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.

The other day I visited Casa Batlló. I wasn’t planning to blog about it. But then the audio tour was so annoying that I couldn’t keep it to myself.

If you were visiting an apartment building designed by a famous architect, and you were listening to the audio tour, which is the only source of information – there’s no wall text – wouldn’t you think that one of the first things you’d want to know was that it’s an apartment building? Somehow, that piece of information didn’t make it into the audio tour until pretty late, when they sort of mentioned the apartments in passing. If you, like me, didn’t already know that this wasn’t just the Batlló family’s house, you would be very confused about why the tour of their house wrapped up after one floor.

You might also be interested in learning things like where the Batlló family got their money, or why they thought it was a good idea to hire this architect, or the fact that it wasn’t new construction but actually a renovation of an older building, or what the neighbors thought about the absolutely insane facade.

See what I mean about the insane facade? I wonder what the neighbors thought about this on Barcelona’s most fashionable street in the first decade of the 1900′s.

Anyway, if you’re looking to the audio guide to tell you these things, you’d be looking at the wrong place. It started with a defense of the extremely high entrance fee and kind of went downhill from there, with a lot of description of what we’re looking at–which, you know, I can see for myself–and very little context.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing that made me roll my eyes. In one room, the guide told me: “In this part of the attic…, there is an unforgettable experience waiting for you. Once this commentary has finished, why not let yourself be carried away by the music and projected images.” That’s some overblown silliness for you right there, especially considering that the thing that was supposed to carry you away was video clips of bits of Gaudí buildings accompanied by excitable piano music. Forgive me for not being transported. The guide kept doing that, telling me what to feel and what opinions I should have.

Bad communication really gets on my nerves. There are a lot of people who have thought about how best to communicate. They could all tell you that, say, if you have a room on a roof where the water tanks used to be installed, and you use sound effects and light projections to evoke the feeling of running water, you don’t have to also tell people that you are using sound and visuals to evoke the feeling of water. You let the experience stand on its own. On the other hand, here are some things that might be worth telling your visitors when they’re visiting the water tank room: Was running water new? What were the tanks made of? Where did the water come from?

Oh, and for a touch of commercialism, the last recording on the audio tour was about the exhibition of chairs designed by Gaudí, including some “exquisite flower-inspired carvings”–how about letting me decide if they’re exquisite or not–and how you should go into the shop and order one, which they would deliver to your house with the utmost of care.

My crankiness about the audio tour aside, the house is fantastic. Gaudí was a creative guy. But if you go, take a guidebook.

Entrance to this historic building is €18.15, which is $23, and it is full of visitors. Perhaps the owners of Casa Batlló should take some of that cash and give it to someone who knows how to write an audio tour.

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.

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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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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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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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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