Euro Trip Day 37: Auschwitz: A world I can only envision in black and white
**Disclaimer: As the post title should indicate, this is kind of a downer of a post. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Only for a bit, though — then it perks up towards the end.**
Sunday July 11th, we got up early and got our bags packed, then took them to the train station and stuffed them in a locker so that we could pick up our train reservation and tickets for Prague, and then hop a train to Oscwiecim (the town where Auschwitz is) before taking the night train to Prague.
We hadn’t looked at the train schedules in advance, because we’d looked before, and there was always a train an hour to Oscwiecim. Well, for some reason there wasn’t today (maybe because it was Sunday?) so we ended up at the bus station behind the train station, to take a bus. While the bus was on the highway, we encountered a very recent traffic accident blocking the road (and “highway” is being generous–there wasn’t even a single line dividing the two halves of the road.) The bus couldn’t squeeze by, and the cops on the scene didn’t have any word as to when it’d be cleared, so the bus driver decided to backtrack and take a different route. And I discovered something. The frustrating part about having GPS is that when the bus driver is going THE WRONG WAY and he doesn’t speak English and you don’t speak Polish, there’s really nothing you can do except for sit and watch him go the wrong way. At one point we were going down a farm road in the middle of a bunch of fields and NOTHING ELSE, and the road was so narrow that branches from trees were hitting us on both sides as well as the top of the bus. The driver pulled over four different times to ask for directions (including one time on that farm road, much to the farmer’s bemusement from which the driver got directions.)
So we ended up getting to Auschwitz over an hour late. This kind of screwed our schedule up, unfortunately, as we had to leave by 6 to catch our train to Prague, and we ended up cutting our visit short, which I was kind of bummed about. But at the same time, we kind of saw enough, you know?
I took almost no pictures. Two with my phone, and maybe four or five more with my regular camera (I’ll post those later, of course.)
Auschwitz is actually three sites–Auschwitz I (the original camp that was mostly used for political prisoners), Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau) which is the most notorious one where most of the atrocities occurred, and Auschwitz III, a labor camp that we didn’t see (and I don’t think is on display.) We actually went to Auschwitz II first, since between the hours of 10AM and 3PM the only way you can access Auschwitz I is via a guided tour, which is not only expensive, but not something either of us was interested in. Seriously, who wants to be rushed through something like that?
Auschwitz II is outside the town a couple of miles, so we had to take a free shuttle bus over there. There’s really not much left–the main building where the main gates were, a few of the barracks, and the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria (ruins because the Nazis blew them up when it became clear that the Soviets were going to come in and liberate the camps.)
I had a really hard time grasping things at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I think partly it’s because so little remains, but also partly because we’re so used to seeing everything as black-and-white pictures, and here we were in full-color on a 90+ degree summer day, with everything around us green and leafy. In my head, concentration camps are always in black and white and it’s always winter, because that seems to be how it is in the pictures I’ve seen. Heck, even in the pictures where there’s no snow, since they’re in black and white, it’s hard to get a sense of the vibrancy and reality of things.
So I decided to turn the two pictures I took into black and white shots… maybe you can see what I mean.
Remains of barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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Same picture, turned grayscale and some other tinkering done to it. This is how I picture it, ya know?
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The blue sky, puffy white clouds, and green trees just don't jive with this infamous sign over the gate at Auschwitz I.
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Yeah, this picture is about how it should look. Incidentally, did you know that some indescribably stupid people stole this sign last winter with the intention of selling it to a collector? When it was recovered, they'd cut it into three pieces, ostensibly to smuggle it out of the country. Wow. Just... yeah.
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After Auschwitz-Birkenau, it was after 3, so we headed back to Auschwitz I. That camp is MUCH better-preserved. The majority of the buildings were brick rather than wood, and they’d turned a lot of them into museums on different topics, so we wandered through them with the time we had remaining. Again, looking at the buildings themselves, I had a really hard time grasping what went on there… but looking at some of the exhibits made some things come alive. They have one room that’s full of nothing but hair the Nazis cut off of the women. It’s dusty and all looks gray and clumped and matted together, but here and there you can see braids, and that caught me. It was hard to look at the buildings and see what’d happened there, but for some reason, all I had to do was look at a braid and envision the woman braiding it for the last time. There was another room just full of shoes, including a large display of just thousands of children’s shoes. That was another really really difficult one for me. There was another one full of clothes. One full of brushes — hair brushes, toothbrushes, clothing brushes, shaving brushes. One of suitcases, suitcases plastered with the name and address label of the owner, and in many cases also covered in stickers from exotic locations to which the owner had traveled. New York City. Paris. Istanbul.
Ya know, I’ve been to the Holcaust Museums in LA and Washington DC. I’ve seen similar displays of personal artifacts, and those definitely affected me. But there was something about seeing the ones at Auschwitz and knowing that this was where they were brought originally — that they were brought there for their intended purposes, and not shipped there after the fact for the purpose of a museum exhibit… something about that hit me pretty hard.
We saw other places where horrible atrocities occurred (the camp prison, the excecution yard) but nothing came to life like room after room of personal belongings. That’s what resonated with me, and is lodged in my brain.
Like I said earlier, we had to leave an hour before the museum closed, so we didn’t have time to see everything I wanted to see… but at the same time it was enough.
***HERE ENDS THE SERIOUS PART OF THE POST. ENOUGH ALREADY.***
We hopped a (very very crowded) bus home (we got the last two seats on the bus — the 15 or so people who boarded after us ended up standing for the almost two-hour ride back.) Once we got back, we retrieved our bags from the locker and headed to the mall next to the train station so we could eat dinner and I could finish postcards. It was here that I discovered something quite amazing.
McDonald’s in Poland serves CHICKEN CURRY BURGERS.
DUDE. WHY DON’T WE HAVE THESE AT HOME. SERIOUSLY.
Ok, granted it’s not as good as actual chicken curry, but for a chicken burger, it was PRETTY GOOD. Just spicy enough without being so spicy that it’d scare people off, and that lovely curry flavor… mmmmmm. Where can I start a petition to get these at home???
Oh, and I can’t remember if I’ve talked about McDonald’s here or just on Facebook, so I’ll explain here for posterity. While I’m all about eating local food while traveling, McD’s in foreign countries are good for two reasons. First, as you saw with my previous example, it’s fun to see what the local menu contains that the American menu doesn’t. So far I’ve had a raspberry “summer shake” (quite good!) and a burger that I tried in Zagreb called a McCountry, which was like a Big Mac only with this very mustardy dijon sauce. I didn’t realize what it was before I bought it, I just wanted to try it. I like mustard, but this was too much mustard for me. I couldn’t finish it, and neither could John. Oh well. I’ve seen this same burger in Poland and in Hungary (where it was called the McFarm… I’m not sure why, but then again, I’m not sure why it’d be called the “McCountry” either.)
