fun at the museum

I remember how, as a little girl, I once got to go 'behind the scenes' at Pietermaritzburg's Natural History Museum. All I remember is seeing a (dead and decomposing and very smelly) crocodile in a huge bath being prepared for, well, I'm not sure what, but some museum collection. That's when I first realized that there is more to a museum than just the exhibits. And since then I have been fascinated with what happens behind museum doors.
So, it's been great attending a course at Stockholm's Natural History Museum. Not only did we walk through exhibits on our way to work every morning, but we also had the opportunity to see where the museum personnel work and store their materials. Yesterday we climbed to the roof of the museum - which was fun and a little frightening (I seem to be developing a fear of heights as I grow older!). On our way up we passed the dusty and almost-forgotten collecting materials, still marked, of René Malaise, who was a well-known Swedish entomologist and explorer. Today we walked through the 3million-specimen insect collection and saw, amongst others, type specimens collected by Linnaeus' students. For someody like me, coming from a country with a relatively young history of science, this is exiting stuff!