The Chocolate Museum was the one exception in my day of museum misadventure. It’s owned by the Barcelona guild of pastrymakers. I’m not sure it would be worth going on a day when you had to pay full price, but it was free today, and this is the ticket they gave me:

I haven’t tried it yet, but I have no reason to argue with free chocolate.

The museum gives a bit of an overview of how chocolate works (it grows on trees and you have to mush it and stuff) and some cultural significance (people like it). I didn’t feel like I learned a lot, but maybe I know more about chocolate than most people. I did learn that chocolate, which grows in central America, supposedly came to the Old World through Barcelona.

The main source of entertainment is dioramas made of chocolate.They had Smurfs, SpongeBob, a creepy all-white monk, Asterix and Obelix (each in his own scene, with Romans) and my favorite, Tintin:

In case you for some reason have not memorized the Tintin oeuvre, that’s Tintin and Captain Haddock seeing the rocket for the first time in Destination Moon.

One room showed what I think was some of the winners of a pastry contest. I have never seen so much chocolate Picasso in one place, or perhaps any chocolate Picasso. I found the multiple representations of Guernica particularly incongruous.

Because nothing says “chocolate” like horrific air raids on villages full of civilians.

It wasn’t all Picasso; that room also had a chocolate version of one of the facades of La Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudí’s delightfully kooky church. Chocolate version:

Real version:

I think the chocolatier did a pretty good job of capturing it.

But the more impressive thing about this museum is what’s below it. Barcelona, like a lot of cities in Europe, was once a Roman settlement. You can see bits of the Roman walls around town and the city stands on layer after layer of older buildings. From the ground level of the museum, you take an elevator down to this fantastic subterranean world of Roman ruins. Raised walkways go along Roman walls, into a sentry tower, through a dye shop, past a pool from a public bath, over a garum factory (more on garum later), past the remains of early Christian buildings, and through a huge winery.

This is a storefront along a real Roman road. Behind it is the dye factory, where the Romans did, oh, laundry and stuff. And dying fabric. The museum had a great audio tour, which was excellent at the time but means I couldn’t take pictures of wall text to remind myself what I was seeing. (Could I have taken notes? Yes. Did I? No.)

Here’s one thing I do remember: They used urine in the dye process, so they would have had big jars to collect contributions from passersby. I know, ew. Roman cities must have smelled awful. I just read something that pointed out how little bathing would have helped, too–I mean, it’s not like they had chlorination then. Everybody brought whatever bodily fluids, dirt, and bugs they had encountered since their last bath and shared them with the whole town through the excellent dispersal medium of nice warm water.

Speaking of things that are smelly, Roman food depended on something called garum. Garum is what happens when you mush up fish and let them ferment in these tanks.

Garum is required if you’re going to pull off any ancient Roman recipes. Imagine if you were 2000 years in the future and trying to make a recipe that called for ketchup or Worcestershire sauce. I mean, where would you start? Garum is like that.

One more thing from that museum. They had mounted a series of funeral portraits, dug up when archaeologists were excavating the Roman walls in the 1960s and 1970s. The whole point of these portraits was to make sure the memory of these people lives on forever, and, as the label points out, they did it! Here they are, 2000 years later, looking you right in the eye.

Way to go, citizens.

I also resent a little bit the fact that I always have to look up the spelling. Hirschorn or Hirschhorn or Hirshorn just seem more likely to me.

I still haven’t broken my streak, but earlier this week I went down to the outside of the Hirshhorn to enjoy a moving piece of art. It’s “Song 1,” a multimedia installation by artist Doug Aitken. It’s a video, projected on all 360 degrees of the cylindrical museum’s exterior, with big speakers playing various people singing “I Only Have Eyes For You,” a song from the 30′s that I didn’t recognize but which has been drifting through my mind ever since Tuesday night.

It’s running every night from sunset to midnight, through May 13–definitely worth a visit. The closest metro is L’Enfant Plaza, but in this nice weather you could turn it into a walk from Gallery Place or just about anywhere downtown.

So on a trip to Ann Arbor recently, of course I had to check on the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, formerly–and less eloquently–known as the Exhibit Museum of Natural History, I suppose to emphasize that they were actually showing things off, instead of just doing research. Research is the point of university natural history museums (and is the reason I haven’t gotten around to blogging about Berkeley–they have hardly anything on display).

Let’s look at some rocks and bones.

