Museum Diary

100 Museums Challenge: Museum No.23 I admit, I’m a sucker for maritime museums. So even without it being recommended to us as a great place to visit with kids, Gothenburg’s Sjöfartsmuseet would have been high on my list! Actually, it’s the Sjöfartsmuseet Akvariet, to give it its full name, as it includes a small aquarium too. Afore mentioned aquarium can be found on the ground floor. It was smaller than the one at Universeum science centre, which we’d seen a few days before, but it […]

Dear Jenni I know how much you love unusual museums and we just visited the perfect one in Naples, Florida. The Naples Train Museum is the model train enthusiasts’ dream, whatever your age. There are ten trains running around a fabulous scale landscape featuring gorgeous little touches such as a lumber yard and a drive-in movie theatre. By pressing buttons on the front of the display you can control the action. It is air conditioned, which is a bonus in the height of the season, […]

Last weekend, we went on a family visit to Berlin’s Museum für Kommunikation. Mainly, because #MuseumBoy wanted to show Granny Scotland the robots (yes, that’s right, he is no longer scared of them!), but I was also really excited to see the special exhibition “Around the World in 80 Things: the Jules Verne Code” before it closes next month. Admittedly, it took some persuasion to drag #MuseumBoy away from the robots, but since he is currently very much in to adventure stories and travelling, we […]

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word ‘submarine’? The colour yellow? Torpedoes? Epic war movie Das Boot? Whatever it is, submarines seem to hold a fascination for many people, so when I heard there was an U-Boot Museum in Hamburg, I had to go check it out. After reading their flyer – adventure, fascination, secrets, mystery – I was expecting great things. I was therefore a little disappointed to discover that the museum consisted mainly of just one submarine – […]

I’d by no means consider myself a plane spotter, but I do have a soft spot for aviation museums, ever since one of my first projects working for National Museums of Scotland was evaluating the Concorde Experience at the National Museum of Flight. Other evaluation projects at the same museum followed, and ever since it has held a special place in my heart. Berlin’s Museum of Technology has an aviation department which we’ve visited several times, but when I discovered that there was a whole […]

In my quest to seek out some more of Berlin’s hidden museum gems, I came across a poster advertising the U-Bahn Museum, which opened in 1997 and has over 300 collected items on display, representing over 100 years of Berlin’s U-Bahn history. “U-Bahn” is short for “Untergrund Bahn”, the name for the city’s underground transit railway (some of which, confusingly, runs over ground), and our visit started with a 30 minute ride on – what else! – the U-Bahn, to the station Olympia Stadion. If you take […]