My trip to the soil museum!
As I mention in my 'About' page what really sparked the idea for this blog was when I was reading the newspaper and saw that they had opened a soil museum in the UAE, so this week as my first post I decided to go visit it.
Located at Al Ruwayyah 2 in Dubai, the Emirates Soil Museum (which I like to call the dirt museum) was first opened on the 8th of December 2016, and it is basically a center that was created with the sole purpose of researching and maintaining the UAE's soil and sediment deposits, and educating the public on the importance of soil.
The museum itself isn't all that big, for reference I would compare it to about the size of a large living room. The main building is of a more significant size, something like a small strip mall. The main building is where the real stuff happens, from experimenting to sustaining, this building handles all the important duties relating to soil.
When you initially enter the complex through the security gate the first thing that you see is the main building (we'll call it the research building).
Then you turn right at the round about, and a few feet down latched on to the side of the main building is the museum.
When you go to the entrance of the museum there is a little alley way before you actually reach the door. When you enter the door, immediately in front of you is a wall with all the different types of sediments in the UAE.
We were immediately met with the man in charge of taking care of the museum and being a tour guide. He quickly introduced us to an amazing feature (and probably my favorite thing about the place) of the museum, which is that we each got an iPad that we were told to use to scan these pictures in front of all the different exhibits and after scanning, a more in-depth information page would pop up on the screen!
This feature made the whole experience much more dynamic, and smooth.
The museum itself was more interesting than I had first expected it to be, and of course the experience was helped along with little activities and interesting informational videos here and there.
There were also some interactive things, such as sand boxes with the different types of sand in them for you to feel and study more closely, and of-course an area where you could pose for pictures.
Once we were finished looking around the museum we were taken back out to another building just across the road where they had a learning activity center and a gift shop. Sadly the activity center was closed at that time, but we still got to peruse the gift shop items, and have a very informative chat with the manager.
All in all i really enjoyed the experience and the museum certainly surpassed the expectations I had going in and I would definitely would consider revisiting in the future, and I would totally suggest it to anyone else who is visiting Dubai and is looking for a quirky and interesting place to visit.