The second reason McDonald’s in foreign countries are great? They ALL have FREE WIFI. And they’re huge — much bigger (more seating) than pretty much any American McD’s I’ve seen. So they’ve become, for John and I on this trip, a meeting spot for when we split up to do our own thing, and also a waiting room when we’re waiting for a train. Heck, it’s a lot nicer than the train station, and you can get a soda and sit there for two hours and no one will hassle you (unlike at a cafe.)
We headed to the train about 20 minutes before it was supposed to leave and found our train car. Have I mentioned yet how night trains work in Europe? It’s really very cool! You board a car that’s going to your destination, but the other cars on the train may be going to different destinations. In the middle of the night, you make one or more stops where your car (or the other cars) is unlinked from the train and hooked to a different train that’s going where you want to go. It’s really nifty!
Anyway, so I hand the conductor our reservation, tickets, and rail passes. Let me explain how that works. We have railpasses, but for some trains (including overnight trains) you also have to purchase a reservation (fairly cheap on day trains, more expensive on night trains) so that you’re guaranteed somewhere to sit. Also, our rail passes weren’t valid for Poland, so we had to purchase tickets from Krakow to the Polish border, and then our passes would be good once we crossed into the Czech Republic. So we had four pieces of paper total — the reservation slip, two tickets, and the railpass. I hand all of this over to the conductor for our car, and he shakes his head and says no, that the reservation and tickets aren’t valid until the NEXT night.
WHAT.THE.HECK.
I looked closely at them for the first time, and sure enough, he was right — they were printed for July 12th. I thought back to that morning, and how the woman who’d printed them had JUST gotten to work — we were her first customers of the day, in fact.
I looked at John, and looked at the time. We had less than 15 minutes before the train was going to leave, and the international ticket counter was on the far opposite end of the station (pretty much as far opposite from where we were standing as we could get) and down and up a couple of sets of stairs (since you have to go underneath the tracks to get to the platforms.) I’m glad I chose to wear my shoes that day rather than my sandals! I left John with all of the bags and took off running, clutching the tickets and the passes.
I got to the counter, completely winded, and was shocked to see that, almost 12 hours later, it was the same woman who’d sold me the passes that morning!! I managed to gasp out our dilemma, and her response was, “Yes, I remember you. Did I really put that as the date? I know you wanted them for tonight.” No apology. She got a new reservation printed out, but handed me back cash and told me we’d need to buy the tickets on board the train. I didn’t quite understand it, but I took it and ran, literally. I sprinted back to the train and we grabbed our bags and got back in line and handed everything to the conductor outside the train door with less than five minutes to spare.
Right before the train left, the conductor came into our compartment looking for us — he wanted our rail passes, and he needed 5 more Euros, since it costs more to buy tickets on the train than in the station (which seemed really unfair to me, since the ticket woman was the one who screwed up in the first place anyway!) He said he’d take payment in Euro or Zloty (Polish currency.) We were out of both currencies — we haven’t been anywhere on the Euro since Montenegro (FIVE COUNTRIES AGO) and we’d tried to use up all of our Zloty so we didn’t have extra left. After dumping out all the small pockets of John’s and my backpacks, we located a 5 Euro bill that had somehow escaped detection. This, however, left our rail passes. The problem was that I’d already given them to him, and he insisted I hadn’t.
At this point I was TOTALLY freaking out. I’d already sprinted across the train station and back to get the reservation changed, it was hotter than hell outside and inside the station, and now he was telling me we never gave him our rail passes (which I KNOW we did, and which are NOT replaceable if we lose them.) John’s yelling at me to calm down and think about where I might have put the passes, I’m yelling back that I know I gave them to him, he’s yelling back that the conductor doesn’t have them, and our compartment companions are watching this in bewilderment.
Finally I go into the conductor’s berth and refuse to leave until he goes through the pile of tickets and railpasses. Lo and behold, there are our passes!!! AAARRRGGGGHHHHH.
I go back into our compartment and want to just curl into a little ball and cry out of sheer relief. We’re on the train, and I didn’t lose our passes. As I go to empty my pockets so that I can stretch out on the bed, I realize that the postcards are still in them. I’d meant to put them in the mailbox on the platform, and in the chaos, I TOTALLY forgot. GAH. Every time we stop for the rest of Poland, I hang my head out the train window to look at the platform and see if I see a mailbox… Nope. Sigh.
So some of you will be getting postcards from Poland when I get home and can stuff them into envelopes. Oh well, at least they have stamps on them. :-p
The other two guys in our compartment were pretty cool. They were two Swedish architecture students who were spending a couple of weeks traveling around Europe, and we talked for several hours, until the Spanish gals in the compartment next door banged on our wall for the third or fourth time (since it was around 1:30 AM and they probably wanted us to go to sleep, even though we were talking fairly quietly.)
Sonne and their traveling mascot. Apparently they put him into pictures at random. I SOOO love that idea -- I wish I'd done something similar on this trip!
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I was miserably hot, and of course at this point our train was stopped in a station waiting for another train for something like 45 minutes, so there was no airflow and no lovely white noise to put me to sleep, so I didn’t fall asleep until well after 2. Ugh. I still like night trains, though, even though it was A THOUSAND DEGREES IN THERE.
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Euro Trip Day 36: Monks on Segways with flamethrowers
Since I’ve managed to get behind in blog posts, I’ve decided to make a concerted effort to post pictures and give a brief rundown of the day, at least until I’ve caught up. :-)
July 10th John wasn’t feeling well, so he relaxed and I wandered around Krakow, seeing more of the historical things to see. First I headed over to Oskar Schindler’s factory (yeah, the Oscar Schindler of Schindler’s List fame.) There wasn’t anything left to see of the factory, but there was a quite good museum on the Nazi occupation of Krakow, and on Schindler and his workers.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsbluff/4781699309/
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One of the things the museum has on display is pieces of firsthand accounts of life in the Krakow ghetto that were written by the children who lived there. Director Roman Polanski (yeah, the sleazeball) actually grew up in the Krakow ghetto. Whatever his sleaziness now, it’s hard not to be struck by what he wrote when he was 8 years old:
Roman Polanski, on the building of the wall of the Krakow ghetto: "I suddenly realized we were going to be walled in. I got so scared that I eventually burst into tears."
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Then I headed over to Zgody Square, now called Bohaterów Ghetta (Ghetto Heroes) Square. It was the main meeting place in the Krakow ghetto, and where all of the selections, deportations, and many violent incidents took place. Now the square has a bunch of empty chair sculptures. The explanation for the chairs was in Polish, but I assume it has something to do with commemorating the people killed there.
I swear I got a better picture of this with my big camera.
