Highlights-Madrid Day 5

I went to the Caixa Forum museum in Madrid. They have two floors dedicated to exhibits. The first was “we need to take better care of nature” (check, if only it were that simple, but high-def video has its limitations) via immersive video experiences in three rooms. The video was on all four walls and the floor (I had gazelles running over my pants, talk about immersive). The second was a “loaner” from the British Museum, what an amazing guy King Ashurbanipal was (king of Assyria at the empire’s peak). More correctly, “what an amazing PR machine he had.” What we know is based on what he paid (or tortured, you never know with absolute rulers) people to portray that we later found buried because the empire was flattened 40 years after his rule. That’s the thing with empires. Two thousand years after all that greatness, everything the Assyrians built was in pieces that were only discovered making sewer repairs (so the sewer doesn’t get fixed).