Does that look like any old rock? Well, it’s not. For one thing, look how pretty! For another, it’s a piece of the Acasta Gneiss, a rock formation in northern Canada. That’s some of the oldest rock on Earth, about 4 billion years old. The Earth only started to form about 4.6 billion years ago. Of course, almost everything on Earth has been here for something like four and a half billion years. It’s just that most of it has been melted down and turned into something else in the last 4 billion years, and this rock hasn’t.

The museum’s main room is about the history of life, with old-fashioned display cases around the edges and some nicely redone skeletons in the middle. I particularly enjoyed the mastodons.

This old girl was found in the 1960′s on a farm in Michigan. Mastodon bones are pretty common in Michigan, and I like that the museum features local fossils so prominently. Like mammoths, mastodons are extinct elephant relatives. You can tell them apart by their teeth and the slope of their foreheads. (Learn more from the Field Museum’s online exhibit about mammoths and mastodons.)

Skeletons of animals from 10,000 years ago are rarely complete, and this one needed some filling in. But you don’t have to guess which bits are real and which aren’t. The museum lays it out for you.

Yes, the tusks are fake, but don’t worry, the museum didn’t make up this mastodon’s differently-sized tusks; she really did break one during her lifetime. The real pieces of ancient ivory are safe in the collection.

One last thing: a little section of the carving around the door to the museum.

Well, this time I checked it out, and I’ll tell you what’s inside the Henry Ford Museum: a whole lot of awesome. It’s heavy on the automobiles and engines, like you’d expect, with a few airplanes and trains, plus some random halls of jewelry and clockwork. (Who knows. Go with it.) Oh, and the chair Lincoln was sitting in when he was assassinated.

It probably helps if you visit in the company of a boyfriend with degrees in physics and enthusiasm, because the museum lacks some basic information (my, that is an impressively large piece of equipment Henry Ford had moved here–how does it work?) but in any case, it was great.

Our first stop was the Dymaxion House, a cheap house designed to be mass-produced in idle post-war airplane factories (they didn’t realize quite how big commercial aviation was going to be). It was designed by Buckminster Fuller, so you know it is going to be both wacky and awesome.

It’s made of aluminum and it’s round and shiny. I could see living in it, honestly, although I’d rather not look at the world through Plexiglas. And the kitchen sink wouldn’t hold a full-sized plate. And I can’t imagine how loud it would be inside during a rainstorm.

The Henry Ford Museum has the only Dymaxion House in the world. Only two prototypes were made before the company collapsed, and they ended up being cannibalized to make part of a house in Wichita. The family that owned that house eventually donated the whole shebang to the museum, which assembled one house out of them. Here’s the Dymaxion House online exhibit.

The museum has a large collection of engines and motors, including this gorgeous steam engine:

Why was it made with gothic arches? Nobody knows. What, a steam engine isn’t allowed to be pretty?

I learned a lot about engines poking around in this part of the museum, but it was mostly because of the aforementioned boyfriend (and my own skills in figuring out mechanical things), not thanks to the museum. I mean, really, would it have killed them to have one sign explaining how a steam engine works? That’s the start of the whole industrial revolution, and if you don’t understand the mechanics, they’re kind of just big clunky pieces of metal. The biggest disappointment was this giant engine that Henry Ford was clearly very proud of–it had provided power to one of his factories. It is GIANT. They had a sign saying what it was and listing the technical specifications, but there was no way to tell how it worked or what all the bits were.

Another highlight: the world’s oldest surviving steam engine, a 1760-ish behemoth that was built to pump water out of mines. That’s what steam engines were originally for! Isn’t that amazing? It was only later that someone was like, heyyyy, I bet I could run machines off of this thing.

Here’s one of the more amazing automobiles in the museum. It’s a bus. But a bus with great historical significance. Look at it.

That is the bus–the actual bus–in which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man. You can get on the bus and even sit in the seat. The bus sat in a field in Alabama for 30 years; it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore it to its 1955 appearance. The museum built a nice little civil rights exhibit around it, and they also have an online exhibit about the bus.

I had my history on Rosa Parks a little mixed up, so here’s the correct version if anyone’s wondering: She was not the first black woman to be arrested for not giving up her seat in Montgomery; according to the museum website, she was the third. But civil rights leaders felt that a nice respectable lady like her was the right client to challenge the law with, because she would get white support. I wonder who those other two brave women were.

