Indigenous Stonework

 We recently wrote about the Pre-Columbian Gold Museum and the very otherworldly feeling that the artwork of the indigenous Costa Rican people had, and I wanted to follow that discussion up with a handful of pictures of stone sculpture by the same people to further illustrate how awesome and unique their style and cultures were. First off, nearly all of their standing objects had three legs; both their food jars/pots and the stone benches which were the pride of the warrior class. After a lifetime of four-legged chairs, they just seem the most natural and stable way to build, but these people carved tripods for most of their needs for centuries.

 Next up, this brazer in the form of a crocodile. We saw many pieces with this strange motif on the head design and never REALLY understood why it was so prevalent and popular, other than being an amazing piece of work. One bit of text did elaborate that their artists would obsess on a single defining feature for many animals and reduce the prevalence of most other body features down to next to nothing. In the case of the crocodile, it was the ridges down the back which their artists chose to express at the cost of all else. I don't get it, but I really liked these "chainsaw lizards" whenever I saw them.

 I wanted to end with this piece since its the only one I've shared which is representative of a human being and would indicate how the people saw themselves. Warriors were a common theme of sculptures in human form, so we can assume this might have been a famous warrior or hero. It was very popular in their art to depict warriors with severed heads, which must have been bragging rights and symbols of power, but this piece does not include any.

Pre-Columbian Gold Museum

 San Jose has a handful of very nice museums, one of which is dedicated entirely to gold artifacts and crafting techniques of the people who lived in the country prior to the arrival of Columbus. Since all the pieces on display are small and priceless, the museum is sensibly built in a giant vault. The same area also had a great display on the history of money in Costa Rica, but doesn't photograph as well since its all either text or notes on display.

 One thing I found very fascinating about all the native art we saw in Costa Rica is just how different a style everything was. This should not really be any surprise given the artists had a completely different culture and understanding from my own, but all their artwork has a striking and alien quality to it. These artisans used the "lost wax method" where they would carve their piece out of wax, surround it in clay, then melt out the wax and use the impression it left behind to cast their piece. Given the detail of all the pieces and the difficulty (so I read) of working in molten gold, the final results are still stunning hundreds of years later.

 Early indigenous people were fascinated by jaguars, vultures, crocodiles, frogs, and a variety of imaginary gods and creatures, and this was clearly reflected in their art. My inner Englishman was particularly taken with this golden shrimp which reminded me of lobstering off the Northumberland coast.

Marine Mammal Symposium

 The University of British Columbia has been conducting an annual Marine Mammals Symposium for the past 22 years and this was the 2nd year that we attended. Its a pretty excellent gathering of the west coast minds for all things cetacean and pinniped, with presentations by grad students, professors, artists, and photographers along with representation from the whale watching industry.

 Each presenter is limited to a 5 minute slot which most people stick to out of 'fear' of the Call of the Rooster, which is a rubber chicken squawk signaling that your time is up. This creates a very intense but rapid volley of presentations with 44 different topics this year. There are several breaks throughout the day for lunch and stretches, and the lobby of the building has some pretty awesome articulated skeletons like the minke whale below.

 This trio of dolphin skeletons graces a nearby stairway, and one of the highlights for me this year was a brief presentation by the fellow who not only articulated all the skeletons in the building, but also the blue whale skeleton at the Beatty Biodiversity Museum, as well as some of the larger specimens at the Whale Interpretive Centre.

 

All in all an amazing but mentally draining day learning about some amazing animals from some pretty incredible people. If this sounds like your sort of thing, I would strongly recommend it, even as an outsider to the industry and a bit of a layman myself I find the whole day stimulating and eventful.

Squamish Railway Museum - Outdoors

 While we were in Squamish with Kathryn's parents earlier this summer, we also stopped by the Squamish Railway Museum which has had some expansion work in the few years since we'd been there last and was a thoroughly entertaining place to spend a couple of hours. As you can see below, a significant portion of the outdoor displays are several lengths of track with an assortment of diesel locomotives, old passenger cars and cabooses along with an old station and roundhouse.

 I find these old snow shovel locomotives particularly amazing given that the cab sits a good 12 feet in the air, giving you an idea of just how much snow needs to be cleared off of the tracks in some of the mountains and interiors.

