Rainy Sunday

My plan for today was to walk to Victory Park and maybe later to Mount Eden, but when I went outside it was pouring!

Instead, I decided to walk to the Auckland Museum. At least, I would be inside!

The Auckland Museum is in the Auckland Domain, one of the public parks. The park is really nice, great for running or taking a stroll, but getting there from The Railway Campus is a nuisance. One has to cross the big motorway and walk along it for a while.

The museum had some interesting collections. The biggest exhibit focused on the life and culture of Maori, of course. Besides many older artefacts on display, the museum had also organized a traditional Maori dance performance. This cost extra, though, and I didn't go see it since I had seen these performances before at the All Blacks game and the Evolution Conference.

Interestingly enough, photography was allowed in most exhibit halls. See some pictures on the right.

I had also gotten a ticket to one of the current special exhibits called "Egypt: Beyond the Tomb."
The exhibit was really well done. The visitors could follow the path of a young woman called Keku, who lived 2700 years ago, make her journey from embalming and mummyfication through the underworld, and hopefully to paradise.
The Egyptians were obsessed with the afterlife; growing up, their whole life seemed only to prepare them for this path. The highlight of the exhibit was of course Keku's mummy, well-preserved in two separate coffins.

Finally, there was one impressive exhibit devoted to volcanoes. The museum itself is built on top of a volcano, and of course 48 volcanoes lie underneath the whole Auckland region.
The exhibit told us a little bit of the history of Auckland's volcanoes, some recent eruptions (mostly in other countries, though), and presented a scenario of what would happen if a new volcano would erupt tomorrow, in present-day Auckland.