Friday 5 May 2017

Lego Exhibition

Yesterday we went to see the Brickman Wonders of the World Lego Exhibition at Melbourne Museum. I'd been planning to take the kids since I first heard about it sometime in March, though I kept putting off buying tickets because I couldn't figure out a good time to go. The exhibit finishes this Sunday so yesterday turned out to be the only remaining day that we could make it - I've done the same with many of the visiting exhibitions (and other activities) - either scraped in during the last week, or missed it altogether. I don't like to book things in too far ahead in case our plans change, which does sometimes mean missing out. I might try to book a few things and work around them and see how that works.

Anyway - I'd seen a similar exhibition at CentrePoint Tower in Sydney, many many years ago (when I was perhaps 10 or 12, with Mum and my siblings) and I LOVED it and have always wanted to go again. I didn't know if the kids would be as excited as I was - from the first moment they saw the Empire State Building in the foyer of the museum, they were bouncing with excitement and so keen to see more.

We all loved the exhibition and were amazed at the skill of the builders involved and detail of every sculpture. The sculptures themselves were incredibly true to the original, and many of them had little scenes set up around them of people enjoying the site - some of those details were hilarious, and it was all interesting. I spent most of the 2 hours saying to the kids 'hey, did you see the guy over here who is doing ...' and we all pointed out lots of fun and interesting details to each other.

There were buildings (ancient and modern) and paintings, sculptures, natural formations, vehicles, metro maps, jewels and crowns - all magnificent. It was also fun to count how many of them we'd actually been to or seen in real life (12 for me, 5 for Liam and Caitlin. None for Millie which has added to her desire to go somewhere overseas). My favourite was definitely the Titanic, there was so much going on in the set up and the boat design was so intricate and realistic.

Many of the sculptures were surrounded by a moat of lego which we were able to use to build our own designs. These were a lot of fun, we made cars and pyramids and statues and towers. We raced our cars down a ramp put there for that purpose - Liam spent a lot of time engineering his car to make it structurally robust - lots of trial and error and then thinking about how to counteract each new problem. He was pretty impressed with his final product, and amusedly annoyed when Caitlin's vehicle of 2 big wheels on an axle was faster than his car.

As we made our way around we were looking for a particular lego figurine - there was a competition to count how many times he appeared throughout the exhibit, then you can enter your answer online and potentially win a prize. This added another whole level of interest to each sculpture and helped us really look at every aspect of the scene.

There were also tables set up with white flat squares of lego, and lots of coloured one by one blocks, where everyone could make their own design and put it on display on the wall. I tried to make a star and didn't get anywhere (although my statue of David was quite cool), the kids had a lot more success at designing something they were happy with.

Millie's, Liam's and Caitlin's designs
The Flying Scotsman, made from lego. Steam engines and lego combined - super exciting for me!
We explored for 2 hours (although it was hot in there and Caitlin and I started to feel a bit overwhelmed) and loved it all, we could have stayed longer. We made our way out through the shop and bought some road bases to use with our own lego, as we don't have any and this was something that all 3 kids were happy to get.

Upstairs we met up with my Mum and Dad, and my sister's son who they were looking after for the day. We all went in to the new Children's Gallery in the museum - we hadn't seen it before and the kids all loved it. Mum and Dad and I had a coffee while the 4 kids explored, then the kids joined us for something to eat and then we all had a bit more of a play and headed home. It was very cool to be able to combine our trip in to the museum with the kids seeing their cousin and grandparents.

The traffic was heavy though flowing on the way home (leaving just before 5pm was always risky) - we got home in about an hour 20 which wasn't too bad. We grabbed a hot chicken and bread from the IGA and ate that at the hall before going in to karate - Tony came and picked Millie up as she didn't want to do karate that night. Karate was fun and challenging as usual, afterwards we chatted to one of the Sempeis about his recent trip to Europe and then came home to finish our dinner and put the animals to bed and get to bed as quickly as possible ourselves - it was a cold night and we were very grateful for our fire!

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