Tag Archives: things to do with kids

Hamburg, Kid Stuff

Miniatur Wunderland Brings Out the Kid in Everyone

story and photos by Kayte Deioma

“If you build it, they will come” said a ghostly voice in the movie Field of Dreams. I can picture this same voice whispering to Frederick Braun when he came up with the idea to build the world’s biggest model train display. He convinced his more practical twin, Gerrit, that the project was feasible, and they set about putting together the funding and the team to make it happen. Now visitors are lining up to see the fantasy world they have created at Miniatur Wundurland.
Since 2001, this ever-expanding project has occupied a warehouse in the Speicherstadt district in Hamburg, Germany. Starting with 975 square feet of tableaus representing areas of southern Germany and the Austrian Alps, the exhibit has more than tripled in size to over 3700 square feet with the addition of Hamburg, Scandinavia, and America, and the latest creation, a multi-story model of Switzerland.

The seven geographic areas host over 800 trains, of which 90 to 100 are moving at any given time. The longest regularly running train is about 45 feet. In the control room, 40 computers operate the trains, 5,500 cars and trucks, 900 traffic signals, and 300,000 lights from car turn signals to the Vegas Strip, carnival lights, fire flames and house lights that come on one at a time as the sun goes down across two continents.

The Hamburg Exhibit at Miniatur WunderlandLoving detail has gone into recreating Hamburg, from the Town Hall to Landungsbrucken and St. Michael’s Church to the red light district of the Reeperbahn, to the thousands of mini fans packing the AOL Arena for an HSV soccer game. Ships and tour boats navigate real water in the harbor, while dozens of trains make their way through the Hamburg Main Train Station and subways stop at Baumwall, where a crowd has gathered for a techno music parade. Elephants cavort in the Hagenbeck Zoo; fire crews respond to a building fire; bikers race across the Kohlbrand Bridge; trucks load their wares in the Speicherstadt, tourists line up to get into the Dungeon, and daily life goes on in suburbs. Hollywood’s best model makers couldn’t have done any better.

The Las Vegas Exhibit at Miniature WunderlandAmerica is about 1/3 the size of Hamburg. Las Vegas is well represented with landmark buildings like the MGM Grand, Luxor and Paris Las Vegas that light up when night falls, which is every 15 minutes at Miniatur Wunderland. In addition to the many cars and trucks moving through the streets and the monorail on the Strip, you get a view of the passenger and cargo trains making their way across the desert and through the Vegas railroad station, that most real life visitors would never see.
The Grand Canyon in miniatureAdjacent to Las Vegas, Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon are in close proximity to each other with mining towns, Indian pueblos and Area 51 in between, all connected by trestle railroad bridges and a freeway system full of semis and tanker trucks. Amtrak delivers passengers to nearby Miami Beach, with its Art Deco architecture and palm trees. Cape Canaveral, the Everglades and Key West fill in the rest of Florida.
Construction of the Switzerland Exhibit at Miniatur WunderlandSwitzerland, which opened in November 2007 is the first multi-level exhibit, covering over 800 square feet. The Matterhorn rises from the third to the fourth floor of the building through an opening in the ceiling. You can follow the trains up the mountain via a stairway or look down on the scene from the railing above. Other things going on in the Swiss scene include a renaissance fair with knights competing in a joust near the foot of Castello di Montebello, workers making chocolate bars at the Lindt & Sprungli factory, and 20,000 fans camped out at a DJ Bobo concert, complete with requisite port-a-potties.
Night comes every 15 minutes at Miniatur Wunderland.There is so much incredible detail to the models at Miniatur Wunderland that you could spend all day and not see everything. If you take just long enough to see the daylight and nighttime version of each set, you need a minimum of two hours, even for a superficial view. If you have kids along, you should allow plenty of time for them to push Behind the Scenes Tours let you see the inner workings of the systems and go behind the models to see where the trains go when they enter the tunnels. The tour goes through some pretty tight spaces, so size restrictions apply.

There is a restaurant on site in case you need a refreshment break, and the gift shop has everything imaginable to start your own model project at home.

Miniatur Wunderland has a great website with extensive photos, videos, facts and figures, including weekly updates (in German) on new construction. There is an English language version of the site at www.miniatur-wunderland.com. Check the video section for train cam videos through Miniatur Wunderland.

