Helen FieldsScience Writer

Last Monday I went for a day hike at the Grand Canyon and stopped by the visitor center on the South Rim. And I thought, hey, this is totally a museum! Sweet! Ok, it is quite a thin museum. There is more open space than stuff, and I think people mainly go in there to ask the rangers questions.

But still, there was enough to make a Museum Tourist post, because check this out. It’s a boat.

Nowadays, people go down the Colorado River on inflatable rafts, often motorized. The first people to run the river did it in 1869, led by a one-armed Civil War veteran. This boat is from much later, the 1930s; like Powells’ boats, it was custom-made for the Grand Canyon. (Unlike Powell’s team, the people who built this boat actually knew what they were getting into.) This boat, the WEN, was built in the 1930s to run the Grand Canyon’s rapids. It was part of what made taking people down the Grand Canyon on a boat into a viable commercial enterprise.

Enough about boats. Here’s what you see if you walk about 5 minutes from the visitor center:

And here is what you see if you take a bus about 10 minutes from the visitor center and walk downhill for an hour:

And if you keep going half an hour beyond that, and you look another couple thousand feet down, or if you squint very closely at this picture, you see: the river.

It’s the brown thing right down at the bottom of the canyon. See? I brought it back to boats.

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See? SFO isn’t the only airport with exhibits. This hallway in the C Terminal at Washington-Dulles used to have pictures of planets, but now it’s photos of D.C. Kind of nice photos. If you want to see them, buy yourself a plane ticket and get on out to the end of the Dulles Access Road.

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A museum…in an airport? What? That’s crazy! Ok, actually, it’s not crazy. There’s a little Air & Space Museum photo exhibit at Dulles that I’ve seen twice and never blogged about. But the San Francisco airport really goes all out. They appear to have a full-blown operation going on – I saw maps listing a ton of different exhibits. There’s a pretty prominent downside, though. You would have to have airplane tickets to get to a lot of the displays, which makes admission somewhat more expensive than even at some other expensive museums I’ve complained about. (But they throw in a free plane ride with your ticket.)

On the way home from a recent wedding, I had lots of time – thanks for the delays, United – to examine the exhibit Second Chances: Folk Art Made From Recycled Remnants.

It’s from the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. I’m not totally clear on what that means about the relationship between them, but I’m guessing a curator in Santa Fe put it together and they lent it to the SFO Museum.

The items in the exhibit are charming – it’s fun to look at something, see its current shape, and also be able to see what it was before. License plates turned into dustpans, bottle caps strung together on wire to make a toy snake. Of course, it’s not like people were recycling to be cute; a lot of this is recycling born out of necessity.

That’s a trunk made out of tin, wood, and paper, Dakar, Senegal, c. 1994. I just looked up “arachide” in the handy French dictionary next to my desk and am delighted to tell you that these tins used to hold peanut oil.

This kind of recycling also funnels into a souvenir trade. One of my favorite Christmas tree ornaments is an angel made from an insecticide can that I bought in Mali. I also love a little dump truck I got there, made from pieces of a can of the “Gino” brand. Something that involves tomatoes. I bought it from a small boy atop a mud-brick building in Djenne. So I was pretty amused to see the exact same design (made from a different can) in the exhibit:

It’s also from Mali, but from 1994 – I bought mine in 2005. So I guess that particular form of folk art manufacture has been going on for a while. It’s really a pretty sophisticated toy. The dump truck dumps.

There was quite a variety of stuff in the show – early American furniture and duck decoys, for example, and some items made by contemporary artists who just like working with old stuff. I think my favorite item was this eagle:

It was made by some Chinese immigrants who came to the U.S. in 1993. I’d forgotten this, although it sounded vaguely familiar when I looked it up. Their ship ran aground off a beach in Queens and over 200 immigrants were stuck in prisons while the U.S. figured out what to do with them. The last people weren’t freed until 1997.

While they were in prison they did a ton of origami. This eagle is made from magazines and papier mache of rough prison toilet paper. Google tells me that some people now call this style of paper folding “Golden Venture Folding,” after the ship that the immigrants came in. Some were granted asylum; many ended up back in China or in other countries.

The SFO Museum’s website says it was founded in 1980 and was “the first cultural institution of its kind located in an international airport.” That’s a lot of qualifiers, so I guess that means it isn’t the first museum in an airport. But it’s still pretty neat. I loved having the opportunity to lose myself in this art for a bit while I killed time before my flight.

