Musée d'Emmanuel Liais

Musée Emmanuel Liais

So it's taken me a week but I finally managed to get back to the Emmanuel Liais Park and in particular, the Museum.

Leon or Arthur Seal

My original plan was to take Marc to go see the 'weird and funky animals', as Fran calls them, on Wednesday morning when Fran went off to work. This would have been ideal, but we didn't end up leaving until 11:10am and it closed for lunch at 12. It should have been a 5 minute walk, but it ended up taking almost half an hour (Marc walks so slowly!). We finally got there at 11:40, only to be told "no no, on ferme dans cinq minutes!!" (We close in 5 mins). I
tried to say, no no, 20 minutes... 12 heures but they were adamant they would be closing in 5 minutes (Typical French!).

Parrots and other tropical birds

We settled for just walking around with Marc in the first room (the one with most of the stuffed birds and animals in anyway), especially as I realised that there was a lot of it up steps and I had Aurianne asleep in the pram.

There were two stuffed seals in there. They were apparently called 'Leon and Arthur' and used to live in the park. When I told this to Marc he just looked at me blankly and said "Hmm, that's interesting. But, what is the turtle called?"

Eagles and other birds of Prey

Marc quite liked looking at the different coloured birds and shells. He's been there before, but not for a while.

The man was standing by the door shaking keys after 5 minutes, so I decided to go. Marc didn't want to leave and so I had to bribe him with playing in the park for a bit.

Anyway, as I didn't get to see it all, I went back today.

One of the biggest of the shell collection

Crystals and Rocks

I think that this whole museum (like the botanical green houses and the rest of the gardens) is just the personal collection of the former mayor of Cherbourg, M. Emmanuel Liais.

The first room also had lots of fossils, small dinosaur bones and crystals/rocks in it.

Pickled Snake, anyone?

The second room was full of 'Reptiles'. Some pretty creepy stuff in there. The third room was packed full of stuffed birds. They had lots of insects (including hundreds of butterflies) in the hallway.

Upstairs were the Native and Central America, Oceana, Asia and Egyptian rooms.

My main complaint was that the exhibits weren't very well laid out. Yes, they'd managed to at least categorise things into 'Marine Birds' or 'Reptile Eggs', but there was a lot of stuff up high, and everything was packed very close together. They needed a bigger museum really but I suppose there wasn't really room.

More snakes in jars

It also wasn't especially interactive or child-friendly. Not only because of the stuff high up, but also there wasn't any children's leaflets etc. but then, perhaps that's just France as I don't think I've seen any especially child-friendly museums here yet.

Lots of turtles and tortoises

I don't have a great deal more to say about all of this, so I'll just say the rest with pictures!

Tortoise-Alligator (it was actually labelled as this!)

A turtle with a stretched out neck. Disgusting.

Skull bones of something...

Stuffed Shark

Lots of picked fish!

Starfish and other Sea Urchins

Big starfish close-up

Butterflies. These just remind me of
Beatrix Potter's brother in the film 'Miss Potter'.
"The young, entomologist"

Very pretty butterflies.
There was a whole section of shiny blue ones,
but the photo was just full of glass reflections.

Huge Moth butterflies.
Even bigger than the one I saw in Corsica!

Upstairs in the 'around the world' rooms

A kayak from

Native and Central America 

Oceana - traditional dress

Oceania - more traditional dress

Africa - Spears

Asia 

The Statue bust of Emmanuel Liais himself

A real skull used for study

Egypt - Coins 

The Statue Bust of Madame Liais
(Emmanuel's wife)

The Cherbourg Mummy