Spider pavilion

In October, the Natural History Museum had a special outdoor exhibit called the spider pavilion. It was a greenhouse-y type structure with mesh walls and celings that had a ton of free roaming spiders in it. When I heard about it, I knew I *had* to go. Spiders (especially their web-making abilities) are sooo fascinating. Here's a pretty big one, about the size of my hand:

The webs were above pathways, across pathways, in trees, on walls...everywhere! It was pretty neat. There were also a few butterflies that people watched breathlessly as they somehow flew around without getting tangled in any of the webs. Another shot of one above our heads:

We chatted it up with one of the museum workers, and they said each morning one of them had to go into the pavilion and clear the paths of new webs that sprung up overnight. The museum also had a neat bug exhibit inside where we saw some pretty crazy looking beetles and the like. We looked around the rest of the museum, too, but no museum in any city can live up to the ones in Chicago. I can't believe how much better the museums are in Chicago than everywhere else...okay, I guess the Louvre and the Met beat the Art Institute, but overall Chicago's museums are really great.