The Universum Museum in Bremen, Germany is one of my favorite museums on the planet.
It’s like a children’s science museum, but for big kids like Carrie and me, it offers hours and hours of entertainment and fun.
The museum is designed like a space ship coming out of the planet (from one side), or like a space ship that crash landed (from the other side). Either way you look at it, no worries… it’s safe to go inside.
The museum is split into 3 parts. Mensch, Erde, und Kosmos, (or) People, Earth, and Space.
I’ve been to the museum twice. The first time I went was when I was in Germany 10 years ago with our friend Anne (who we’re going to see in Munich soon), and now with Carrie – 10 years later!
In these two visits, I’ve spent a combined total of 5 hours in the Universum museum, and still only seen 1/3 of it: Mensch. When I went there this time, I forgot which part I had seen, so we went to see Mensch. Most of the experiments and displays were again new for me (even though I’d seen them before), so even though I remembered having seen a lot of it, everything felt new.
And I learned a lot about humans. A lot.
Did you know that there were only 1 billion people on the planet in 1900? This means that in the last 110 years, we have (as a species) grown by 7 times. In all of human history up to 1900, we only reached 1 billion. Millions of years (or at least 8,000 years depending on your beliefs) to reach 1 billion, and then BOOM! huge population growth to 7 billion (the 7 billionth person will probably be born in October in either India or China – no way to know for sure).
I’ll spare you more learning for now, but I find this kind of thing fascinating.
I felt bad for Elsbeth and Harald who took us there – they got through the full museum in 1 ½ hours and had time for a coffee. Carrie and I spent 2 ½ hours there, and were the last ones out of the building as they were closing at 6 PM.
Moral of the story – if you go to a museum with us, come prepared to spend a lot of time. We like to see everything!
And the other moral of the story – if you’re in Bremen, Germany, take an afternoon and go to the Universum Museum. We loved it, and I think you will too.
I’m sorry we missed it when we were there!! Looks like lots of fun! Oh well …. we loved Bremen, so there’s a good chance we would go back there someday!
Will be fun to go to Universum together!