The Powerhouse Museum

This museum is located just south of Darling Harbour. It’s a great museum. The museum was once the powerhouse (electricity source) of Sydney. However, now it’s a pretty sweet and interactive museum. I was encouraged to see this museum by my “Popular Culture since the 50’s” lecturer. She mentioned they are showing an 80’s exhibit. I traveled with a couple people from my program. The museum only cost $5 to get in for students, which is amazing to find something in this city that’s fun and cheap. the 80’s exhibit was pretty cool. I got to see all the different popular artists and styles of the 80’s. The big highlight for 1989 (the year I was born) was the falling of the Berling Wall. I got to see Michael Jackson's famous sequenced glove and jacket, Princess Diana’s wedding dress (which was pretty plain and simple to my surprise), an AIDS quilt, took a 80’s rapid quiz, and I got to solve a life-size touch rubics cube. I didn’t actually solve it. I cheated. Alf and the guitar and drums from INXS were there too. I wish I got there earlier because there was so much to see at the museum, I did not get to see half of the exhibits.



They had a space gravity simulator. Kinda gave you the feeling you were in zero-gravity (sorta). The cool part was they had a replica of what astronauts get to live in. I there living quarters look like a storage cabinet and you sleep head to toe, but since there is no gravity guess it doesn’t matter. I got to sit in an electric hair. One of coolest exhibits was the space exhibit. The infra-red pictures of Saturn, the moon, nebulas, the sun, etc. were so cool. Did you know the sun is half way through its life cycle? The exhibit did not include Pluto since it wasn’t technically a planet anymore. It’s classified as a dwarf planet now. The museum closed at 5pm; actually, everything shuts down at 5pm in Sydeny. It is really annoying sometimes. We caught a coo coo clock show before the museum closed. It was a pretty intricate clock. The clock told the time from several places in the world, a different biblical story everyday at 3pm, told us the position of the planets, and much more all at the same time. Afterwards, we walked to the area Surry Hills to find a restaurant. Couldn’t find many restaurants despite what the RA told us. Guess we were on the wrong street. Ended up at the Hippo Lounge for dinner, I ate some really good salmon over noodles.