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On the square is the old pharmacy Under the Eagle, which was the only pharmacy in the ghetto (and the pharmacist was the only non-Jew permitted to live in the ghetto.) It’s now a museum on the Krakow ghetto. It cost extra to take pictures, and there really wasn’t much to take pictures of, as the only original piece of furniture that remains is a desk. Still, it was a neat place–the pharmacy ended up as a kind of community aid center. People who were being deported would leave messages there, and they’d sell things like hair dye (for people trying to look younger to avoid being declared too old to work and therefore shipped to the gas chambers at Auschwitz) and sedatives for infants so that they could be smuggled out of the ghetto. The whole place was really, really eye-opening and sobering.
After that I walked back across the river and through the old Jewish quarter of Kasmiriz, and then on to Wawel Castle, the old seat of power in Poland for hundreds of years.
Part of Wawel Castle.
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I wandered around for a while, then headed over to the castle’s cathedral to catch the 5PM church service. Pictures aren’t allowed inside the cathedral, unfortunately, but I took this one outside the cathedral.
Wawel Castle Cathedral.
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This statue is right outside the cathedral door -- Pope John Paul II celebrated his first mass here, and it was his cathedral when he was the bishop of Krakow. In fact, there's pope stuff all over the city. It's kind of crazy.
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After church, I walked through Planty Park from the castle to the old town square. Back in the 1820s, the city decided to tear down the old city wall (which was falling into disrepair and wasn’t being used to protect the city anyway), fill in the moat, and turn that space into a park. Now there’s a lovely green park that rings the entire old town, and it’s a really really nice place to relax on a hot day.
Planty Park.
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I forgot to mention that this entire time we’ve been in Krakow, there’s been a street festival going on, with different performing acts from all over the world (no seriously–there was an Iranian group there.) There was music, drama, performance art, and some just plain fun and silliness.
Bubble makers!
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I went back and watched the accordion players for a while (see the video in my previous post) and finally broke down and bought one of the CDs they had for sale. I couldn’t help it–they were fun!
I also finally managed to get the Hejnal on video. The Hejnal Mariacki is a traditional Polish hymn that was at one time used as a bugle call to signal the opening and closing of Krakow’s city gates. Nowdays it’s played once an hour, 24 hours a day. According to legend, the tune is cut short at the end because back in the 1200s, a bugler played it to announce the Mongol invasion of Poland, and was shot in the throat by an arrow. If you’ve ever read the Newberry-award-winning book The Trumpeter of Krakow, it revolves around this legend.
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I also stuck around until 9PM to watch a French musical group I’d seen rehearse earlier in the day. Now, I’d seen them rehearse in their street clothes, so I really wasn’t prepared for their actual musical act, which involved fire, monk’s robes, and Segways (yeah, those two-wheeled contraptions.) All but one of them were playing brass instruments that had been massively modified from their original shapes (well, except for one guy who had a plain old soprano saxaphone.) The one woman in the band was the only one who didn’t have a musical instrument. Instead, she had two wands with fire coming from them, and periodically in the act she’d light the ground on fire (I have no idea what they prepared it with ahead of time so it’d do so.)
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The whole thing (about 30 minutes) was beyond bizarre, but again, it was fun. :-)
That completed, I headed home… and managed to get really, really lost. It turns out that they closed the tram line for road construction that I’d normally take to get back to our dorms. Well, they didn’t actually CLOSE it — they switched the tram line to another route and street entirely, but called it the same line. And the sign announcing the change was only in Polish. (And yeah, I know I was in Poland, but given the HUGE number of tourists there, having a translation would have been HELPFUL.) And since it was nighttime, I didn’t really notice that it wasn’t the same route — silly me for assuming the same Line 15 tram that we’d been taking the past couple of days was anything but the same as it’d been.
I didn’t get home until after 11, at which point I was really, REALLY grumpy. But at least I made it home.
A side note about English. Both John and I have found the relative ubiquity of English really interesting. Heck, I heard a FRENCH person complaining in Budapest that a museum didn’t have enough English translations, or at least an audioguide in English. And that’s far from the only non-native English speaker we heard complaining about the lack of English. As John pointed out, it’s an issue of practicality, since English is more widely spoken than any other European language. And there’s something neat about listening to two people converse in English, but neither of them speak English as a native language (and in some cases, I’m guessing not even as a second language.) However, as a native speaker, I still felt a bit self-conscious and self-centered about wanting signage in English. Oh well.
…and I’ve now concluded I’m incapable of giving anything resembling a brief rundown. But you knew that. Sigh. :-)
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 33: Rugs with guns and trains with bunks
Wednesday, July 7th started somewhat busy as we went to run some errands and then head back to our hostel and proceed to conduct the now-usual jigsaw of trying to fit all of our stuff into our backpacks. We got packed up and went to the train station to get our tickets for the night train to Krakow, put the packs into a locker, and see one last thing in Budapest before we left.
There's a bunch of 4x4s in place as construction scaffolding (or something like that) in the international ticket office at Budapest Keleti train station. It appears to have been in place since 2007, judging from the dates on it. At some point, someone wrote their journey's stops and signed their home country, name, and that day's date. Now the scaffolding is covered, and as we waited, we enjoyed perusing the gallery of where everyone had been before they ended up in Budapest, or where they were planning to go. John added us to the historical register. I love it.
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Bags in lockers, we headed over to the Great Synagogue and Jewish Museum to see what there was to see.
This is the world's second or third largest synagogue (depending on which source you read.) It's absolutely BEAUTIFUL.
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Something that absolutely fascinated us about the place (aside from its size) was the resemblance it bore to, well, a church. (Incidentally, the word for both church and synagogue in Hungarian is “templom”.) It had an organ and an altar and a choir and frescoes on the walls and a dome and a bunch of marble. It just seemed somewhat odd to us, but we both still were amazed by its sheer size and beauty.
A couple of things I somehow neglected to get a cameraphone picture of, but that I know I have pictures of on my big camera. First, in the courtyard area next to the synagogue, there is a mass grave where over 2000 victims of the Nazis from the Budapest ghetto during the winter of 1944-1945 are buried. The courtyard now contains trees, ivy, and a lot of gravestones that are just leaned up against each other and against the trees, since because they’re mass graves, people aren’t sure where the gravestones need to go. Around the outside of the courtyard are pictures of the courtyard (which was supposed to be a garden originally) from the early 1900s until the 1980s, including pictures of the bodies and their burial. Very, very sad and moving.
The other thing I don’t have a picture of is the Memorial of the Hungarian Jewish Martyrs, a silver sculpture designed to look like a weeping willow tree. On the leaves are engraved the names of the 300,000+ Hungarian Jews who were victims of the Holocaust. It’s located next to the synagogue in Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who used his position to help Hungarian Jews emigrate to safety during the war, and was eventually taken into custody by the Soviets and “died of a heart attack” at the age of 35 while in Soviet custody in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. What’s the old grim joke? Something about a .38mm heart attack? Not very funny, but sadly most likely true.