 Another fun aspect of the outdoor area is being able to clamber around and inside of most of the exhibits. Valerie in particular was delighted to climb up into a caboose as seen below and was very keen on exploring and sitting behind the wheel of every machine in the yard.

Capilano Salmon Hatchery

I'm a cheap date. Pack a lunch and bus me to North Vancouver's Capilano Salmon Hatchery. I'd never seen salmon migrating before and it was high time I did.  We went when the Chinook's were heading to their salmon grounds on a spectacular fall day.  Below is the dam and the fish ladder is the opening on the lower right.

These here are the tanks where the small babies are held.  They raise several types here including chinooks, coho and steelheads.  The survival rate is very good. The small fry are a different colour from the adults. I like the coho fry the best with their curiosity and stripes.

I knew due to David Attenborough and National Geographic that the trip back to the adult's original spawning grounds is long and hard.  But I never realized how hard until I saw it for myself.  The fish below is very battered. There are scales missing and the white flesh looks necrotic.  Maybe this one will make it. Hopefully she/he does not have far to go.  Geordie and I headed down stream to watch them in a more natural setting and I dunked my camera int he water and the perfect moment to get this intrepid traveler.

Dinosaurs! New Ones and New Finds!

I am still 5. Geordie is too.  We love dinosaurs!  They are big!  So we went to the Royal BC Museum that had a great dinosaur exhibit. All about new discoveries.  You know its going to be good when a big Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton greets you.

Psittacosaurus is this neat little fellow. Either that or I typed by sneeze.  He has the cutest cheek tusks.  They are a newer discovery.  See the little ones?  The display had great dioramas recreating a few different periods.  There is some amazing stuff coming out of China right now. These guys are believed to be a very early ancestor of triceratops even though the adult shown would be less than 2m long.

One of the newer discoveries is that dinosaurs may not have used some of their spikes, plates and bone for defense against predators or like the pachycephalosaur skull below to joust for females like mountain goats.  Instead of heat butts and defense it might be used to attract mates! Apparently the curvature of the bone would allow for only glances rather than crashing charges and the structure itself isn't built to withstand those sorts of impacts.

In conclusion, dinosaurs continue to surprise and kick ass in equal measure.

Quebec Archaeology

Quebec had a few neat archaeological surprises for us. First off there was a display in Montreal which alternated between Indiana Jones props and actual artifacts, juxtaposing the films against the real science. We couldn't take pictures inside because of copyright and nonsense like that, but suffice to say that movie props only look good on film and look a bit chitzy in real life, while artifacts still look impressive under closer scrutiny. Luckily enough this display was only in Montreal for a few months and that was its only North American stop before going to Europe and Japan, so we really timed it well given that it opened the week before we arrived.
On the more traditional approach, the Archeo Topo near Tadoussac was a very nice and modern museum with a collection of first nations and early settlement artifacts along with a large selection of taxidermied animals. As we were there in the middle of the week and had the courtesy to bring our own archaeologist, the fellow running the place was very helpful and let Kathryn poke through some of the cabinets. The displays themselves were quite good and he was eager to provide us with booklets of English translations.
We also had a poke around the area itself as the chap in the Archeo Topo had mentioned a few spots nearby that he had found stone tools. The mosquitoes were quite bad and I'm not much help from telling stone tools from stones, so we didn't turn up anything in our quick search, but it was a fun attempt all the same.

The Canadian War Museum

In Ottawa we soaked up as many museums as we could fit into the time we had and one that we were both keen to see was the Canadian War Museum. It was redone in 2005 and is an incredibly impressive and well built museum. The exterior looks and feels like a bunker and the central gallery leads into sections detailing all of the major conflicts of Canada from pre-contact to Afghanistan.
We spent a full afternoon there and only managed to absorb a fraction of the details and stories available but it was entirely overwhelming. The World War 2 section had one of Hitlers cars which was a chilling artifact of an evil empire.
Ther was also a huge gallery off to the side of the main displays which was filled to the brim with every sort of field gun, tank, and artillery device imaginable along with an assortment of support and supply trucks. Strangely enough there was going to be a grad party there that evening which struck me as an odd sort of setting to choose while celebrating a coming of age, but whatever works I guess.
All in all a world-class museum and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone passing through Ottawa.

