By Andy Millsap
At first I thought going to a wax museum would be kind of boring. I mean what is there to do but just stare at wax models do nothing. Well, that really is what a wax museum is all about. It can even be really funny, especially when a wax figure doesn’t look much like the person it’s supposed to be!
On November 14 myself, Mary, Eric and Kyle took a tour of the Grevin Wax Museum. It was actually a really cool place. The tour started with a movie. Now this movie wasn’t at all related to wax or the rest of the museum but it was still very beautiful. It was shown in a large room with mirror walls so as the movie played the lights reflected off the mirrors and made for some really cool effects. The clip itself showed the different seasons changing and showed different places all to a full orchestra. It really set the mood that you were in a wondrous and magical place. As the movie ended we walked into the start of the gallery.
The first wax model I saw I thought it was a real person and I was really confused why there was some women in a big dress just standing in the middle of the room. After a few seconds I realized she was made of wax and was instantly, well, a little creeped out, to be honest! All the wax models looked very real and the entire time I was expecting one of them to just start walking away or start talking to me.
So the entire museum was set up in sections. There was a section on famous Canadian entertainers, athletes, and politicians. I had no idea who they were but they were still cool to look at. Another section was all about Canada’s history. We saw a lot of the First Nations Peoples as well the first explorers. We did meet one recognizable person in here and that was none other than Mr. Champlain himself! It was really neat to see Samuel de Champlain in wax instead of the stone monument Champlain College has on campus. We took a picture with him, of course, and then continued on.
The next section was for presidents and other government officials. I feel that the Obama statue looked
nothing like Obama, so it was kind of funny! From there we saw classic famous people from all around the world like John Lennon, Albert Einstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Andy Warhol and many others. One of the last sections of the museum was a large area filled with famous American Actors. I got to take a picture with Meryl Streep and Scarlet Johansson (she looked a little off but it was ok) as well as George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling and even Leo made an appearance. It was very cool to see so many famous celebrities in one place!
One really small and quite random section was a Deus Ex section. Here there was a model of Adam Jensen
and three human sized monitors. What you could do was stand in front of the monitors and it would scan your face and put it on the body of the main characters in the Deus Ex games. Once you had chosen the body you wanted you then made a pose and the body on the screen would follow your movements and take a picture of the model in the pose and you could send it to your email. It was pretty accurate in placing your head on the body and it was very weird holding your hands in front of you to move the cursor to select different options.
Overall the hour and a half we took to walk through the museum was well worth it and I would happily do it again. It was a great and fun experience and I suggest if you have time you should go there and experience it for yourself!