I have no recollection of every being in a butterfly room at any museum, ever. I like looking at all the trays of the pinned bugs, but this joint had LIVE butterflies.

The first thing that hits you when you go in the Puelicher Butterfly Wing is that it’s damp and warm, which is really nice during a midwest winter. It’s like a greenhouse in a museum, so it instantly sets you up for feeling tropical. It didn’t look like there were too many different types of butterflies in the room itself, and there wasn’t much information that I could see about the different species. I like reading that kind of thing.

Right at the entrance to the room is a case full of chrysalides. Some of them are absolutely crazy looking:

I thought these looked like crazy jade beads with gold accents.

Seriously, these were shiny gold. Like polished gold. You could see your reflection in them!

After you stare at the case for a few minutes and start to make your way through the room, you are struck by two things: holy crap that butterfly tried to eat my face, don’t instinctively squish it, and holy crap there are butterflies everywhere, don’t step on one.

The amazing thing is, even with my crappy little digital camera I still got some amazing photos. So, this is for real a must stop if you like taking pictures.

The first exhibit we went to in the Milwaukee Public Museum was the “Streets of Old Milwaukee” which is meant to look like oldie-timey Milwaukee circa late 1800s and early 1900s. We always like looking at these kinds of things since it tugs at our “sad that hipsters have taken steampunk from us” heartstrings. Also, they have a candy store in the middle of the exhibit that had Bottlecaps candy which was awesome. Right next to this was the “European Village,” which displays these rooms that represent the different European ethnic groups that immigrated to Milwaukee back in the day.

My father is Czechoslovakian, from back when Czechoslovakia was a country and not two countries. I suppose I’ve mostly considered myself Slovak rather than Czech, but I really have no idea how that kind of thing is supposed to work, so whatevs, I took pictures of both!

The wall hanging translates to something along the lines of “if you want to keep your man learn how to cook.”

Also, I happen to have tons of that painted wooden utensil/plate/stuff at my house from the old country, including a shot glass set, so it was cool to see more of it.

The info thing for the Czech room said something about guys chasing girls around and hitting them with sticks, but we didn’t see any sticks in the room.

Also, Christmas tree? Maybe my deeply ingrained love for Christmas decorating isn’t a personality flaw but a CULTURAL TRADITION so stop judging me.

We went to the Irish room expecting to just see a dude passed out on the floor. Instead, just a grandma knitting, and a spinning wheel, not a whiskey bottle to be seen.

Seriously, there were five or six spinning wheels in this exhibit, but all the fake wool looked like synthetic wigs and distracted from the magic. The rooms also had lots of taxidermied cats for some reason.

Next up, BUTTERFLIES!

So, I really, really like going to museums. We spent most of our NYC/DC trip going to museums. There is zero pressure or obligation in going to a museum as a trip; you don’t have to be anywhere at a specific time unless you want to go to a special exhibit, and you’re free to decide which areas you want to go to first, second, third etc. We almost never make it through an entire museum when we go because we’re really, really slow in the areas we really like. I probably spent over an hour in just the American Museum of Natural History’s Rose Center for Earth and Space Hall of the Universe. FORGET the Metropolitan Museum of Art; I think we were there for a few hours and saw only about ¼ of it, and it would easily take four or five trips for us to see all exhibits. I really REALLY like going to natural history museums. I am all about DINOSAURS and OUTER SPACE and ANIMALS and BUGS. So, during a visit to Milwaukee, we hit up the Milwaukee Public Museum, which my husband has been to many times, and apparently I’ve been there before (in grade school?) but have no direct recollection of ever going.

Of course, this presents something of a dilemma for my poor husband. Taking me to a natural history museum guarantees that I’ll be in a good mood the whole day. It also guarantees that I’ll make an utter fool of myself in public and embarrass him because I pretty much turn into an eight year old boy at museums. Guaranteed, I spend the first five minutes pretending I’m a dinosaur (T-Rex, specifically) and stomp around with mimicked short arms and three fingers biting him repeatedly. Interspersed in this carnival is me whining about wanting to see either the outer space exhibit or the dinosaur exhibit RIGHT NOW.

Now that I have a camera and three blog readers, I also feel compelled to take photos of every stupid thing I find because they are ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS and I MUST SHARE THEM. This is the only reason I have this photo:

I do actually have cool photographs of the butterfly room and the village thingie, which I’ll share later, but I leave you with this photo of another diorama, which, if I had to guess, probably pretty accurately reenacts what you’d see if you ran into me at a natural history museum.