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The visitors’ center at the Miraflores Locks, as previously mentioned, is full of models of ships and various kinds of train equipment. Both historic models, from the early days of the canal 100 years ago, and modern models.

I love these models. I suppose some of the modern ones might be more or less mass-produced, but at least for the models of historic equipment, you know someone put a ton of love and care into each one. (I really hope that’s true of the modern ones, too.)

This is a dirt spreader; it runs on rails. Sorry, the museum is dark, so bear with me while I explain this murky picture.

Building the Panama Canal meant moving a lot of dirt. They had to get through the continental divide. Sure, the continent is only 30-some miles across right here, but there was still a lot of dirt dividing the low parts on either side. They blasted, they dug, they used the rails to haul stuff out. When they dumped it, they dumped it right by the side of the rails. And after they dumped it, this thing, the dirt spreader, went through and spread the dirt out so it wasn’t just all mounded up next to the rails.

This next model is also about moving dirt.

It’s a dredging ship. It was built in Scotland for the canal and started operating in 1913. Those buckets carry dirt up from the bottom.

Here’s a bit of a modern dredge:

It’s being used for the canal widening project, which is going on now. (They’re adding a third lane of locks that can handle much bigger ships.) This model was presented by Dredging International of Belgium. I kind of fell in love with the teensy life preservers:

Awwww.

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Starting at the Pacific, ships in the Panama Canal go into the Miraflores locks, then the Pedro Miguel locks. That gets them up to the level of most of the canal. On the Caribbean side, they go down through the Gatun locks.

The Miraflores locks are the coolest – they raise ships by two steps, not just one – and also the closest to Panama City. They also score a huge visitors center.

The museum inside has four levels. You start at the bottom with the history of the canal. It started with a totally doomed French effort to build a sea-level canal, with no locks. Here are some French surveyors:

There were a lot of reasons why the French effort was doomed. For example, building a sea-level canal here was a really bad idea. (I believe the reasoning was along the lines of “Well, it worked for the Suez.”) One of the other reasons was that nobody had figured out how to fight yellow fever, which killed thousands of workers.

By the time the American effort started in 1904, about 15 years after the French gave up, Walter Reed had figured out that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes. That means people were finally able to fight the disease. They did it in part by getting rid of places mosquitoes could breed, like puddles in dirt roads. These are some of the bricks that were used to pave roads:

You know the problem with most museums these days? They just don’t have enough piles of bricks.

After the floor about history, there’s a floor about water. Much of the canal follows the track of the Chagres River, but then it also crosses the continental divide and brings together water that was not originally joined. So building the canal created a new watershed, and all that water and wildlife and whatnot has to be managed.

The next floor has a cool section on how the Panama Canal operates, including a sped-up video of a container ship going through a lock, projected behind the windows of a mocked-up bridge. This was so realistic, I felt the need to adjust my balance when the ship was rocking from side to side.

There are also tons of ship models scattered through the visitors center, which I think I’ll save for another blog post.

The visitor center experience ends up on the top floor, which has one of several observation areas for watching ships go through the locks:

More on the locks later.

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Here’s a weird fact. The “Panama Canal Museum” is in Seminole, Florida, and it’s just about the U.S. involvement in the canal.

The museum in Panama City is the “Museo del Canal Interoceánico de Panamá.” That is something along the lines of “Interoceanic Canal Museum of Panama.” Or “Interoceanic Panama Canal Museum.” Or “Panama Interoceanic Canal Museum.”

This museum is about the whole canal, from when it was but a twinkle in the eye of…um, somebody famous in olden times, to the 1880’s, when it was a totally messed-up French project, to when the U.S. picked it up in 1903 and finished it in 1914, to the handover when Panama took control of the canal in 1999.

I’m a little hazy on some of the details because there was no text in English. Which is fine – it’s not like most U.S. museums are falling over themselves to put writing on the walls in foreign languages, so I can’t really complain. (Notable exception.) They do provide a decent audio guide in English.

Unfortunately, most of the actual facts kind of went in one ear and out the other. Also, they don’t allow photos inside, so even if there had been English wall text, I couldn’t have taken pictures of it to remind myself.

So I present you with the one artifact you can take pictures of.

I bet every vaguely maritime-themed museum in the world has at least one of these on display. They’re really pretty. This one is made from brass and crystal. I think the audio guide said it was designed by the guy who made the Eiffel Tower, but now I’m not so sure, because I don’t think the Spanish label says that. It’s certainly connected to him somehow, and Mr. Eiffel was involved with the failed French attempt to build the canal – he was supposed to design the locks.