In any case, as part of the memorial park, they have plaques and pillars honoring him and many other Hungarian members of the Righteous Among the Nations, the designation for non-Jews who assisted Jews and helped them be saved from the Nazis during the Holocaust. I’m not quite sure why Wallenberg gets a plaque in the ground and certain names go on it (there were tons more names on three other pillars surrounding this central plaque.)
This is located in Raoul Wallenberg park behind the Great Synagogue in Budapest. The names on the stone are other Budapest members of the Righteous Among Nations, those non-Jews who helped save Jews from the Nazis during World War II. The stones are part of a Jewish custom of leaving a stone on a person's grave as a sign of respect.
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After that, we went inside the museum. The top floor of the museum housed a temporary exhibit of Jewish rugs. At this point in the day, I was already kind of tired, so I almost asked if we could skip it… I’m so glad we didn’t! John and I actually spent more time here than we did in the rest of the museum. I’m not quite sure how to explain why we both found the whole thing so fascinating, but we did. It wasn’t just rugs made by Jewish people and/or for synagogues, either. They had Chinese-made rugs and Afghani-made rugs and even Navajo rugs.
This rug was made in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghani conflict. It has woven into it tanks, machine guns, and grenades. Sad.
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There was one more rug that both really really caught John’s and my attention, and left us thinking afterwards… but that’s going to be its own blog post. It’s that special. Yeah, I know we’re weird.
After we got out of the rug exhibit, we ended up at a Chinese food place (don’t laugh — we had to try it!) for dinner, and then we headed over to the McDonald’s by the train station to wait for our train. Yeah, we could have waited IN the train station, but for the price of a Coke, McDonald’s is clean, has clean bathrooms and free wifi, and is free of annoying people who keep asking us if we want to give them money or if we want a taxi or accommodations. Sometimes it’s just nice to not have to deal with that. I did my usual last-minute postcard writing (why do I always wait until the last minute??) and then we headed over to find our train.
Something that I find really cool about trains in Europe — you sit in a specific car based on your destination. A single train doesn’t always travel to a place in its entirety. Our train was at least 15 cars long, and it contained cars going to different cities all over eastern Europe (like the car in the following picture, whose final destination was St. Petersburg.) Then, at various stations on the journey, cars detach from one train and attach to another train, and are carried to their final destinations. Our car was the only one on the train going to Krakow, for example. SO NEAT.
Am I a freak for wanting to hop this train and go to St. Petersburg? I'd LOVE TO.
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Lousy cameraphone picture of us in our triple-decker bunks on the train.
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Train next to us leaving the station. I wonder where all those train cars are headed to.
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Sunset as seen from the train. It was an absolutely amazing one.
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I don’t think there are words to describe how happy I was to be on that train. I know I’m odd, but honestly, that’s been one of the highlights of this trip for me–lying in my bunk, hanging my head out the window, and watching the countryside go by. So so so amazing and wonderful.
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 30: In which we get yelled at by an old lady on the bus, go to a Latin mass, get kicked off the subway, and end up at an apparently fascist rally
Ok, I’m a day late posting this. So sue me. My excuse is the world’s.WORST.upload.speed.EVAR. Even my cell phone camera pics are going slowly, and the ones from inside the sanctuary are my big camera. I did get this post at least STARTED on Sunday, though. :-p
Yesterday we got up and took a metro to a bus to the top of Buda Hill, where we went to Matyas Church to go to their 10AM Latin high mass. I’m not Catholic, but I’ve never been to a Latin mass, and it sounded interesting. Besides, I figured I’d understand it better than a Hungarian service. :-p
On the bus on the way there, for some reason, a well-dressed older lady (I’d say mid-70s at least) started yelling at me for no apparent reason. I have no idea what she was scolding me about, as she was speaking Hungarian, but she was quite irate, and went on for a couple of minutes until we got off the bus. She got off at the same stop as we did, so I worried for a minute that maybe she was going to church too, given her nice attire. Thankfully, she walked a different direction. So I was kind of surprised when the service started and I realized she was two pews in front of us… Go figure.
Anyway, this following video doesn’t have video, just sound — it’s the choir doing part of the service. I didn’t want to be obvious about recording, and I really did just want the audio, so hit play for a bit of soundtrack and keep reading the post. :-)
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Standing in the back and looking forward.
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This door is actually not centered on this wall, so to make it less obvious, they painted the angels on each side. Look closely at it.
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I LOVE the quality of this picture. Not bad for handheld at 1/8 of a second and f/4. :-)
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Altar view. The balcony on the left is the former royal box. Oh, this was the church where all of the coronations took place. Neat!
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If I had to rank my all-time favorite churches I’ve seen, I think Westminster Abbey in London would be first, then St. Mark’s in Venice, then this one. Seriously. Fourth would be the Duomo in Milan, incidentally… this even comes in ahead of that. I’m not sure why I like it so much. I mean, it’s obvious I prefer gothic churches, but there’s something about the first couple and then this one that I really, really like. I know all of them have been extensively restored, but to me it’s not as obvious as some other churches I’ve been in… so maybe that’s it.
Outside of the church. Ignore the scaffolding -- they're doing restoration on the church.
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After church, we stopped for a bite to eat, then we went wandering on Castle Hill. We walked down the hill to the river, then took the funicular back up. Have I mentioned it was a gorgeous day out? Because it was. A tad warm, but not unbearable.
Danube River and Parliament.
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Hungarian Parliament.
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At the top of the hill, we headed toward Buda Castle (which is no longer an actual castle, as the Communists stripped it of anything cool and castle-like. It’s now three different museums.) On the way we saw several groups of kids scattered around, playing musical instruments. I’m thinking it was for a class or part of their music lessons or something. They were quite good! There was actually a string triplet (violin, viola, and cello) that I kept trying to get a video of, but we ran into them three different times, and they were always in the middle of what seemed to be their last piece before packing up and moving to a new location when I’d get to them. By the third time this happened, John thought it was hilarious.
Again, the video is kind of lousy, but just hit play and scroll down the page. At least both are short… they’re fun though! I really enjoyed listening to the kids. Ignore my sniffles — there’s something here in the air that’s causing both John’s and my allergies to flare up.
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Anyway, we ended up at the Budapest History Museum, where they had a bunch of stuff from Budapest from prehistoric times to now. Very interesting stuff. And since it’s built into the castle, some areas are obviously old and castle-y. Neat!
It's either Han Solo in carbonite, or a 14th century knight's tomb. I'll let you be the judge.
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Stained glass window, with the castle wall beyond.
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Reflection in a castle courtyard window.
