M is for... Met ...n ... Model ...

 

Hello and welcome! to another A-Z series on M-i-V... 

All through April I'll be posting on the broad theme of Museums & Monuments Across the World - mostly those I've been to and a few on my bucket list that I haven't been able to visit yet. Museums are one of my favourite ways to get to know a culture, they sum up what those peoples want to preserve and pass onto their grandchildren, the facets they want to show their foreign visitors, how they perceive, present and preserve their own storyline and that of their interactions with the world. Come museum hopping with me!

M is for The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met on a sunny summer's day.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, often called the Met for short, is  an encyclopaedic museum of art. It is by area the largest art space in the Americas. Located in New York along what is known as the Museum Mile, it is the most visited in NYC and fourth by visitor numbers globally. Its over 490,000 collections span art from all corners of the world covering about 5000 years of human history. I visited it about 5 years ago and I'd go back in a heartbeat if the opportunity arose!

Detail of the Fourteen Year Old Dancer by Edgar
Degas. 1922. Tutu added later.

The Met began in 1870 in Paris with a group of American philanthropists, artists and financiers who wanted to bring art and art education to common American people. The original collection was around 175 paintings and has grown to its current size organised into 17 separate curatorial departments. Its collections comprise of masterpiece paintings, sculptures, objects d'art, furniture, musical instruments, costumes, armour and weapons and other historical objects as well as contemporary artworks. Among them are works by Vermeer, Degas, van Gogh and Hokusai and other super famous names. As well as Egyptian Pharaonic temples and eye-popping Egyptian objects. The Met has holdings of exquisite works of Islamic and Near Eastern art and also those from classical antiquity. It is a space where one can lose track of time altogether.

The museum got around 5.7 million visitors in 2025. Read more about the Met by clicking the link here. 

M is also for Madurodam 

Madurodam is a miniature theme park and tourist attraction in the Hague, the capital of the Netherlands. It is named after George Maduro, a young student who fought the Nazi occupation. Madurodam exhibits a range of scale models, exact replicas of various important and famous Dutch landmarks. They include the Binnenhof, the seat of the government; Schiphol airport; canal houses; windmills and the port of Rotterdam among others.  In short, it showcases the Dutch way of life to visitors. It was opened in 1952 and attracts 600,000-700,000 visitors every year. I've visited it sometime in the late 90s and remember being impressed by the meticulousness and the attention to detail. There are miniature trees and people, correctly attired for the season. There are tulip fields and football stadia and train stations, all 1:25 scale exact replicas down to the very last detail. The Dutch are perfectionists!

Madurodam, 1999. Yours truly is there in the photo only for
illustration of scale.

Even without any humans in the frame, the scale is evident from
the regular height buildings in the background. 

Read more about Madurodam by clicking the link here.

Another super famous candidate for M is undoubtedly Madame Tussaud's Waxwork Museum which has a slightly different type of models. It is not exactly a museum but an interactive theme park type visitor attraction. I've been there as a kiddie kid only once, there were just two Madame Tussaud's then - the main in London and another in Amsterdam (I've never visited that). They are now dozens of them in multiple cities all across the world. Never had the chance or the inclination really tbh, to go back to Madame Tussaud's London because of the rush. The London waxworks get around 2.5 visitors annually, yikes. 

No photos from that long ago visit, sadly but I do remember I enjoyed myself there, especially in the Chamber of Horrors, as crime was always one of my favourite genres even then. Read about Madame Tussaud's here.

Did you know there is a mini- Europe in Belgium? Though I have been to Antwerp I haven't been round to that. There are similar miniature parks in Germany and Israel as well. Are there any miniature parks where you live? 

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Thank you for visiting and reading. Have a wonderful A-Z if you are taking the Challenge and a wonderful April if you're not!

Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2026