Oh, if you haven’t seen one of these, it’s a lighthouse light. Impressive, n’est-ce pas?

One of the things that most amused me was a reference to Sir Francis Drake as a pirate. Eh? Pirate? I thought he was, you know, a Sir of some sort, and didn’t he hang around with Elizabeth I? So I pulled out my handy Kindle with 3G and looked him up on Wikipedia. Answer: One man’s pirate is another man’s privateer. England and Spain were at war, so he could totally get away with pirating Spanish ships. Also, he was a slave trader. Ugh.

Later I used the handy Kindle to find out what the Spanish Main was. If you’d forced me to come up with a definition, I think I would’ve gone for, like, a fleet of ships. (Apparently I thought the Spanish Main was the Spanish Armada.) It turns out it was actually Spain’s mainland colonies around the Caribbean, particularly the Central American coastline. Am I the only one who didn’t know that?

They do have one other artifact you can take pictures of: the museum itself. It was built as the Grand Hotel in, uh, sometime in the 19th century, and later served as the headquarters for the French canal project, then the U.S. one. Those headquarters later moved, but when they were looking around for a place to put the museum, they came up with this building.

It’s quite grand, and it sits in the middle of a neighborhood with quite a grand past, Casco Viejo. (Here’s the UNESCO page about the area – it’s the Historic District, not “Panama Viejo,” which is the ruins of an earlier city near here.)

Keep an eye out for more canal-related blog posts in the near future. There are plenty of canal-related museums to go around. There’s even a website called canalmuseum.com. I don’t know what/where/who that is.

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In 2009, Norway’s national TV broadcast a live, real-time train journey – the beautiful route from Bergen to Oslo. They called it “Bergensbanen minutt for minutt” – “Bergen Line, Minute for Minute.”

Well, right now they’re trying to make magic again with “Hurtigruten – minutt for minutt.” This time it’s a live webcast from the Hurtigruten, the coastal express boat route. A ship left Bergen, on the west coast, three days ago with a live webcam on board. Right now it’s making its way through the fantastically beautiful Lofoten Islands. In a couple of days it will reach Kirkenes, the last town before Russia.

We’re coming up on the solstice – the perfect time to be in the north of Norway! The ship won’t see another sunset until it gets back south of the Arctic Circle, well into the return journey.

Of course, Prague has lots of museums that aren’t natural history museums. We also stopped in on the Museum of Communism. I had been led to believe by the guidebook that this would be interesting. It has great posters all over town, like this:

It turns out the graphic design of the posters is the best thing it’s got going for it. The museum itself falls into a category I’ve seen before: lots of stuff and lots of ideology.

The people who started this museum clearly have a thing against Communism. I understand that. People had it tough behind the Iron Curtain. But the point of the museum appears to be to go on and on about how bad Communism is, and I prefer my museums more objective and less ranty. And it would have been nice if they’d spent some of that graphic design budget on a writer. Seriously, try to read this:

Huh? Try to summarize that in your own words. Now imagine reading it standing up after reading many other similarly dense texts. Ouch. Also, Brezhnev may have been an apathetic wreck, but let’s try to support that with examples or at least attribute the opinion to someone rather than just throwing it up there.

The museum does have a lot of cool stuff, although I would have appreciated more labels telling me what the cool stuff was or why I was looking at it.

This sort of thing may well be a fun trip down memory lane for someone who lived in Communist Czechoslovakia, but for the rest of us, it’s a bit mystifying.

Our favorite such scene was the classroom, complete with good Communist child and, one presumes, good Communist badger.

One thing I did learn at the museum was the story of the Stalin Monument in Prague, which is just the sort of story one wants when one is demonstrating the absolute absurdity of the Soviets.

This monument was big. Seriously big. It was the biggest monument ever made to Stalin, and I think he was a guy with no shortage of big monuments. This one was 50 feet tall and more than 70 feet long and stood on a hill above the Moldau. Here’s what it looked like:

You may note that I’m referring to it in the past tense. That’s because it didn’t survive long. It was unveiled in 1955, just as Stalin was falling out of favor. Seven years later, the statue was blown up. That’s right, with explosives. I hear the plinth is great for skateboarding.