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After this, we headed back to our neck of the woods… only to be kicked off the metro for some unexplained reason several stops before home. We headed up to the surface to see if we could walk to the next stop, when we saw literally HUNDREDS of riot police in full gear (face masks, shoulder pads, shields, giant Halo-esque helmets. Much to John’s dismay, I insisted on crossing the (very large) street to see what was going on (hey, I like a good unexpected rally again and again…)
But this wasn’t a good rally. I took a few pictures with my other camera, but we both got a really really creepy vibe pretty quickly (despite the fact that everything was in Hungarian) so we left. After we got home, I Googled the name of the organization that was on the flags, and it’s an organization that Wikipedia describes as being extremely right-wing, fascist, and fairly racist. Ummm, WHOOPS. Yeah, glad we left that one. It’s not going to stop me from running toward every large crowd gathering I see — hey, stuff like that is interesting! but I understand why they had the riot police out like they did.
We walked multiple blocks until we found an open Metro station (we got turned away from a couple) but by the time we got there, our tickets had expired. GRRR. So we stopped for ice cream then bought new tickets to complete our journey home.
Oh! I have to mention the metro line near where we were staying — Line 1, AKA the yellow line, AKA the Millennium Line. It was built in 1896 (the same time as Heroes’ Square) for the Millennium Exhibition, which was World’s Fair type of event to celebrate 1000 years since the first Magyar tribes (Hungarians call themselves Magyars) settled in the Budapest basin. The subway hasn’t been updated since then, so it looks more or less like I would think a New York subway would have looked in 1896 — wooden ticket booths and paneling on the wall, white subway tile, cast iron painted support beams… I love it. So neat!
Oktagon station.
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And that was it for our Fourth of July. :-)
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 29: Art is long, life is brief.
I’m writing this post quickly because I need to get ready so we can head up to Buda Castle Hill to Matyas Church, where I’m going to a Latin high mass at 10AM. Neat! (I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it here before, but one of my goals this trip is to go to church in every country. I missed Bosnia, but I’ve gotten every other country so far. Sweet.)
Sign on our train from Pecs to Budapest.
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The train ride through the Hungarian countryside was amazingly beautiful. This video quality is kind of lousy just because we were on the train and the windows were tinted and dirty, but you get the general idea. They had massive flooding in June, and it was still clearly evident as we passed through flooded fields, roads, and in one place, houses. Sad.
Train station in Budapest.
Our Couchsurfing host lives RIGHT in the center of the city, near some pretty famous stuff. He wasn’t home when our train got in, so we walked across the street from his apartment to the Museum of Fine Arts and Heroes’ Square.
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Heroes' Square
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Inside the Museum of Fine Arts. What a beautiful museum!
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"Art is long, life is brief." (Ars lonca/ Vita brevis.) At least I'm pretty sure that's what it says, based on my almost non-existent Latin ability.
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Museum of Fine Arts from Hosok Tere (Heroes' Square) at sunset.
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I do realize we're going to tourist hell for this, but we did have Mexican food for dinner. Their horchata was basically milk with sugar and cinnamon. I was like, "Dude, you forgot the rice!!" On the other hand, though, I had a 20 ounce glass of absolutely excellent fresh-squeezed OJ that cost me about $3.50. Can't beat that. OMG GOOD. (In Amsterdam, they'd sell 0.2 ml glasses of fresh-squeezed OJ for 3 or 4 Euro... expensive!)
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We both got a kick out of the wall display teaching Hungarians the finer points of Mexican cuisine. :-)
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Where we are now:
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Euro Trip Day 25: I should be packing, so instead I’m writing today’s blog post
Tomorrow morning we’re heading out of here bright and early at 8AM to hop a train to Pécs, Hungary, yet another checkmark on a list of my attempts to see as many UNESCO World Heritage sites as possible (we’ve seen 3 so far on this trip: the old city of Dubrovnik in Croatia, the city of Kotor in Montenegro, and the city of Mostar in Bosnia.)
Anyway, so because we’re leaving early, and because we’ve done the pack-and-scramble thing twice now (when leaving Dubrovnik, because I forgot it was Sunday, and when leaving Montenegro, because we accidentally fell asleep the night before) and it’s really not all that much fun, I really should be packing right now. But darn it, I’m comfortable here! So because I’m lazy, here’s today’s post.
Today we got up… well, kind of late. I’d wanted to be out of here at 9, and we didn’t actually get out of bed until 10. We both kind of stayed up until 4:30 (I was working on trip planning and the blog post, John was reading) and it was already starting to get light when we went to bed (I HATE it when that happens) so neither of us was in the mood to leave early. Oh well. Vacations are about relaxing, right?
So we got up, had a leisurely breakfast of bread and honey and yogurt (sold in 1 liter bottles here), and headed downtown to go museuming. Unlike yesterday (when we read “14″ on a tram and somehow both read it as “4″, and it ended up taking us an hour and two different trams to get where we needed to be) it took us only about 15 minutes to get downtown. We had intended to head to the Natural History Museum, but got sidetracked by the Zagreb City Museum (sidetracked=”this looks interesting and it’s on the way — let’s go in here!) and I’m so glad we did. Like the archaeological museum, it wasn’t huge, but it was VERY VERY well-displayed (even if there was an unfortunately small number of English translations of things — audioguides, folks, they’re the wave of the future!)
They forgot to reset this sundial for daylight savings time.
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A lion that used to be at the entrance to the Zagreb Cathedral. Neither John nor I thought he was particularly scary. I believe my comment was something along the lines of, "Dude needs to pay a visit to the Wizard."
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Take a look at the picture below, and take a guess which picture is the cathedral before being demolished by the 1885 earthquake, and which picture is the cathedral after the earthquake (well, and subsequent remodeling.)
If you guessed "the left one", you win... something. I think I have a piece of Tupperware I can give you.
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Here’s a frog that used to be on the old cathedral. I mean the new cathedral. I mean the old one that was renovated in 1885, when they added the frog, and it became old and so they removed it when they started doing restoration in the 21st century.
They say you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince...
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After the City Museum, we went to the Natural History Museum, but that was so tiny and depressing that I didn’t even take pictures. It’s not a *bad* museum, it’s just incredibly incredibly outdated. And I’m not talking Smithsonian Air and Space Museum outdated either, with its 1980s exhibit on the personal computers of the future (anyone know if they’ve gotten rid of that? It was still up when I was there in November 2008.) I’m talking display cases that were built sometime in the late 1700s/early 1800s and haven’t been moved or dusted since. Motheaten stuffed animals (as in, dead and stuffed, not the cutesy plush kind.) Virtually no displays that explain to the viewer (in any language) how what they’re seeing all ties together… just dead, stuffed animals, and signs in Croatian, Latin, and English as to what they are. I will concur that they had some interesting specimens, and for the most part, their dead animal collection (which, I kid you not, mostly dates back to the late 1700s/early-to-mid 1800s) is in better shape than the one in the Smithsonian Natural History museum. But still… yeah. Needs a lot of work. And note to the museum — an entire litter of dead, stuffed tiger cubs so small that their eyes weren’t even open yet? Depressing, even if they were killed in 1812.
