Chicago – Tuesday, Museum of Science and Technology

On Tuesday we slept in and rested a bit before heading off to the MSI (Museum of Science and Technology)

Jacob at Fullerton Station waiting on the Red Line.

They have an Omnimax theatre there. This is like an Imax only the screen is a huge dome.  We watched a documentary called Born to Be Wild which was about the rescue of baby elephants and orangutans.

A very cool thing they have at this museum is an actual German u-boat.

Will and the kids took the tour of the inside while I checked out all the exhibits around the outside which told the story of the men who captured the U-boat as well as the lives of the crewmembers who became prisoners of war and all the items that were aboard the boat when it was captured.  I didn’t take the tour because I don’t handle small crowded spaces very well. I can handle small spaces just fine but I don’t like being in closed in quarters with a lot of people around.

Below is a picture of one of the pins the U-boat crewmembers was wearing, from Hitler Youth. Most of the crewmembers were members of Hitler Youth as kids.  It made me think about all the pins and awards we have for Scouting and reminded me of the bible verse Proverbs 22:6 Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.

One of purposes of capturing a U-boat, besides the obvious goal of saving merchant ships,  was to gain access to their communications. Below is one of the Enigma machines. As a kid who spent a lot of time making up secret languages I was fascinated by this.

There were four other floors of exhibits at this museum, it is HUGE. Like the other museums we went to, you could never do everything in one day.  We saw planes, trains, a main street all set up as it looked in 1903, a chicken hatchery, a tiny mechanized circus.  Below is a tornado in the weather exhibit hall.