From the German version of the website, I recommend the video showing The Construction of Switzerland in 10 Minutes.

Buy your tickets online in advance to avoid a long wait to get in, or check the section on Waiting Times on the website so see the estimated wait times for a given day.

Miniatur Wunderland Hamburg
Kehrwieder 2-4,
Block D 20457 Hamburg – Speicherstadt
(49) (0) (40) 300 6800
www.miniatur-wunderland.com

Brussels, Kid Stuff

The Flanders Toy Museum in Mechelen

story and photos by Kayte Deioma

There is a small Toy Museum in Brussels, but if you’re this close to the largest toy museum in the world, you might as well take the short half hour train ride to the town of Mechelen.

Mechelen is known for having the first international Carillon School, and being the home of the De Wit Tapestry Factory, which restores tapestries for castles and museums around the world. But its youngest world-class attraction is the Flanders Toy Museum (Speelgoedmuseum), which since opening in 1982, has grown from 7,800 square feet to over 32,000 square feet of space devoted to the display, preservation and interpretation of play things.

The museum is located in a rather drab converted four-story department store, whose showcase windows, although filled with toys, give no hint of the creativity displayed inside.

About 15,000 of the museum’s 20,000 toys are on display at any one time. You have to pass the gift shop and play area before you get to the exhibits, so if you’re visiting with kids, plan a few minutes of playing at the beginning and end of your visit to avert the frustration of not being able to play with the toys on display.

“Everything you see in everyday life you can see in toys” says Museum Director, ??. “We try to show the connections between the objects and society. Through the developments in toys, you can see the evolution of our culture.”

Most of the permanent exhibits are only tagged in Dutch, or Dutch and French, so it’s helpful to hire and English tour guide if you really want to understand the significance of what you are seeing. Guides are available by appointment for 25 euros for one to 25 people.

On the first floor, cases are filled with hand puppets, marionettes and dolls – fabric dolls, wooden dolls, porcelain dolls, and plastic dolls. Some display cases show the work of a particular manufacturer or country. Others show doll play groups set up at a picnic, on a sailing outing, in the kitchen, in a music shop and numerous other settings.

The exhibit on the evolution of the toy typewriter mimics the progress of the real thing, with over 50 examples in the museum’s collection.

A full-size funfair mirror is your welcome to the mechanical Funfair exhibit, with miniature merry-go-rounds, Ferris wheels and other carnival attraction. You’ll also see the museum’s first acquisition, a duo of mechanical clowns from 1880 that do a balancing act.

In a partnership with UNESCO, the museum exhibits toys made by children, folk artists and cooperatives in developing countries. This is one area where tags are also in English, but there’s not a lot of interpretation.

The most creative exhibit by far is the life-size walk-in model of Pieter Bruegel’s 16th century painting, Children’s Games. A poster of the painting, depicting children playing 80 different games, is just outside the entrance. Many of the games illustrated, like leap frog or cartwheels, don’t require toys, and the space in the painting where these things are going on is empty in the room, waiting for groups of kids to fill the space. Examples of the playthings that are evident in the painting are on display in glass cases at grade-school-child viewing level. Some of these include knuckle bones (the precursor to Jax), jump ropes, darts, marbles, hoops and tops.

A few three dimensional characters from the painting are re-created climbing a fence near the display cases, and many more cutouts are placed in perspective playing into a 3D background. You can walk through Bruegel’s archways to see what’s beyond the painted space.

There is prominent display of model trains on the third floor. This spot was chosen because it has the best view of the real train station and railroad tracks out the window. The tiny town played a significant role in the history of the railroad in Europe. The first train on the continent went from Mechelen to Brussels in 1835.

The history of the “teddy” bear, the evolution of board games from ancient Egypt to the present, wooden blocks with castle turrets and metal building sets from which you could construct the Eiffel Tower, are a few more fascinating exhibits from the permanent collection.

A large part of the third floor is given over to temporary exhibits. For the museum’s 25th anniversary, they created a striking display of the private childhood toy collections of famous Belgians, from actors and musicians to politicians and journalists. An interactive spotlight area was created for each category where you could stand behind a podium to give a press conference, like a politician, be a TV talk show host and see yourself on TV, or be onstage in a band.

For the 50th anniversary of LEGOs, in 2008, they are planning an extensive LEGO exhibit.