After that museum, we wandered around for a bit.
Skyline of part of the upper part of the city. The two spires in the background are the deceptively-young Gothic Zagreb Cathedral.
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St. Mark's Church, built in the mid-to-late 1800s. The crests on the roof are for the city of Zagreb and for the Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia (Slovenia), and Dalmatia (which is now Croatia.)
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Since it was hot out, John and I went in search of air conditioning and something sweet to eat. We found a nice little bakery/sweetshop that had a line out the door. We figured that was a good sign, so we ordered.
Here's my cake...
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...and here's John's caramel sundae. I wish I had his metabolism.
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Ban Josip Jelacic Square, the main square in Zagreb. That's the ban (governor) on the horse on the left.
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And since I for some reason like to do short videos of my surroundings (in case you haven’t noticed!) here’s one of Ban Josip Jelacic Square. Ignore John talking about random stuff in the background — he tries to videobomb every video I take. :-p
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Euro Trip Day 23: Sarajevo to Zagreb
This post is coming a bit late because it seems like our internet access always seems to die on us in the evening, which is when I’d prefer to be sitting around working on things like reservations for upcoming cities and blog posts and the like. In any case, most Zagreb museums are closed on Mondays, for some reason (we had this problem in Dublin too!) so it gives me time right now (now that the internet has decided to work again) to get stuff planned. I’m trying to make hay while the sun shines (or the internet works) I guess.
Anyway, before I post a few Zagreb pics, here are a few leftover pictures and videos from Sarajevo that I wanted to post. There are more pictures on my Flickr than I’ve posted here, so feel free to go look at them. :-)
Here’s a video I took of pigeons in the Turkish marketplace in the old section of town:
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Here’s another video from the marketplace.
Here’s a video I took of the main street in Sarajevo — to me the main street (Austro-Hungarian influence, from when it was a part of that empire) is a really interesting contrast to the marketplace (Turkish influence, from being part of the Ottoman Empire.) Regardless of empire, it’s a beautiful city.
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Not to get too morbid (that was Day 21′s post) but here are more roadside graves from the war, right in the center of town.
These were on the main street right across from a huge shopping mall.
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While we were sitting at the train station waiting for our night train to Zagreb, we heard the evening call to prayer (Sarajevo has a fairly large Muslim population as it was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries.) I’d been trying to catch this on video (well, audio) the whole time we were there, and I finally succeeded just before we left. What I think is really cool about this one is that you can hear two different calls from two different mosques. Neat.
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Here are links to two other videos (video 1, video 2) of it that I took–I kept them both because they both have different things that I liked about them (in one of them I look around the train station where we are, and the other one I just like the sound.)
The night train to Zagreb wasn’t bad, even though there were no sleeper cars so we had to sleep on the seats. Seating is in compartments, so you can shut the curtains and door and it’s a bit more private than open train seats, although the conductors come in periodically for ticket checks and three different people came in to check our passports around 4AM when we crossed the border from Bosnia to Croatia. That was pretty irritating, because they didn’t come all at once. One came in, we fell back asleep. 10 minutes later, the next one. We fell back asleep. 15 minutes later, the third one. At that point, when that guy left, I sat up and looked around and said, “ANYONE ELSE??” GEEZ.
Other than the sleep though, the ride was quite enjoyable. We ended up sharing a compartment with a late-20s British guy living and working in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He’s a reader (although he prefers fiction like John does, rather than nonfiction like me) and has a BA and MA in international relations, so we ended up talking books and politics (British, Irish, American, and Bosnian) until almost 2AM. He was REALLY interesting to talk to! He made an observation that John and I both were amazed by — he pointed out that both Northern Ireland and Sarajevo (well, Bosnia in general) went through a really war-filled, violent period in the 90s. However, if one looks at both cities now, Sarajevo has transformed into what appeared to all three of us to be an atmosphere of peace and tolerance, whereas he said that Northern Ireland is still very filled with tension and is very segregated — that the peace largely exists because Catholics live in neighborhoods that are 90%+ Catholic, and Protestants live in areas that are 90%+ Protestant, and all you have to do to tell which neighborhood you’re in is look around to see if the flags being displayed are for the UK or not. It’s neat to see how far Sarajevo has come, and it’s sad that Northern Ireland hasn’t managed to do the same, despite centuries of tension in the respective regions.
Although to be frank, I’m pretty sure not all of Bosnia is as tolerant as Sarajevo appears to be. In the city of Mostar, where we spent the night before Sarajevo, by law, 50% of the city council is Muslim, and 50% is Christian. They also live on different sides of town and support two entirely different soccer teams. And the country of Bosnia itself is actually divided into two regions per the 1995 Dayton Agreement — the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is mostly Croats and Bosnian Muslims, and the Republika Srpska, which is the (88%) Serbian region of the country. Each has its own government, flag and coat of arms, president, parliament, police & customs departments, and postal system. Technically the country has one armed forces, but both entities maintain their own armies. To make things even more crazy, there’s one city that’s claimed by both FBR and RS, so it’s currently under international supervision. So they’re still very, very divided within their own country.
Anyway, so it made for an interesting train ride that passed quickly, and even though we ended up sleeping on train seats, hey, it was one night we didn’t have to pay for lodging for. I’m all about that. :-)
John, trying to sleep on the seat at around 5:30 AM.
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When we got to Zagreb, it was about 7:45 Sunday morning, and we realized that nothing was going to be open for a while, so we found a comfortable place to relax that had free wifi (outside a hotel) and we hung out there for a couple of hours.
About 10AM, the Zagreb Archaeological Museum opened, so we headed over there, and I have to say that I am REALLY impressed with the breadth their collection. The whole museum only took about an hour and a half, so it wasn’t a huge collection, but what they had, they had a lot of and quality examples of.
900,000-year-old stone hand tools -- COOL!!
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I had to laugh at this. This is a stash of coins from a Greek hoard that was found in the pot in the picture, but whoever put the display together snuck in a 10 lipa (about 1.7 US cents) coin right in the middle. If you click on this picture and then click on the picture on the Flickr page it goes to, you can see where I put a note on which one is the modern coin. :-)
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After the museum, which closed at 1PM, we wandered up to the Zagreb Cathedral and caught the last half of the church service. I missed Bosnia, but so far I’ve managed to go to a church service in all of the other countries we’ve been to. Neat! Anyway, the cathedral is a Gothic cathedral, but it’s not actually all original — the main nave collapsed in an earthquake in the 1800s and the whole thing sustained serious damage, so it was mostly rebuilt back then, and it’s been remodeled/reconstructed at various other times in history as well. Still, it was really neat, and there’s been a church on that site since 1094, so that’s something.
Doorway of the cathedral
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Crucifixion at the back of the church. This was one of the more interesting ones that John and I had ever seen -- I can't remember if I've ever seen the complete scene like this as statues within a church. Also, the way the guy on the right is looking down on the onlooker is kind of creepy. Finally, anyone know what language that is above the scene? We were trying to figure it out. Aramaic, maybe?
