I wanted, but Tim said I was broken, not the bike.
We wandered around some more, and found a ride that took you through your digestive system! It reminded us of chocolate world from hershey park, so we hopped into a little four person car in the shape of a vegetable that we had all to ourselves! The car started rattling down into the ride and the walls were covered in bulbuous balls of gross pink colors. We were spun in circles while we traveled through the intestines and were stopped periodically to watch 3d videos with our goofy glasses on (why were mine so wet??). When we got to the stomach, we watched a little video of some goofy round ball guy swimming in a pool of green goo. Then we traveled through the bladder, and then we finally exited through the butt, where we were stopped to watch a very surprising video. We weren't quite sure what we were seeing at first, but after a while we figured it out. We were outside, looking at the butt, while it was spewing stuff at us. There was even a suggestive breeze on our faces, which Tim said was matched with farting noises. Tim took a photo of the video.
We were pretty flabberghasted at this point, and the ride continued. Suddenly, there were flashes! When we exited the ride, we discovered that they had a camera at the end of the ride. We didn't want to buy the photo, but Tim snapped a picture of the photo from the lcd screen. It's not good quality, but you can see our reactions from the ride!
Tim is just flabbergasted, and I am laughing hysterically.
We spent some more time wandering around the museum, and found a little robotics section. They had a robot that would play some chinese game against you, but half of them were broken and there were a lot of kids waiting to play. I got to play one for a while but some little kid butted me out. Oh well! There was another robot that would pick a purse off the conveyor belt that was the color of your choosing (you said the color into the microphone) but it only understood chinese, so it never gave me the color I wanted. Another would take a photograph of your face and then sketch it out with a marker. It was really slow though, so it was hard to watch. One area had a little doggy on a video, and when you gave it a command it would do what you said! You could ask it to sit, beg, come, walk forward, etc, but once again, it only understood Chinese. There were lots of kids standing in front of the screen screaming out commands, so the poor puppy was pretty confused. After a while, we'd wandered through the entire museum and we found that we were hungry. We left the museum, stopped at a Starbucks for some frappachinos, and looked for something to eat. Eventually, we found some yummy looking dumplings so we grabbed some and ate them in the street. They were really juicy and our hands and faces were a mess, so thank goodness I had a nalgene full of water to clean up with! We grabbed some pastries at a bakery down the street to finish our lunch, and headed home.
When we got home, we were pretty hot, so we went for a swim in the complex pools. They have two pools; one is a big recreational pool in a silly shape that is outside, and the other is an indoor lap pool. We started in the recreational pool, but since we didn't have goggles, we couldn't really do laps easily. We settled for backstroking across the pool. Since I am incapable of backstroking in a straight line, I bumped into the wall everywhere. That pool was really cold, so after a while we switched to the indoor pool, which was warmer. Now that I had ceiling tiles to stare at, I could backstroke in a straighter line, so I got a few more laps in. After we tired of backstroke, we discovered that there was a hot tub, so we soaked for a while.
We walked home after swimming, and dinner was ready! Dinner was some sort of chicken taco, and it was pretty good. After dinner, we watched fanboys on youku, walked down the street to get some ice cream and beer, and then I fell asleep.
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