Frommer's Review
This is one of my favorite museums anywhere. The ROM (rhymes with "tom"), as it's affectionately called, is Canada's largest museum, with more than six million objects in its collections. Now that the massive renovation is complete, visitors can appreciate the results. I have to confess to mixed feelings about the space. From Bloor Street the new crystal, which houses six galleries, looks fabulous. Daniel Libeskind's design is an eye-catching übermodern palace of jutting crystal prisms, and you can appreciate it even from blocks away. The interior of the crystal is another story. Much of the glass is blocked or covered (a sensible move, since the light would be blinding on a sunny day), but the result looks like a whitewashed warehouse. Through small openings you can see bits of Bloor Street West, but only a particularly unattractive stretch that is home to fast-food restaurants. The interior, in spite of its high ceilings, lacks the grandeur of the façade.
The collections, on the other hand, are impressively grand. These include the Chinese galleries, which feature an intact Ming tomb as well as the Bishop White Gallery of Chinese Temple Art (my personal favorite). There are also wonderful galleries about the ancient world (Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, and Bronze Age Aegean are standouts), the natural world (dinosaurs! Yes, there's also a Bat Cave, and galleries devoted to birds and mammals, but the dinos are impossible to beat), and hands-on galleries that let kids learn while playing (the CIBC Discovery Gallery even has a "dinosaur dig" for would-be paleontologists).
One hint: even if you hate climbing stairs, give the ROM's Stair of Wonders a go. Behind glass panels on the walls are curiosities such as a 20-kilogram hippo jawbone, fossils, antique toy soldiers, and stuffed Birds of Paradise.
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