On September 10, 2024, I traveled north to Michigan to tour the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The University of Michigan is known for its status as an exceptional research university. It is consistently ranked among the top public universities in the United States and boasts more than 668,000 living alumni worldwide.
My first stop was the university’s Museum of Natural History. I visited its planetarium and saw “We Are Stars,” a film detailing the origins of the universe and the formation of life on Earth. Additionally, I created pipette art, walked through an exhibit detailing evolution, saw taxidermied animals, and attended an information session a professor hosted on the animals that coral reefs their home. I visited the museum’s cafe, appropriately named “Darwin’s” after Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary biology.
I felt I would be happy to live in the Museum of Natural History for the rest of my life. The mastodon fossils on display near the entrance were incredibly impressive, as were the multitude of other fossilized animals.
After falling in love with the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, I took a tour of the campus. It was
here that I discovered the university’s wide assortment of libraries. There are an astounding twenty libraries on campus in total. I was quite impressed with the campus overall.
Then, I made a quick stop at the university’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. A multitude of Egyptian and Greco-Roman artifacts were on display, including sandals, statues, and amphoras. I was more than a little disappointed that I did not get to see the Museum of Anthropology or the Museum of Dentistry, but hopefully, I will visit Ann Arbor again someday and walk through them.
I spent the rest of the day on campus simply walking around. Ann Arbor is a beautiful college town. The campus has a lot of squirrels and, funnily enough, the University of Michigan boasts both a club for feeding the squirrels and a club against feeding the squirrels.
The next day, I convinced my family to make the trip over to Farmington Hills, Michigan to see Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum, a hidden Michigan gem that I, truthfully, only knew about because of Tally Hall’s first album of the same name. I stepped inside and instantly wished to live there. All of the machines were coin-operated and still worked. The place functioned much like a modern-day arcade, but significantly cheaper. It was here that I played tic-tac-toe against an animatronic chicken and tied three times. It might be impossible to win against this machine. Nearly every machine in there was even older than I was. It was easily one of my favorite places I have ever been to.
If an individual is near the Ann Arbor or Detroit area, I would seriously recommend that they check out these amazing places.
