This week, I assumed another identity. I was Maria Riveria from Mexico on a mission to Adel, Iowa to get an autography from Pasty Brown. (That’s right I still remember! :) ) If you haven’t been there before, then you might be extremely confused at this point. I was at the Spy Museum!—for the third time. As an aficionado of all things Spy Museum related, I wondered if there would be anything new and exciting for me to learn, though I doubted it because my last trip there was this past April. Before I had even gotten to the museum I had decided that the single most important component of my mission to the spy museum was to assume another identity and become a spy.
Initially, I felt like a was a spy kid with Juni and Carmen, but as I read about the techniques spies used to remain undercover, I started to imagine if I were indeed a spy. Would I be able to maintain my cover? Could I be swift enough to be unnoticed by surveillance cameras? Would I be able to crawl through an air duct without stirring the attention of the enemy below? The answer: perhaps.
I did try crawling through the air duct tunnel with my fellow spy and though the actually crawling was not a problem (I mastered the art of crawling when I was a baby), I could not imagine how I’d get out of the air duct without the stairs that the Spy Museum had provided.
Probably one of the coolest displays at the museum was the James Bond car. I don’t want to give away the awesomeness that is the James Bond car for those who have never been to the Spy Museum, but its AWESOME and helps you realize that things are not always what they seem, or as my elementary school librarian said “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”
Before reaching the final checkpoint that tested my knowledge of my undercover identity, I walked through the exhibit that showed us what happened when a spy got caught. Most spies, it seems, got tortured in order to attempt to leak some information from them. One of the most shocking facts I read was that spies were given glasses that had poison in the core of the glasses rim, so if the spy was caught, one could chew on the rim of the glasses and die. If captured by the enemy, it was better to die by suicide then by enemy torture.
With that in mind, I took the final test and passed. The enemy did not suspect me at all! But not everyone passed, some people failed their missions, others raised the enemy’s suspicion levels. Had it been real life…who knows what would happen to them?
The Spy Museum helped me understand two things: 1. Things are not always as they appear. 2. You can have a different and meaningful experience each time you go to the Spy Museum.
Resource:
http://www.impawards.com/2001/spy_kids.html
Student Jane Meyer, 13, from Sweet Water, Tennessee on my way to Dublin Ireland for 7 days on vacation.
ReplyDeletejust saying. ;)
Greta Schmidt, 33, astronomer, from somewhere in Germany, travelling to London for 4 days on business :)
ReplyDeleteDhea,
ReplyDeleteGreat reflection on the Spy Museum. I, too, felt like a Spy Kid. It was so surreal to see all the "artifacts" that the Museum had "picked up," and even more dumbfounding to consider that many top secret operations were occuring in the real world as we pretended to be agents.
However, being a spy was not as glamorous as it seemed. It is serious political business. Although one may not agree with such espionage, after visiting the DIA, I guess it may be necessary because war exists. In a realist point of view, we cannot trust the motives of any individual.
P.S. Travel agent Angelina Falcone, 17, from Milan, It. to Japan for 30 days. . . . I think ;)