La Brea

Back in 2008, Kathryn and I were down in LA visiting her brother and seized the opportunity to check out the La Brea Tar Pits. Because after years in the movie industry, when I think of Hollywood, I think of a terrified and witless brute thrashing itself to death in several meters of steaming waste. The pits themselves are a bit of a shock to find as the city is so built up around them that you simply come to a green area full of puddles and pools of tar. Apparently there is so much tar in the area that its not uncommon for it to start seeping through people's basement foundations.
The on-site museum had an excellent selection of bones for Kathryn to admire and enjoy along with a lab for analysing bone and pollen samples and the like. One of the strangest displays was a rack of dire wolf skulls several times the number shown in the picture below. Being pack hunters with a strong alpha leadership system it was apparently not uncommon for whole packs to get caught in the tar following their top dogs. And with so many large animals in the tar as well its not surprising that wolf packs would get greedy about the chance for so much fresh meat.
Speaking of tar just popping up out of the ground, there were frequent pools at random throughout the grounds. Kathryn and her brother Steven were totally hypnotized by this and spent many happy minutes poking in the tar with sticks and generally making a mess.

The Biodiversity Museum

After months of meaning to go, Kathryn and I finally made our way out to UBC to look at the Biodiversity Museum. The crown jewel of said museum is the articulated blue whale skeleton suspended in the entry foyer. Buried in PEI in the 80s, the skeleton spent 20 years getting vaguely cleaned up naturally before a group of professors and students exhumed it and moved it across the country for mounting and display.
Beneath the whale there are rows upon rows of display cases containing articulated skeletons, stuffed birds, plant samples, and endless jars of preserved fish and reptiles. The cabinets are both museum and univeristy collection with every 3rd case having a facing out display for visitors and the rest being closed for preservation and student uses.
Each of the rows in the picture above is a decent sized display of specimens, with the whole museum containing thousands of different animals of all sorts. Our visit was long overdue and very enjoyable once we finally made it.
By blind luck we also ran into some of our friends from Vancouver Island that happened to be in town and in the university for the same 5 minutes we were passing by and we met up for dinner with Roger and Colleen in the evening.

Whale Interpretive Centre

Another reason that we were quite keen to get up to Telegraph Cove is that our friends there not only run a whale-watching company but also started and continue to help manage the Whale Interpretive Centre. Anyone that claims to know Kathryn at all knows that she is fascinated by bones and loves to get up close and poke at them and this was the perfect opportunity to do so. The photo below doesn't do it justice but there's also a 3rd Minke whale in the background in the left behind the front whale.
Aside from cetacean bones there was also a sizeable selection of displays on pinnipeds (seals etc) which are always favorites of mine. Below are a harbor seal and Stellar's sea lion; having seen both of those types of animals in the wild so often it was really neat to see how they fit together under the blubber.
I feel that the quality of whale skeletons on display here is better than anything I've seen outside of London or Paris and the place is a real testament to the dedication they have put into it. Anyone who finds themselves in that neck of the woods is heartily recommended to go give it a look.

Amsterdam: City of Vice

Along with all the history and art, Amsterdam has a rather famous seedy and wild side that we only peeked around the edge of. Don't let the swans below fool you, the Red Light District is pretty crazy. Every corner is covered in sex shops, lingerie stores or glass doors with prostitutes flaunting their wares to passersby. Weirdly enough the area always felt safe despite the bawdy nature of it, no doubt in part to a steady police presence and daily cleanup crew, but we saw families with children wandering around at 9 at night without concern so its clearly not too bad.
Even more prolific than the brothels, Coffee Shops are peppered through every corner of the downtown core. Here you can buy pot from the guy at the counter or just get a coffee and smoke your own if you want. Every little souvenir shop within 100 yards of one of these places also sells pot, mushrooms, salvia and pretty much any soft drug you can imagine.
Even vice gets its own museum there, with 3 floors of exhibits covering everything from the history of burlesque to fetishes and an animatronic Marilyn Monroe posing for photo shoots. Also included are a number of artifacts from various cultures dating back hundreds of years, showing that mankind has been giving this particular subject a lot of thought for a long time.
Even being green hippys from Vancouver we found Amsterdam to have an unexpectedly liberal and unrestrained feeling which took some getting used to but became enjoyable after a day or two. I imagine that living in the downtown core would get exhausting pretty quick however.

