Northern Exposure: Espoo Nature Museum

Last week was my school's exam week. Since all the exams are in Finnish, I didn't have to do any but the english exam. My english exam was on a saturday which meant I got monday to friday off, so Fiona and I went touristing to the Espoo Nature Museum called Haltia. We caught a train and a bus there. It was a freezing cold day and waiting for the
busses was not at all pleasant!

We paid our 2 euro entry fee and headed off to the first exhibit. We walked through a white corrider with displays of bears, birds, snow and fish on either side. When we came to the end there was a huge map of Finland on the ground.

The map had circles which followed you wherever you walked. When you stopped at a place it would bring up all this information on the tv screens next to it about that palce. It was in english for us too! We spent at least 10 good minutes playing on this map.

After the map there was a section of colourful wall and floor with animated fish swiming on it. I have decided Finnish people really like their fish.

In the same room there was a huge screen displaying the 5 different seasons (spring, summer, autumn, winter, late winter). It was really beautiful and you felt like you were really in the scenery. It even had sound effects of running water and birds singing to go with it. Fiona and I sat here and watched the whole thing play through. It was really nice.

They also had interatctive screens with all this information about the seasons. I found it really interesting as the seasons are so different to Australia. It was also in english!

A really cool igloo.

Swans playing chess? No idea what this was about...

One of the exhibition rooms had bear tunnels for little kids to crawl through. Of course we couldn't resist and decided to crawl through them. In the middle of the tunnels there were beanbags and a little tv screen showing videos of bears. A good 10 minutes was spent here. At the end there was a real stuffed bear. Techniqually I have hugged a wild bear.