Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Body Worlds

I went to Fort Worth a couple weeks ago to visit some friends and meet their 3-month-old baby girl, and somehow I managed to talk them in to going to the Body Worlds exhibit in Dallas. Wow! I totally recommend going to see it. Everything has been "plasticized", so it all looks a little unreal and is easy to forget that these were once-living people who donated their bodies to science and education. Except some of the bodies still had hair. But one of my friends managed to make it through--I was so proud, because she's not a scientist but an accountant. Then she told me that she had been expecting to see body parts in JARS, entire bodies in big windowed freezers, and other such things. Whoa! That would've been a totally different experience, indeed!

It was a very interesting exhibit, and one that we were all glad to have gone to. They had healthy organs alongside unhealthy ones: smokers lungs next to nonsmoker lungs, cancerous organs next to healthy ones, etc. It was amazing to be able to see what a difference disease really causes. I mean, I can look at diagrams and stuff all day (and have, in fact), but to see these, and to know they are real, is fantastically educational. Amazing, really. I highly recommend it!

(And, for the record, my friends' baby was beautiful and adorable! And my friend even cooked while I was there! ) We also went on a mad dash one evening to find the Grey's Anatomy Trivia Game, but we couldn't remember what store's ad we had seen it in, so we rushed to 3 or 4 different stores before we finally found it, right before they closed. Whew! Then, of course, we stayed up playing a few games of it, and even my friend's husband won a game! (he's not a fan...)