Amsterdam: City of Art

Being an old European city, Amsterdam is full of museums, and since we were there in a rather rainy and wet springtime, it was an ideal time to check out as many as we could. The Rijks Museum was under heavy renovations (like most of the rest of Europe constantly is) but there was still quite a bit on display inside. The highlight for us both was "The Nightwatch" which is a Rembrandt classic, but there were lots of other paintings and works of art to make it a memorable visit.
The Van Gogh museum is quite enjoyable as well, featuring many of his paintings alongside other painters in the expressionist movement. While I don't personally 'get' many of his paintings it was nice to see them all the same, although some that Kathryn had been hoping to see were out on loan to other museums.
We also visited Anne Frank house which maintains the original buildings and interiors behind this updated and reinforced exterior. The tour is very well arranged to guide people linearly through the home and into the attic annex where they stayed. Following the wishes of the surviving father that started the museum, the interiors are all stripped bear as the nazis left them after the people hiding there were discovered.
None of the museums allow photography so you'll have to make do with these exteriors as proof that we actually went to these places, but all are certainly worth a look should you find yourselves in Amsterdam one day.

Victoria Wax Museum

There's a branch of Madame Tussads wax museum in downtown Victoria and since I'd never been to the one in London, Kathryn agreed to have a look around it with me. And nothing says dead-eyed zombie stares like the Royal Family.
Of course you can't have the kings of earth without representation of the king of heaven, so there was a neat display of the last supper with a light traveling through the scene while a voice-over talked about each apostle.
And like any respectable wax museum they had the obligatory hall of horrors with people being impaled and burned at the stake. I forget if the George Bush dummy was in that section or the Hall of Presidents....

Miniature World

Our whirlwind tour of Victoria in 2009 tried to take in the majority of the museums and cultural collections of the city. One such place which had been described to me by a co-worker as "the best place in the world" was 'Miniature World', a small museum connected to the Empress Hotel.
The small size of these photos doesn't really to justice to the scale of some of the displays, the train photograph below is only a snippet of a diorama showing Canada from coast to coast with a train running the length of it every few minutes along with lights for day/night and detail crammed into every inch.
The displays ran the gamut throughout history from World War 2, to the Middle Ages to an entry display of a space station which was gorgeous but sadly too dark to photograph well enough to share online.
I found that the macro mode of my camera helped capture these miniatures with a sense of scale and depth which I very much enjoyed experimenting with but which may not come across as well in such small pictures.

A Space Odyssey

One of the great things about guests is they give you an excuse to visit all the neat tourist places that you never get around to otherwise. With my parents providing a handy excuse we finally got to check out the McMillan Space Centre which shares a building with the Vancouver Museum and knows how to start things off right.
Thats right, a giant statue of a crab shooting water... perhaps the most awesome thing ever. They even have a plaque explaining it so that anyone that doesn't buy the notion of "Giant metal crabs are fantastic" can have an artsy rationalization.
Once inside it was imperative that I expand my collection of pictures of "Kathryn In Big Hats." There were also some neat displays about space, rockets, shuttle tiles and the like as well as a ride where you get to deliver science fiction madness to Mars, very much like the Star Tours ride at Disneyland.
The price of admission also includes planetarium shows which run every hour or so and are pretty fantastic. I also think that everyone can agree that in the robot uprising, the battle between the crab out front and the projector will be epic.

Closed and Accidental Railway Museums of the West

On our journey through the west coast states and BC we happened across a couple of railway museums, one on purpose and one quite by mistake.
The intentional one was also the closed one unfortunately. The Kettle Valley Railway was listed in our tour book of the Okanagan but didn't happen to mention its seasonal nature and though I followed in my fathers footsteps and poked around the engine shed, someone had callously locked it.
And then as we were passing through Garibaldi, Oregon we came along this one sitting in the middle of the town and quite open to our pokings. Although this locomotive is no longer used (and has a boiler full of garbage tossed in by ungrateful passers by) they do let you poke about and there is another engine that does rides in the summer as well.