West Lake Cultural Plaza
2 min readTop of the list for kid-friendly museums is the Zhe jiang Museum of Natural History，which is no mean feat when you consider that Hangzhou boasts some of the country’s best museums.Chronicling the“Life Story of Earth”through a chronologically ordered array of exhibitions，models，interactive displays，and multimedia stations，the museum shows how life on this big blue planet we call home evolved from simple floating organisms that dwelled in the depths of the ocean to the Homo sapiens that walk the streets today.What the museum lacks in English translation it certainly makes up for in dinosaurs，and at the end of the day，who needs words when you have a full size T-Rex，towering palm trees，and the skeleton of a woolly mammoth？
On the museum’s third floor lies an impressive taxidermy collection that includes creatures both great and small, ranging from an African elephant to a tiny frozen-in-time blue tit. Pleasingly, there is also a localized section here that focuses on Zhejiang’s own flora and fauna, offering interesting tidbits along the way-featuring Zhejiang’s 99 species of mammals,450 different kinds of birds, and 82 species of reptiles native to the province. New to the museum is a rather immersive nocturnal hall, that, as you might guess, goes to great lengths to re-create the world of our nocturnal neighbors. Here the lights are dimmed low as you circle around a huge, hyper-realistic reconstructed forest full of beasts of all descriptions. Before leaving the museum, where you could easily spend a good 90 minutes to two hours, be sure to check out the first-floor gift shop that is located to theleft of the entrance escalators. Here you can purchase some fantastically realistic-looking plush toys, stationary sets,3D T-shirts, puzzles, posters, umbrellas-pretty much anything you can think of as long as it’s animal-themed.A great afternoon out for the family.