If you plan your visit to Mechelen on a Saturday, you can also pay a visit to the exhibit rooms of the DeWit Tapestry Factory (10:30 am) or hear a Carillon performance (11:30 am). English language city tours can be arranged through the Mechelen Tourism Office

Flanders Toy Museum (Speelgoedmuseum Mechelen)
Nekkerspoelstraat 21
2800 Mechelen
Belgium
Phone: (32) (0) 1555 70175
www.speelgoemuseum.be

Mechelen Tourist Office
Hallestraat 2-4-6
2800 Mechelen
Belgium
Phone: (32) (0) 7022 2800
www.inenuitmechelen.be

 

 

Destination Features, New York City

A Taste of Art: A Bite-Size Visit to the Met

story and photos by Kayte Deioma

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s largest and finest museums. Ironically, that’s why I hadn’t visited it in any of my previous trips to New York. I felt that a great art museum like the Louvre, the Prado or the Met deserves a full day to really appreciate its collections, and I’ve never stayed in New York long enough at one time to be willing to devote a whole day to one activity.

The Metropolitan Museum of ArtSince I was in New York this time with my sister and her kids, I decided that it was more important for the kids to get a taste of great art than to worry about not having time to see the whole thing, and thereby miss everything. We didn’t expect the kids to have the patience to stay in a museum more than a couple hours anyway.

I was much more relaxed once I gave myself permission to miss lots of wonderful stuff.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is located in a massive Gothic-Revival building on Fifth Avenue along the western edge of Central Park. After getting our tickets, we went to the information booth in the center of the Great Hall to find out if there were any family programs scheduled that day. It was a Saturday, and we were in luck with a “Hello, Met!” family introduction to the museum scheduled an hour later.

With just an hour for exploration on our own, we chose to start with the Egyptian exhibit, with the largest collection of Egyptian artifacts outside Cairo.

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Becca takes the audio tour through the Egyptian exhibit at the Met.We rented the audio tour headsets, which I don’t usually do on my own, but it turned out to be great for the kids. It was easier for the younger ones than reading the information panels. As we moved through the colorful sarcophagi, carved limestone monuments and painted hieroglyphics, they really enjoyed punching in the numbers and having control over which descriptions they heard. There wasn’t a child-friendly version of the tour like there is some places, but they seemed to do just fine.

Becca was somewhat selective in which pieces she wanted to learn more about, but Sarah could have spent all day “listening to stories” and didn’t appreciate being hurried to keep up.

We hadn’t made it much farther than the maze of corridors through the Tomb of Perneb – a part original, part reconstruction of a 4300 year-old Egyptian burial chamber – when it was time to head downstairs to the family program.

The Hello, Met! Family Program

The "Hello, Met!" family program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.We met the rest of the families downstairs in the Uris Center for Education. After a brief introduction, our guide, Amir Parsa, took us back upstairs to the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. We all settled on the floor in front of a glass case lined with carved wooden masks from Mali. After a brief Q and A about the use of masks around the world, we learned more about these Dogon Masks, used in mourning dances several years after the person died.

The "Hello, Met!" family program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.We moved around the corner to Papua New Guinea to study more masks and spirit boards from the temporary exhibit “Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf.” After studying the intricately carved and painted spirit boards and learning how art and culture go hand in hand, children and parents were given paper and pencils to copy their favorite board designs, or create their own.


Our last stop on the Hello, Met tour was in the Modern Art wing, where our guide used a series of Jacob Lawrence paintings to talk about shapes and colors before distributing colored pencils and letting the budding artists get back to work, either coloring their spirit boards or creating something new.

Becca and Sarah make wishes in the fountain in the Greek and Roman exhibit at the Met.After our hour-long journey into art appreciation, we planned our exit route to take in the new Greek and Roman sculpture exhibit in the sky-lit Leon Levy and Shelby White Court. The atrium, populated with Roman statues from the first century BC to the third century AD, was a great preview for Derick, who would soon be setting off on an excursion to Italy.

The girls took the opportunity to throw a coin in the fountain and make a wish. They wouldn’t reveal their wishes. Maybe, like Trevi, it was a wish that will bring them back to the Met someday.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198
General Information: 212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is included in the NYC Go Select Pass and the NYC Explorer Pass.

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