Category: Fulbright – Szczecin Poland

Here I am in front of the Three Eagles (not dragons as I originally thought).  With me is my colleague Jakab’s daughter Ola.

I made the trip over to meet the University President (here called a Rector) and saw this building on the way back.  This is a very typical pre-war German building.  Some have been nicely reconditioned and are displayed in bright colors, like this one, others are much in need of TLC (“tender-loving-care” for my Polish readers).  One, just a block from my office, still had during my last visit, many bullets holes from the house-to-house combat that went through here with the Russians in 1945.  (That building has just been reconditioned, so I will have to look elsewhere for a picture of that effect.)

The Geology Department here is moving to a new second building, while retaining the old one, which had a small science museum not a whole lot different from ours.  They have received a big grant for display cases and are moving into much better digs!  They have been setting cases up all week; I cannot wait until the specimens start to move in.  Believe it or not (and you knowing me, know that I believe it), we could do something like this in northern Maine.  Not just geology of course, but something like this.

The first picture here is of chestnuts, collected immediately in front of the geology building.  The are the nuts “roasted on an open fire” of Bing Crosby fame.  Chestnuts were once the most prolific tress in the current United States, much as the Passenger Pigeon was likely the most prolific dinosaur (sorry Jason, bird!) in the US.  It was once said that a squirrel could cross the entire eastern half of the country moving from one chestnut tree to another and never touch the ground. But the chestnut trees had a blight that started some 150 years ago and has virtually wiped them out.  Chestnuts, though a different species, survive in Poland, but they too are under threat, here by a parasite of some kind.  The trees line the roads here and are very majestic – think of oak, but taller.

The other scientific task that is consuming my time is sample preparation.  I ordered samples from nearly a dozen deep sea drilling sites.  The four samples on the left, for example, are of Paleocene age (~60 million years old) from a core drilled in the early 1970s in the Eastern Indian Ocean.  I will break this samples down through a many-step process that includes treatment by hydrochloric acid (my geology know all about this!) and hydrogen peroxide.  The result will hopefully be isolated fossils that I can view in the light and electron microscopes.  I will show pictures of these fossils later, but it will be a while.

It has been two weeks since I arrived here.  I have been very busy here – already engaged in three projects – but do not yet have any silicoflagellate pictures to show.  Much of my time thus far, besides the process of meeting people, bank arrangements and so forth, has been devoted to reviewing the scientific literature as I gear up for my formal work, and preparing samples.  The picture here is what my desk looks like as I evaluate the literature on modern silicoflagellates so I can give advice to a graduate student here.

I finished my reading of POLAND, by James Michener.  I do not read novels very often, but James Michener was such a good writer of historical fiction, and his book on Poland was a good way to start my experience here.  Michener novels and very long and consist of many smaller stories that follow a family through time.  There is always one story that sticks to the mind – Levi Zendt from Centennial is someone everyone should read.   For Poland, if you have time to read but one chapter I would suggest the 7^th (VII), Mazurka.  It details two Poles who work together in the Ministry of Minorities in Vienna (a piece of Poland is integrated into the Austrian Empire at that time).  It is about 85 pages long but goes quickly, and you can enjoy this without having to read the whole book.

These are Zloty – Polish currency.  Poland is part of the European Unit but does not use the Euro.  They have 10, 20, 50 and 100 Zloty bills and 5, 2 and smaller Zloty coins.  I had all but the 50 Zl bill and 5 Zl coin in my pocket and so took a picture.  The faces on the bills are all very old Polish Kings (very old, since the last ended his reign in the early 1790s when Russia, German and Austria split Poland up between them).  A Zloty has a value of about 25 US cents.  But the money goes far: I have bought a large bag of groceries (fruit, water, yogurt, beer & etc.), almost as much as I can conveniently carry, for circa 70 Zloty.  Basically, prices in Poland for food is about 20-25% of US prices.  However, salaries are about 20-25% of ours.  We love to complain at UMPI about our low pay, but my colleagues in Poland are paid much much less.

This is at the Park, near the Jon Pawel statue.  We need to build one of these trains for The Fair!

This is the street on which both the Geology Department and my apartment are on.  Named after Adam Mickiewicza, national poet for Poland, Lithuania and Belarus (1798-1855).