The Corpus Experience

In an earlier post I mentioned that while my parents were here we were going to Corpus, which I was pretty excited about.   I’d first seen info on this place months ago and was keen to take my parents there because I thought it’d be really cool.

When you look at their website it gives you the impression that you are going to something truly magnificent!  That you are going on a ride through the human body, that you and your family and friends can take goofy photos inside the mouth and other parts of the body and you’d see some really cool visuals of what goes on inside our bodies.

Sooooo not the case!!

I guess I got this impression from their photos that it really is a ride, I mean you see people sitting in the seats moving up and around and all that, and people talking and taking photos in different places.   I also that that for €16,50 per person, and the fact that you had to book it well in advance because it was so busy, that there was something fantastic going on here.

I was so disappointed.   The whole thing is split into two parts. The first part is the trip through the human body.  I started getting worried when I saw the headsets, but was relieved when I found out they had the commentary in English.  Just the though of trying to translate everything for my parents made me squirm because I don’t know the Dutch names for most of the body parts.

The way the first part works is that you are put in a group of 16 people.  You get your headset and go up this big escalator where you begin your journey.  The headsets are set by language and all work automatically by sensors in doorways between each section of the body.  Problem is, if you walk through with more than one person at a time the sensor may not catch yours and the sound won’t be triggered… and we were in a group with a bunch of people with kids.

Ever try to keep kids from running excitedly through something like this?  Well, you may have but some of the parents we were with didn’t.

Each section was like a hall with different parts of the body on the wall and a TV screen with a video.  The video was this sort of excited sounding guy explaining what happens in each part of the body while that part would light up and flash so you’d know to look at it.   I couldn’t help but thinking that the guy sounded a lot like the dude who was in those ‘What’s Happening To Me’ videos we saw in health class as kids.  The videos were also quite similar, more cartoony than even remotely realistic.

There were a few parts where you got to sit on a bench and watch a 3D movie, and those cushy black chairs were in one of them.  They don’t move up and around anything like in the video, that’s a load of bunk.  They just tip and shake while you watch some movie about how the blood goes through the heart.  YOU aren’t actually going through anything…

Plus, every time I got those glasses they were loaded up with fingerprints from the bored employee who handed them out.

I got really irritated when mine and my mother’s headsets didn’t even work in the sections for the nose and eyes.  Which was basically just standing in this room with an eyeball on the wall and a platform in the middle in complete silence while everyone around us heard whatever they were hearing.  Boooorrrinnng.

During this hour, or however long it is, you can’t talk to each other because everyone has their headphones on and is trying to listen to that, there are no toilets and you are NOT ALLOWED TO TAKE PHOTOS (that’s what ticked me off most).

I didn’t get a feel at all like we were moving through a body.  There were body part things around us but it just didn’t turn out like I expected at all.   I certainly didn’t feel like we got €66 worth of fun out of it.

The second part is just about 5-6 floors of rooms with pictures on the wall with info about stuff in the body and games for the kids.   Nothing that interested me at all.

I guess I went there expecting some kind of wow factor and came out completely underwhelmed.  I think it’d be a great place to go for a school trip, or for parents to take their children for an educational and fun outing… but for 4 adults who have a general idea of how the body works.  What a total bore.

I could have saved our 66 bucks and found more interesting and realistic videos on the internet.