i'd finally made it to the end of the list of needed stops in wellington. it'd been a long day having been to both the beehive and the city and sea museum. yet still i hadn't succeeded in disposing of any of the maori flax baskets!
if i was going to get rid of any of them, it was here. the national museum of new zealand... te papa.
arriving even after such a long day, i was very excited to visit this museum. it was an internationally famous institute (more so than even the tyrrell, and way more than the otago sadly) and as of such it must be good.
walking up to just the front of the place you couldn't help but expect great things. the place was HUGE!
entering the front lobby just added to the scale. it also through the nice huge posters advertising it informed there was a special whale exhibit on! man do i love whales!!! i was definitely checking that out, even if it wasn't on ms. rhonwyn's list.
now contrary to the motif i've noticed of museums having giant globes in their lobbies, te papa instead had a giant marble sphere on top of a small fountain (a move i sort of appreciated... though it obscured the view of an otherwise basic fountains. i do love my fountains!).
so though you couldn't look at where you were in the world this sphere had a totally different cool function to great visitors.
you could spin the big heavy ball! due to the water from the fountain it was rollable. in place mind you, but still you could spin the thing to your hearts delight!
though it had a very open lobby concept going like my workplace the otago, i realized this place was a whole new brand of museum than what i was used to. unlike most other museum's te papa didn't have a strict floor organization.
i don't mean what was one the floors themselves either. i mean as in there wasn't a clear first, second floor kind of thing. even when you were on a level it didn't guarantee that it stayed that way for long. all throughout the complex were cool (but confusing) walk way bridges connecting the various random parts together.
on the first-ish level there was a cool maori statue to greet you. this was a very good thing i thought quickly checking my flax artifact cargo. plenty of stuff for the baskets to react with.
as i started to explore the place i was blown away by how open it was, and yet how non visible everything was. had i been a security guard here i couldn't pull my usual trick of standing in the open lobby and watch the entrances to the various galleries. here there was no clear central lobby, and even if there was there were plenty of hidden entrances and walkways!
though the imaginary alternate reality where i worked here was the least of my problems.i quickly became slightly lost and disoriented.
the one good thing was this definitely kept me in the museum long enough to make sure if the baskets were going to do their thing they'd have the time to do it!
i spent the whole rest of the day in the place due to not knowing how to get out. i ended up hitting every spot at least twice in my efforts to get out (and in some more "central" spots i was at them closer to a dozen times!!!). the bright spot i saw pretty much everything here!
the problem is i'm not quite sure what i saw in which order.
rather than hurt my peanut sized brain trying to sort it all out people of the innerweb i'm just going to put up the posts about the various part of te papa.
i'll put links to them all here at the bottom of the page which you can use, or you can just read them in order of the rest of my blog.
next the galleries of te papa...
geology gallery
new zealand's conservation issues exhibit
art gallery
maori hall
whale display
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