Okay, so I had an internship back in 2006 at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. I worked in the Insect Zoo, which was their only living exhibit – I got to feed adorable bug babies all day, and show them off to guests to pet them!!! We had a bunch of silk moths (the puppies of the insect world – they can’t even fly anymore, they just sit on your hand and flutter and fluff and look adorable), some hissing cockroaches that were so well socialized they didn’t hiss anymore, the amblypygi (an arachnid you may remember as HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THAT TERRIFYING CREATURE that Mad Eye Moody demonstrated the unforgiveable curses on in the Harry Potter movie series – side note, one of them climbed off its perch and onto my shoulder once and was whacking me in the face with its antannae. HOLY NOPE.), orchid manti, leafcutter ants, black widow and brown recluse spiders (NOT FOR TOUCHING, heh), and an entire bookshelf filled with tarantula aquariums. Also, new guinea stick insects and those super cute leaf-mimicking insects that shake their hips to mimic leaves blowing in the wind.
ALL OF THIS IS TO SAY that for a few precious weeks, I could amble around the back areas and staff-only floors of the museum, and IT WAS MAGIC. I passed THE BONE ROOM every day, along with the display of precious gems including the goddamned Hope diamond, and a closed door intriguingly titled the RODENT RANGE.
Museums are the goddamned best.