The next best thing to actually visiting a museum

My memories of my younger years are largely lost to time. What little I can recall, is mostly what other people remembered about a younger me. I hope you’ll enjoy this secondhand memory I remember via my mom, about a visit to our museum of natural history, Naturalis. I was around six years old at the time.

Musea have always felt like churches to me. Not only because of the often imposing architecture, but also because of the reverence I felt for the art or knowledge on display. I guess this must have started from a young age. My mom told me that on this particular visit, I brought a little notebook, and went meticulously through all rooms. There, I drew all of the exhibits, from the largest dinosaur skeleton to the smallest butterfly. I took notes on their scientific names and wrote down their characteristics. Because I was still learning to write fluently, this took quite some time; thankfully, both my mum and her aunt were very patient with me. I mostly remember that whenever I entered a museum, be it on natural history or art, immediately my hyperfocus mode engaged and I lost all track of time, lost in exploration of the treasures on offer.

What makes musea wonderful to me, is that they make their collection available to a wide audience. With the advent of technology, this has gradually expanded to the web in some cases. People who otherwise wouldn’t be able to visit the museum for whatever reason, can now recreate some of that wonderful experience from their own home.

On that topic, I can share a later memory of my own. When I was in high school, I helped a family friend, an older lady (I called her Gran), with mastering her computer. I mostly helped her with finding her way around a Word processor, and we’ve made a lot of photo albums with pictures of her children and grandchildren over the years. But in addition to that, she had heard from friends that she could visit musea on her computer—this must have been somewhere around 2005-2010.

This discovery was very special to her: when she couldn’t sleep at night, she could look at pictures of her favourite paintings. Not just on puzzles and in magazines, but via a virtual, 3D visit from her own computer. In this way, the internet gave her access to the wider world of art.

Here I find myself, roughly fifteen years later, in the same circumstances: due to long covid, it’s not really feasible for me to explore a museum any more. But then I remembered those computer lessons and how I could use the internet to make a virtual visit, just like I taught her all those years ago. The web is my connection to the wider world; especially during this time of illness, it has been a sanctuary to me. So, I decided to treat myself to a virtual visit to Naturalis.

The first thing that strikes me is that since my last visit, they’ve rebuild the museum (in 2019, the director who welcomes us tells us). I no longer recognise the atrium, but it fills me with some of that same awe I remember from other musea. I think the architecture is stunningly beautiful and reminiscent of Nature.

I go up the stairs, unsure of what I’ll find. More stairs, it turns out. Luckily this is a lot less tiring that it would’ve been in real life. Whoops, I’m on the second floor already! Did I skip two floors? Well, I can always come back to those later. I enter the exhibit called “Life”. There, I enter a dark cave, bathed in blue and green light. I feel like I’m underwater. It’s really stunning how they’ve managed to capture this experience (I love that occasionally, you see the shadow of a very boxy camera). Sharks hang on the ceiling above me; oh! there’s an gigantic, life size African elephant around that corner, I think I’ve taken a wrong turn again. No matter, this experience of getting lost and exploring is exactly what I came for.

I can’t stay too long, but I’ve just enough time for a visit to the next floor, the “Earth” gallery. It’s a completely different mood: there’s a camping van, parked next to a Shinto shrine, of all things. In the background, I can see photos of a volcano. What’s the connection, you might ask? Well, for the details, you could virtually visit the museum yourself: it’s completely free of charge.

Thank you so much Naturalis, for letting me wander around your virtual halls for a moment. I’m sure I’ll be back again some time! The Shinto shrine is the last spot I visit before I close the page. A fitting end to my visit to Naturalis, where the overarching theme is, of course, love of Nature.

This is my late submission to the Indieweb Carnival of March 2026, hosted by James. The topic was Museum memories.