Yesterday I went to London for my birthday day out with Tilly and Mummy – and even Andy came too! We saw Dr Gunther von Hagens’ exhibition called BodyWorlds. It was absolutely amazing! I admit it was a bit of an odd place to go for a birthday day trip, but it was really interesting and a one-in-a-lifetime experience. Dr Gunther is a scientist who plastinates human bodies and takes out all the organs and blood vessels so you can study them. Everything we saw really was the inside of a real person! We saw a brain, a heart, even tiny little embryos and fetuses that had presumably been miscarriages.
I thought one exhibit was really interesting. It was called the Split Jumper. It was a man which they had positioned to be doing a straddle jump, and they split him down the middle and opened him up so you could see all his organs sliced in half! It sounds weird but it was really fascinating. It meant that you could see the inside of all the organs and muscle and bones.
We had headphones so you could listen to short lectures about what you were seeing. As well as the Split Jumper, I liked the High Beam Gymnast. They had positioned a woman like she was doing acrobatics on the high beam, like gymnasts do in the Olympics. They had split her so you could see how all the different muscles were working. It was really interesting. I also thought one was especially fascinating – it was a woman who had died while pregnant, so you could actually the baby inside her. It was really amazing but also quite sad. I liked looking at the tiny embryos and fetuses that you could look at and watch develop over the weeks. I didn’t know that after only five weeks or so, it was a tiny baby about the size of your finger-nail, but it still had eyes and tiny toes and you could see it was a baby.
They had also displayed some real human hearts, both cut open and whole. I have been learning about the heart on Khan Academy so I could point out the pulmonary arteries and veins and the atria and ventricles and everything. It was really interesting. You could also see the lungs – healthy lungs and a smoker’s lungs. They had many smokers’ lungs exhibits. Some were people who smoked regularly, if only for a few years, and they were completely black – inside and out. I’ve learnt about the lungs on Khan Academy too so I could point out the lobes and the cardiac notch on the left lung. (Did you know that the right lung has three lobes but the left one only has two? I learnt that on Khan Academy.)
When we had finished the exhibition, we had lunch in Pret a Manger. I had a chicken salad wrap which was absolutely humongous! After that we walked around the shops and tried on lots of perfume and make-up at The Body Shop (and I mean lots!). Then we went to look around Anthropologie and I used their ‘try me’ nail varnish to paint all of my nails for my birthday (ssh!). Then we decided to go back home. On the train back we played Hangman and Mummy fell asleep. We got home just after four o’clock and we watched The Great British Bake-Off and The Secret Life of Four-Year-Olds (my new favourite documentary!).
Overall, I thought the day was really fun. I’ve decided to donate my body to Dr Gunther’s team when I’m older. I think it would be a really cool thing to do.