It’s 11 a.m., and the man working in the gift shop of the Lego Jurassic World exhibit at Telus World of Science has just informed me that the special exhibit requires an extra ticket. I stare back at him, blankly. Not because of the price — just under $7 per person with an annual pass — but because in my bleary-eyed state, I’ve somehow missed this information, readily available in multiple places, and now have to wrangle my young kids and get back to the front entrance to pay.
“Some people take two hours to go through the whole exhibit,” he adds.
My two- and four-year-old girls are still buzzing from their time in the CuriousCITY playzone, and to top it off, it’s almost lunchtime.
Under these circumstances, two hours is an eternity. But we’ve come across the city in the middle of a cold snap, so we press onwards.
Tickets in hand, we walk through the entrance and, for an entire 20 seconds, my girls slow down, subdued by nervous energy, as we round the dark corners of the exhibit’s zig-zag layout. Suddenly, we find ourselves beneath gigantic green Lego legs. They belong to a dinosaur whose head is poking out from the roof.
Both kids are too excited to stop and take in the spectacle, opting instead to zip through the exhibit at full tilt. I lose sight of them more than once. After the third time, I pull my four-year-old aside to explain that if she can’t see me, I can’t see her. It’s no use; her eyes are darting from dino to dino as I lecture.
With dim lighting and decorative greenery, the space has been transformed into a series of rooms that depict Jurassic Park plotlines: extracting DNA from an amber-encased mosquito, warnings that dinosaurs are on the loose, and, of course, an epic Jeep chase. And in case it were not obvious — all are made from Lego.
It isn’t until we are on our way out of the show that I notice signs posted next to the Lego creations explaining the number of bricks and total hours each took to make. (The armoured Ankylosaurus, for example, was built with 8,264 bricks in 173 hours.)
Preschoolers might not appreciate these numbers, but for me, they bring a new perspective to how much time and effort went into these creations.
Sprinkled throughout the exhibit are long bins filled with Lego bricks — and, in one case, its younger, larger counterpart, Duplo — where kids can stop and work on their own builds. As my daughters comb their hands through the tiny, interlocking bricks I can’t help but think about all the sneezes and unwashed sticky fingers that have come before, but I cast those intrusive thoughts aside for the sake of fun. (OK, fine, I spot some hand sanitizer near the exit.)
We hole up in the Duplo section for quite some time until I gently — then desperately — remind them that we have these exact pieces in buckets in our very own living room.
I guess building Lego is more fun with a triceratops audience.
Right before we reach that grand finale — a giant T. Rex with its mouth agape behind a Lego Jeep with a (very popular) working steering wheel — my four-year-old quips: “I don’t believe in any exhibit that doesn’t have a T. Rex”
She was not disappointed on this trip — though with that motto, future museum visits are bound to be a letdown.
Telus World of Science | 11211 142 St NW | 780-451-3344
