Kevin's Photoblog

The Berlin-Tagel Airport is half-way between Ulan Bator (Mongolia) and New York City (US).

I love European bakeries.  In Budapest to Vienna we found mostly cakes in the bakeries, but in Berlin we finally find what I have been looking for:  European pastries!  What we in the US generally call donuts appears to be more of a western-European thing.  But in this display is an “Amerikaner” donut.  I buy one but find this to be like nothing I have seen in America.  So why the name?  After some thought, I have the answer: this is Berlin joke.  John F. Kennedy, when he visited the Berlin Wall in 1963 said “Ich bin ein Berliner” which literally means “I am a jelly donut” since that is what a “Berliner” means in German  (I am from Berlin would be “Ich bin Berlin”).  So, among the Berliner donuts, this bakery has an “Amerikaner”!

We have arrived in Berlin for a night before Kate returns to the US and I to Szczecin.  Here we have a final dinner, for a while, at a microbrewery restaurant.  I have a very good (11% alcohol) dark beer with sausages and sauerkraut while has Berlin-meatballs, which are quite good.

We are enroute from Bratislawa, Slovakia to Praha (Prague), Chech Republic (also known as Chechia) on board a train.  We very seldom travel on board trains in the US, but travel in Europe shows that this can be done with surprising efficiency.  On this trip, we sat next to a little area where children could watch videos for entertainment, and is one of the many interesting ideas I see on these trains.  Trains are one of the things that I think we will have to get back to once the predicted oil peak transpires.  I know that airplanes work as mass transportation as well, but trains can actually be powered by electricity while large airplanes cannot.  (You probably do not want to ask me where the electricity [or hydrogen fuel] will have to come from).

A dinosaur egg nest showing that the eggs were laid in pairs, something that I did not previously know.  Modern birds also have two oviducts but one is closed, thus eggs are laid singly.

Those who have visited my office in Presque Isle know that to be decorated in pterosaurs.  Here is a large full-sized skeletal construction in walking stance.

Shown here are reconstructions of Homo neanderthalensis and Australopithecus afarensis (“Lucy”).  The models – if you can them that – are real size, very well done and can be examined from direction very closely, and are typical of the high quality of many of the special exhibits in this museum. The Neanderthal display is of an older and younger male and shows how the skull developed as the individual matured, with the “sloping” forehead of the adult.  The australopithecines are a couple, displayed in the context of a cast of Mary Leakey’s footprints from Laetoli, set into the floor – I actually walked out the trackway.

I did not take pictures but should mention the simply incredible displays of iron and bronze- age artifacts and culture.  Absolutely fascinating, especially as this is something that I previously knew little about.

For some reason, these pictures came in out-of-focus – this was in a small special room and the camera must have reacted badly in the odd light conditions – but I show these anyways.  This is the world’s most famous prehistoric human artifact, the Venus of Willendorf, made circa 29,500 years ago.  This is about the size of a ladies fist (11 cm), found 1908, carved from oolitic limestone.

Johanne Beringer was one of the early scientists who tried to systematically study fossils.  The problem was that he published a book in 1726 on spectacular “fossils” that in reality were carved by some very obnoxious students of his.  The point here is that so little was known at the time about fossils in general and more specifically the fossilization process that he could be taken in by such a hoax.  This is one of the original “fossils.”  I have heard that several of these survived in the Science Museum in London, but this is the first I have ever seen personally; size is about 25 cm across, so that is a pretty large fly, which should have given Beringer an inkling.

This (left) is the largest fossil spider in the world, from Argentina.  The body area is about 35 cm long – the size of a casserole dish.  The spider lived in the Carboniferous Period at a time when oxygen levels where higher than today, which produced larger arthropods.