Amelia’s Blog from Te Papa

Friday December 11, 2009

Yesterday, we went to a museum called Te Papa. It had lots of cool things in it. It was so big that we didn’t get to see the whole thing. Me and Mommy went on a submarine ride, but we really were not underwater. We saw underwater volcanoes on the screen.

At the museum there was a Colossal Squid. It was found near Antarctica. It was the biggest squid that they have ever found. Unfortunately, they have never found a male squid that big before. It was a female. It was 4.2 m and weighs nearly half a tonne. We saw real bits of the squid and got to feel models of them, like its mouth. It looks like a bird beak. And got to feel the claws on the tentacles and the claws and they spin around. We got to build our own squid on the computer. You can visit mine and Bridget’s squid at www.tepapa.govt.nz. Type in AMELIA and I am the Canada one, same with Bridget. You can build your own too!

I went in cool Discovery Centres. Mom made a video of Bridget dancing, in the Pacific Island centre. I was making the music with mommy on drums. We can’t put it on the blog. We can show it to you when we get home. (videos from mom’s camera won’t upload to blogspot). We looked through microscopes at rocks and shells and a pine cone. I felt like a scientist seeing all the different holes . We dressed up in traditional Maori clothes and tossed sticks like they do. Mom and Mommy were pretty good. Me and Bridget need a little more practice.

We went on a nature walk and we got to dig in the sand for fossils. It was huge. It took us 10 minutes to dig up a quarter of it. We think it was an old sea creature. Then I went to see a big piece of a greenstone. I used some sand to scrub at it to make it shiny like the taonga that Mom has.

Mommy’s favourite part of the day was the Christmas Carols that we listened to by a jazz band and she drank a glass of wine.

Merry Christmas Everyone
Amelia