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I know I’m a horrible person, but I took a couple of videos during the service, just because the choir was so beautiful. Unfortunately, I wasn’t thinking and held my phone vertically to capture more of the scene, and when I used a program to rotate the video, it lost image and sound quality. Oh well. Here’s one video, and here’s a link to the second (shorter) one.
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Inside the cathedral. Don't worry, I took this (and the other pictures) AFTER the service was over.
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After church was over, we went back to the train station (where we’d stashed our backpacks in a locker) and went in search of our lodging for the night, a guest house we’d booked through hostelworld.com (which has been my go-to website on this trip when we can’t find somewhere free to stay.) I was a bit leery of this place when I booked, because it had no reviews and because it was considerably cheaper than other double-room accomodations in Zagreb. Well, turns out that it’s a bit of a ways outside the city (but a few minutes walk from a tram stop that serves several tram lines into the city) and because it’s pretty new. I don’t care about either one — John and I both agreed that this is a really nice place. Everything’s new, it’s clean, it’s quiet, the owner speaks fairly decent English, and while we share a bathroom, there’s only one other person staying here right now, and there are two bathrooms, so it’s really one to ourselves. Excellent. :-)
Lovely room!!
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We ended up taking a nap for a couple of hours since we still were exhausted from the train ride, then we woke up and went in search of a McDonald’s. I know, we’re horrible typical American tourists… but after 23 days on the road, we both wanted something familiar. Well, as familiar as one can get at McDonald’s in a foreign country. I ordered a burger called a McCountry… is this something that only exists overseas? ‘Cause I don’t usually eat at McDonald’s at home, but I don’t ever remember seeing it on the menu the couple times I have been there in the past few months. It was two chicken patties (slices of chicken, not McNugget style) and a funky beige sauce that was VERY mustard-y. Too mustard-y, actually — I couldn’t finish it, and neither could John. And it really wasn’t a big sandwich, either — maybe the size of a regular McD’s burger, only with the two patties instead of one? Oh well. The fries and strawberry shake were good, even if it did end up being quite a bit more pricey than at home. :-)
Odd McFlurry mix-ins. I believe Cornetto is chocolate-dipped (on one side) ice cream cone pieces, I know Smarties are kind of like M&Ms, and a Kit Kat is a Kit Kat (do we have Kit Kat McFlurries in the US though?) But I'm not entirely sure what Daim is. And also, can we order just plain strawberry, chocolate, or caramel McFlurries in the US? I may have to go back just to try one of these. :-)
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Where we are now:
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Milo the Screech Owl
Milo the Screech Owl, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.
This little cutie is Milo, a Western Screech Owl and a resident at the Discovery Museum of Sacramento. John’s nephews (ages 9 and 11) spent the night last night, and since it was pouring rain today and we didn’t want to do anything outside, we took them to the museum instead. It was a fun afternoon. :-)
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Amish quilt at the DeYoung Museum
Amish quilt at the DeYoung Museum, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.
The DeYoung Museum in San Francisco: King Tut, with a side bonus of Amish quilts. So awesome. :-)
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Reflection on the outside of the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco
Reflection on the outside of the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.
Today we went to San Francisco to see the King Tut exhibit at the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park, then we met up with Carrye and Aron for dinner in Half Moon Bay. Such a nice day! :-)
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A few neat old odds and ends
A replica of an 1882 horsecar (streetcar pulled by horses) purchased from 20th Century Fox, used in the movies "Hello, Dolly" and "Cavalcade".
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1909 Wolfe Touring Car.
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Wheel from the 1909 Wolfe Touring Car. Check out the chain drive on this!!
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1908 Ford Model T Touring Car. 1908 was Ford's first year producing the Model T.
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According to the docent I talked to, this was the highest-selling Model T ever a few years ago–I think he said it sold for $73,000. Nice. It’s one of only a handful in existence of this type, apparently. One thing that makes it unique is that it has two pedals and three levers (instead of three pedals–gas, brake, and clutch) and two levers, which Ford switched to shortly after this car was built.
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Gas generator for 1908 Ford Model T headlights.
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From the display:
In the top half of the canister is water and in the bottom there is a screen that holds calcium carbide. Turn the valve and let the water drip on the carbide crystals at about 90 drips per minute. This forms highly flammable acetylene gas. It also creates a stinky foamy mess inside the can. During the chemical reaction, the gas is released. It builds up pressure and flows through the tubing to the headlights. Quickly, you open the doors of the headlights and ignite the lights with a match.
Everything works just fine for a while. Then, pretty soon the stinky, foamy mess will start through the tubing also, eventually plugging the little holes in the headlight burners. In the dark, you will have to poke a wire around to open the holes again so that the gas can come through and the lights can be lit again! If the water and carbide last, and the system stays clean and unplugged, you have lights for a while. A lot of trouble, but worth the thrill of motoring!
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1906 Ford Model K Touring Car
Like I mentioned yesterday, over the course of the next few days, I’ll be posting some pictures I took of the classic cars at the California Auto Museum this past Saturday. Normally I’ll mix things up, like I did yesterday, but today I’m sticking with only one car, because someone said that it made his week to see the engine of this car, and I thought I’d put pictures of it online for him.
As I happened to be wandering through the museum, a nice gentlemen asked the docent to open up the hood of this car so he could take a look, and I happened to be right there and popped in for a picture. He asked me to email me a copy, so I gave him one of the Moo MiniCards I had made with my website address on it, and told him I’d put it online. I can’t remember your name, sir, but please email me if you need me to send you this picture–I’d be more than happy to do so!
After I took this engine picture (more difficult than it sounds because of the lighting in the museum), I took a few more pictures of this car, because it was just a really neat car. As always, click on these pictures if you want a larger version.
Engine on a 1906 Ford Model K Touring Car.
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Text from the display:
This 1906 Ford Model K made its debut as a true luxury car. Henry Ford never cared for the car as building it was the desire of his business partner, Alexander Malcomson, who wanted to build expensive, luxurious cars for wealthy customers. Ford eventually bought out his partner and turned his attention to smaller, less-expensive cars. The Model K, selling for $2500, was built at the same time as the much Smaller Model N, which sold for $500.
The K roadster was guaranteed to reach 60mph, which would have taken courage given the roads and tires of the time. Its great weight, cost, and persistent problems with the transmission, combined with Henry Ford’s dislike for the car led to ending its production in early 1908. The Model K was the first six-cylinder Ford, and the last until just before WWII. Only 11 of the 867 Model K touring cars remain today. This car is one of only two known to have its original body, a style called “Victorian” or “Tulip”. A lighter and faster model, called the “Gentleman’s Roadster”, was also available.
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1906 Ford Model K Touring Car.