Now for something completely different: The one thing my brother could say with reasonable certainty was in the museum. It’s right at the entrance.

Actually, I say completely different, but this is from about the same era as the Montgomery bus; the bus was built in 1948 and this is the 1952 Wienermobile.

Even with inadequate signage, I feel that I got my 17 dollars’ worth of edification. The museum was hosting a temporary exhibit on the Titanic, and we were a little disappointed to find that it was sold out–until we realized how awesome everything else in the museum was, and also that one of the features of the exhibit was getting your picture taken standing at the front of the ship, Jack-and-Rose style, in front of a green screen. Gag.

I expected a “There it goes!” and you go home. I was wrong. The shuttle took multiple loops around the area, including one pass right over the Mall. It was flying low and slow. It was awesome.

If you haven’t already worked this out from everyone else’s pictures, the shuttle rides on the back of a 747. The Washington Post did a fun online animation showing how the shuttle gets up there.

We weren’t exactly alone at the Lincoln Memorial. It was a great place, though – while there were a lot of people, it didn’t feel crowded, and wow, the views!!

Here’s the shuttle on its last pass through downtown, before it went out and looped around the Beltway, past Andrews Air Force Base and Goddard Space Flight Center:

And, finally, out to Dulles again.

I like how all those cars just stopped dead on Memorial Bridge. Space shuttle traffic jams–that doesn’t happen every day.

And, for a bonus, here are some ducks I saw poking around the Tidal Basin. My guess is canvasbacks, but I’m not very good at ducks. Anyone know any better than me?

Duck update, Monday 3/5: I believe the consensus of my Facebook commenters is Lesser Scaup. The head is more scaup-shaped and the bill is lighter than a canvasback.

Some kind of fly, maybe? I don’t know my bugs well enough. There were three of them wandering around at sunset.

Ok, this isn’t a series, but I did post a picture of a bug on my window once before. I wonder how many it takes to make a series? Three? Five?

The work has finally started, which means when you walk by the museum, you see this:

Bricks! The building looks so strange without its marble overcoat. Less like a national monument, more like a suburban house. I learned from a 2008 Wall Street Journal story that bricks fill in the space between the load-bearing concrete. If you’re interested in how buildings work, the WSJ piece gives quite a detailed explanation, including the various things that may have gone wrong. Apparently the biggest problem was the expansion and contraction that happens every day in the heat of the sun. So, while the panels should be floating on steel supports that transfer their weight to the concrete structure, some of them have started to rest on each other instead. Oops. The reconstruction should fix that.

photo: me, with my phone – how ’bout that?

There’s a big emphasis on things you can try out yourself, like a nifty display case that shows the different ways that seeds or other bits of biological material can disperse to islands. (It used ping pong balls and levers and stuff. Really pretty fun.) Even before you go inside, in the parking lot, you get some real hands-on experience of a simple machine, by lifting this real live truck:

Obviously, as a reasonably-informed adult, and one who successfully completed the unit on simple machines in third grade, I know that you get more out of a lever the farther you are from the fulcrum, but boy, it takes on new meaning when you use it to lift a truck. (Note the actual space between the tires and the pavement.)

The museum has a lovely trio of space ships:

From left to right, a whole swath of space history: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules. That Mercury capsule is the very one that Ham the chimpanzee rode in on January 31, 1961. The Apollo capsule flew in 1975, which was after the moon landings were done; its main claim to fame is that it docked with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. All three are on loan from the National Air and Space Museum. I wonder how many of these things the Smithsonian owns, and where they all live.

The Science Center has a huuuge exhibit on ecosystems (which is kind of tucked away and easy to miss – a shame, because it’s like 75% of the museum). I particularly enjoyed a room about polar research. It’s kept extra-chilly and there’s a wall of ice where you can feel how well different insulating materials work:

They have a mitt made of fur, one stuffed with down, and so on, so you can see which one feels warmest. I can’t remember anymore, but I had fun poking the wall of ice. In the neighboring desert room I was amused to see a display on Katy Hinman, a former bat researcher who I was distantly acquainted with in college.

One of the most striking things in the museum was in the L.A. section of the Ecosystems exhibit. An artist took glass plates, put stencils on them, and left them outside on roofs in Los Angeles for one month. Here’s what happened.

And that, my friends, is just how much particulate pollution falls out of the air in Los Angeles. Makes you never want to breathe there again, doesn’t it?

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