Dioramas

Living in Quezon City, in the 1970s, my family used to visit our friends Uncle Ben and Auntie Dettie with their children Jojo, Joy, and then baby Julius. Jojo was very imaginative and constructed sci-fi dioramas out of shoeboxes. My brother, I, and he were playing with snails, throwing them at one another and against the fence wall. I guess that we could have made an escargot dish out them.

The whale is surrounded with a dizzying collection of similarly updated material, 750 sea creature models, high-definition video projections, interactive computer stations, and 14 renovated life-size dioramas, including elephant seals on Mexico's Guadalupe Island, an Arctic polar bear, and a dolphin feeding frenzy.