When you’re old and married with a kid like I am, it’s very important to spend quality date time with your husband so that the two of you don’t end up sitting on the couch in your sweats watching tv every night (five nights a week is enough for that). Between work (especially as we are on opposite schedules) and life and parenting it can be difficult, but lucky for us, my daughter spends three nights a week at her father’s house, giving us plenty of opportunities to go out and have Date Night.
Our most recent Date Night was actually a Date Afternoon. Last Sunday Taylor and I crossed the bridge to go check out the Ravishing Beasts taxidermy exhibit at the Museum of Vancouver. It runs until February 28th so if you live here you should definitely take the time to go check it out; admission is only eleven dollars (cheaper than a movie!) and the exhibit itself is amazing.
“No animals were killed for this exhibition. They were already dead.”
This dog was at the bottom of a glass case and when I bent down to look at his dog face I almost burst into tears, he looks so sad.
I loved this piece; the picture really doesn’t do it justice. It was in a really dim area and all the reflections on the dark plexiglass look strange. It’s a kind of large-scale diorama of a coyote- you can’t see it but at the bottom there are rocks and fake plants and resin poured to look like a little stream.
This little fellow was from the same section.
There are tons of other displays, including the sad old lion from A Night at the Museum, a huge rhinoceros head and an even huger moose, some intensely creepy bears, horrible specimens preserved in jars of alcohol, an entire wall of mounted antlered/horned heads, a passenger pigeon, and a great horned owl with a wonky eye that made him look like my fat cat Claire. Most of the pieces are really old (the earliest is a swan from 1896) and rife with arsenic so you can’t touch them, but there was one mounted deer head that you were allowed to touch and it definitely made me feel very uncomfortable to do so.
We also checked out the permanent exhibit, which is a history of Vancouver from the mid-nineteenth century up until the 1960s. Here I’m pointing out our house on a map from the 1890s.
that dog is so gorgeous and so sad!
That picture of the dog almost made me start crying. 🙁
I want to see the taxidermy platypus!
Agreed about the dog. Everyone I showed this to also thought that dog was still alive. Sad sad dog. Also: hooray blog!
Morgan #1: I think Taylor took a picture of the platypus but didn’t put it on flickr (I can’t imagine why). I’ll see if I can get him to upload it!
Morgan #2: Thank you for the hooray!!