I said the coolest thing about the museum is the posters – I was tempted to buy a t-shirt, even though I didn’t like the museum – but there were actually two other neat features. First, this is the stairway that leads up to get to the museum’s entrance (which it shares with a casino):

And, second, it’s right next to a McDonald’s. Yay for capitalism?

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The National Museum in Prague had a particularly large number of trilobites. I gather the Czech Republic is rich in them – the rocks that are at the surface there must be from an era when trilobites ruled the seas. Some even have some version of “Bohemia” in the names – Bohemia was the name for the western part of today’s Czech Republic, back before Czechoslovakia formed. For example, here’s our friend Bohemoharpes ungula ungula:

He appears to be an important little guy, because at some point he had his portrait done:

Going to a museum without many labels in English is kind of like going on some sort of a detective expedition. Why is this here? Why does it seem to be important? I wonder if this is connected to something we saw out in the hall:

It looks like a page in a book, but it’s actually the mirror image of a page in a book – it’s a stone used to print a lithograph. This actually did have an English label next to it, which said it’s a page of Bohemian trilobites from an 1852 book about the Silurian period in Central Bohemia. The Silurian ran from about 444 million years ago to about 416 million years ago – the dinosaurs didn’t appear til more than 150 million years after that, so we’re talking about a long time ago.

There’s a ton of different trilobites. Here’s a cutie:

The label says it was found in Prague, and it’s a Bumastus hornyi. (I can’t read Czech, but I know Latin names and the conventions of museum labels.)

Here are a bunch of its friends, one of many cases of trilobites in the museum:

See? All shapes and sizes. You may think “trilobite” and think it’s just one thing, but they’re really diverse; I’ve seen ones that are the size of a pinky fingernail and bigger than a dinner plate. And since they’re arthropods with hard exoskeletons, they get fossilized pretty easily and show up in rocks all over.

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Cases and cases of minerals. Stuffed animal skins. Grand staircases. This, my friends, is what a natural history museum should be. It’s on a hill at the end of Wenceslas Square in Prague, in the Czech Republic, and I was delighted to get to visit it a few weeks ago on a business trip to Central Europe (with some vacation thrown in, too).

The sign by the door tells you you’re getting “PREHISTORICAL, MINERALOGICAL AND PETROLOGICAL, ZOOLOGICAL, OSTEOLOGICAL, PALEONTOLOGICAL, ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS, THE NATIONAL MUSEUM LIBRARY.” So right away you know this is a museum to be reckoned with. And then you go inside, buy your ticket, and approach the collections from the bottom of this grand stairway:

Then imagine your excitement when you enter the first gallery of minerals and it looks like this:

The old wooden cases! The endless ranks of rocks, labeled only in Czech and completely uninterpreted!

My boyfriend and I had fun figuring out what the minerals were – some, like “kuprit” and “zinkit” were pretty easy, but we had trouble with “zlato” – the team was split between gold and pyrite. (It was gold; pyrite is “pyrit.”) “Smithsonit” was quite self-explanatory. Most I probably wouldn’t know in English, either, like “diopsid” and “smaragd” and “axinit.” We went from there into a room of meteorites (chondrites is “chondrity”), also displayed in beautiful wooden cabinets – which, the English sign told me, were designed by the architect of the National Museum building and a professor of mineralogy. The cases were installed soon after the building was completed in 1891.

The fun of working out what the minerals are is fairly representative of the kind of fun you can have in the National Museum in Prague. Now, you know I love my natural history museums, and this one is lovely. It’s great at one of the functions of natural history museums: displaying cool stuff. But it scores low on another function: educating the visitor. The schoolkids we saw wandering through looked pretty universally bored, with the exception of these girls:

The zoology halls were redone in the 60s – note the somewhat more modern-looking cases. Here’s a closer look over one girl’s shoulder:

Other exhibits in the museum included fossils, birds, reptiles, and an exhibit on Czech fairy tales that was really quite hard to follow if you are not familiar with (a) Czech fairy tales and (b) Czech.

The exhibit was kind of exciting to walk through, because it was modern and was done to feel like a forest and villages and such, so it had dim lighting, ramps and passageways, and a very different feel than the glass-cases-in-large-rooms aesthetic of the rest of the museum. There were even labels in English, but we couldn’t quite figure out what was going on; the exhibit appeared to be blending artifacts from the tribes that lived in the area thousands of years ago with the tales that Czech children grow up with, and it just didn’t make a lot of sense to a person who didn’t grow up with those stories.

I think that’s enough Czech natural history for one day. More soon.

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photos: me