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When I look at this car, I can’t help but break into song. Come on, tell me this doesn’t make you think of the musical “Oklahoma”… You all know what I’m talking about, right?
…right?
…no?!?!
…sigh. Do I have to do EVERYTHING myself? Ok, here goes…
All the world’ll fly in a flurry
When I take you out in the surrey,
When I take you out in the surrey with the fringe on top!
There, now do you know what I’m talking about?
Ok, back to the pictures.
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Closer up shot of the cab area. Check out the horn and the two shift levers (? I think that's what they are?)
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And now a few detail shots…
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Front wheel.
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Top of a headlight
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Headlight/spotlight. Look at the wood! It's so beautiful!
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It’s classic cars week here at HowISeeLife.com!
Today I went to the California Auto Museum downtown for a photography workshop, where I was fortunate to spend several hours there having fun looking at the gorgeous cars and talking to one of the docents. While I don’t really care about a car’s performance (well, except the one I’m driving!) I’m a sucker for body styling, especially of classic cars. I think I have a slight obsession with anything related to transportation (hence the train pictures I feel compelled to take, and why I love sitting and watching airplanes.)
Anyway, over the next week or so, I’m going to be posting some of the pictures I took, with links to more on my Flickr. Tonight I’m going to start off with the few I took at the outdoors portion of the workshop, where they took three classic cars outside for us to experiment with. Unfortunately, since they were outside, I don’t have much in the way of details about what the cars were. I was able to look up make, model, and year for two of the three, but I’m not entirely sure about the first one (other than that it’s a Ford, which is pretty obvious.) If you know more about this than me, help me out here–take a peek at their inventory list and see which one you think it is. :-) A few more pictures are available in my Flickr gallery of pictures from today, and I’ll be putting more up there as the week progresses. :-)
Driver's side of an old Ford
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Old Ford
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Back in the days when trunks were trunks.
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Logo from a 1951 Ford Crestliner
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1951 Ford Crestliner
They don't make 'em like this anymore
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I love the lines on this. Beautiful.
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Are we there yet? (I was trying to go for the feel of what it would have been like to be a kid sitting in the back seat of this car taking a road trip. Don't know if it worked or not.)
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Dashboard.
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1967 Chevy Camaro convertible
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Aerospace Museum of California
Last Sunday I ventured out in the torrential rain (over an inch!) to the Aerospace Museum of California to check out their new space display, a NASA-created traveling exhibit that will be there through September. I like space well enough, but I didn’t think the exhibit was worth the extra $10 on top of the regular admission price. I did find the huge GM commercial at the end of the exhibit rather amusing… at least they funded it before things went south!
One of the things they had that I thought was interesting was a bicycle-powered centrifuge. I got to take a ride on it – it was fairly neat. Close your eyes, tilt your head the direction it spins, and you just feel like you’re moving. But try to face up or opposite of the way it’s going, and instant stomach-churning. Also, opening your eyes also = a bad idea. For the record, I was only a bit green when I stepped off.
Me trying not to yack.
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My favorite part of this was, maybe not surprisingly, a camera. According to the display, astronauts on Apollo 17 used this 70mm Hasselblad aboard the command module during their December 1972 mission to the moon. The docent seemed bemused that I was taking a picture of a camera. I couldn’t explain it to him more than “it’s just cool” because, well, it is cool, or at least to photobug me, anyway.
Space camera.
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The reason I wanted to go to the museum yesterday was that this week’s photo challenge is “the moon”. I’ve only got a couple of shots of the moon, and neither is particularly creative. I was hoping to get something more moon-ish here, but alas, this chunk of rock was the best I could do.
Moon rock.
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While I thought I’d be more into the space exhibit than the aviation part of the museum, the opposite ended up being true. I really had a good time looking at the planes and plane accessories (sorry, lame King of the Hill joke), and I wish I’d gone on a day where it wasn’t raining, because they have a HUGE outdoor lot with old restored aircraft on display. Inside, along with all of the vintage planes, they also had one that was in the process of being restored, and I spent a long time just checking it out – it was waaaay neat.
Wing struts.
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The plane was a 1939 Cessna T-50 “Bobcat”, built as a passenger airplane. I was surprised to see all of the wood used in the plane’s frame, but then put two and two together and realized that they probably were trying to conserve steel for ramping up preparations for war. The accompanying display, which I read after I drew this conclusion, referred to the plane as being built out of “non-strategic materials”, so I figure I guessed correctly.
Wooden wings.
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Anyway, the plane had a reputation as being easy to fly, so it was frequently used as a trainer aircraft. When it’s in one piece, it looks like this:
Cessna T-50 Bobcat
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As you can see, they have quite a ways to go with the restoration. :-)
I don’t remember what this next plane was, and I forgot to take a picture of the sign that went with it, but it was shiny and therefore captured my attention.
Oooh, shiny!
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I saved the most awesome thing for last, though. Right when you walk into the museum is the thing I think they’re most proud of, and rightfully so – a 1932 Curtiss-Wright B-14-B biplane. There were apparently only two of these built, and one of them was destroyed in a crash in the ’30s, so this is the only remaining one. It was built for air racing, but it’s been primarily used for aerobatics instead. It spent seven years (from 2000-2007) being restored, and then was flown to the museum where it sits now. I couldn’t back up enough to get decent pictures of the entire plane (need a wide angle lens. need a wide angle lens.) so you’ll have to content yourself with this picture from someone else’s website, only imagine it a heck of a log brighter and shinier. Seriously, I’m not a huge mechanical stuff buff, but this thing was GORGEOUS. I could have spent an hour cheerfully ogling it.
The N-shaped wing strut was apparently well-known. I just thought it looked cool.
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Curtiss-Wright.
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Cockpit.
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Engine and propeller.
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Engine and propeller.
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Old Town Sacramento
Last Sunday I went down to Old Town Sacramento with some friends. First we went to the Crocker Art Museum for the last day of their Warner Bros exhibit, and then we wandered around Old Town a bit.
My favorite picture of the day is probably this one, just because of its sheer randomness:
Dock and Tower Bridge.
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This is the dock in front of the Tower Bridge on the Sacramento River. I used TiltShiftMaker.com for the effects on the picture–it’s supposed to make it look like a model. The original of this picture is here.
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We weren’t allowed to take pictures of the Warner Bros exhibit inside the Crocker, so I don’t have anything to show of that, but suffice to say, it was really neat. They had, of course, tons of old sketches and animation cels, but what I found the neatest was looking at some of the old backgrounds done in the 40s and 50s. They were true works of art, actually quite rich in color and techique, and it’s kind of sad to think how little (if any) attention they got in the cartoons.
My other two favorite pictures of the day:
What can I say--I like trains!
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This cat was hanging out under one of the trains and watching the world go by. Not a bad place to hang out.
Click here for a link to the entire gallery from the day.
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