Lions and Tigers and... Seals? Oh my!

Wow, have I already been at my internship for five weeks?! We got another intern at the museum this week and I was honestly really annoyed at first. It seems like Nigel barely has enough time to supervise Blair and me so I couldn’t understand why they would give him another intern. (Although things have been better for us lately but that’s really only because we took the initiative and it didn’t have much to do with Nigel at all.) But it doesn’t really matter because now that it’s the end of the week I love our new intern!!

We got to spend most of our week over at the storage facility at Beggars Bush, which was great because we hadn’t been able to do a lot of work there before. The first two days I worked with the new intern, Rory, as we re-shelved the small library that’s held there. Although there wasn’t a whole lot of educational value that went into this task I still really enjoyed it.

The library in Beggars Bush that Rory and I reshelved.

For one we got to deal with books that were as old as 1847, which was honestly just a really cool thing. Also I really enjoyed the time I got to spend working with Rory because we got into some really great discussions and actually had a blast!

Having some fun while re-shelving the library... "Who ya gonna call?" "Bookbusters!"

She’s also from the United States (a small school in Maryland) and also an educational history major so we already had a lot in common. I told her all about my trip to Dachau last weekend and since she’s also a history education major she understood what I was talking about when I started discussing how I could use that experience of mine in a classroom. It was just nice getting to talk to someone that was on the same ‘level’ as me. She had also visited the camp when she was much younger so we got to compare and contrast our visits, each occurring at such different times of our lives.

I also got to spend some time cleaning bones this week! I felt like I was an archaeologist from Jurassic Park or something, haha. Sitting there in my white lab coat, with my gloves and dust mask… and of course my paintbrush for wiping away the dust! Rory and I worked on a skeleton together that we originally thought was a dolphin, then someone said it was some type of big cat (puma, lion, or tiger), it was later changed to a deer and we finally found out it was a seal!

Working on cleaning Bubba Odysseus.

Rory named it Bubba Odysseus!!

Blair and I also took this week to finish up our report on the signage problems at the History Museum- I don’t remember if I talked about it in previous blogs. But anyway it was basically just a report on what problems we found with signage in relation to the ease of navigation at the museum and what we thought could be done to remedy the situation. It came out great and with all the appendices and results wound up being ten pages! I’m actually rather proud of it, haha. We were even able to add graphs by using the data we complied from some visitor surveys we did- it looked quite spiffy if I do say so myself.

Last night was Rory’s twenty-first birthday so I went out with her and a bunch of her friends to this great thai restaurant. (First time having thai and it was yummy!) It was a really cool atmosphere and the food there was great! I actually only ordered an appetizer because the food was kind of expensive. But then one of Rory’s friends realized the meal he’d ordered had shrimp in it, which he’s deathly allergic to, so I told him I’d switch if he wanted to. So it was actually a pretty sweet deal- I got a main course for an appetizer price, hehe.

After dinner we went to a pub called The Porterhouse and had a few drinks there. I couldn’t really afford to stay out too late since I had a quiz this morning in class (which went okay I guess). It was kind of funny because one of Rory’s friends wanted to go home after dinner because he had to be up early. Well we convinced him to come to the Porterhouse with us for an hour then when Rory and I were leaving at one he still wanted to stay out! He said since he was out he was going to stay until closing, which was at 3! We gave him a hard time since he was the one that hadn’t wanted to go in the first place but he said it was all or nothing and now that he went out he was staying until 3… because that makes a lot of sense! Haha

It was cool getting to hang out with a group of kids that aren’t the normal people I’ve been hanging out with these past six weeks (even though I love hanging out with all of them.) Some of Rory’s group were from Seattle, others from Ohio, and a few from Rory’s school in Maryland. Overall it was just a really fun night! Jahna’s twenty-first birthday is tomorrow so I’m sure we’ll be out late for that and having tons of fun!! Stay tuned…

written by

kmr788 on July 10, 2009 from Dublin, Ireland

from the travel blog: Dublin, Ireland

Send a Compliment

comment on this...