Totem poles in Seattle

I biked down to the AAA office to pick up maps for my trip, and since it was such a very nice day, I continued to bike down to the University area. I stopped at the Burke Memorial Museum of Natural History and Culture. It is a small museum with essentially two permanent exhibits and two temporary exhibits.



The permanent exhibits were of aboriginal peoples of the Pacific Rim and the local geology of the state of Washington; the temporary exhibits were of polar bears in Alaska and Arctic migratory birds. Both of these exhibits were photographic.



The geological exhibit was interesting, I was expecting the geological history of Washington to be similar to that of BC but it is not, primarily because the glaciers did not extend this far south. When the glaciers melted a large lake was formed in Washington and that shaped much of the landscape of the state interior.



They also had an Egyptian mummy on display, I guess that would be their Odds and Ends exhibit.



I took some photos of the totem poles outside of the museum.

A sunny day for a bike ride

Today was a nice sunny day so I thought I'd go for a bike ride around Green Lake, which is just a short distance from Dave's place. It's a very pretty little lake, similar to Trout Lake in Vancouver but a bit larger I think. And apparently safer for swimming, they have signs up allowing swimming anywhere up to 50 feet from shore. In Trout Lake you can only swim at the supervised beach at one end.

I also saw someone out in a kayak on the lake, it made me think about doing the same. Maybe tomorrow if the sunny weather holds. There were lots of people walking, running and roller blading around the lake, I only saw one other bike.

I biked around the lake once in one direction and then a second time in the other direction. I saw a Great Western Grebe on the lake, haven't seen one of them in a very long time. Also saw a stand of Bald Cypresses, a very interesting looking tree. From a distance it looked to me like a redwood, but then I got up close and saw that its needles are quite different.

I also went shopping for groceries for Dave and for my trip. The supermarket had substantial savings on food items if you have a card for that chain, but of course I didn't. However, when I was looking at the apples, the guy in Produce told me I could get the card price anyway, just tell them at the cash that he said so. So I did, and the cashier gave me the sale price, along with an application for a card. Should I fill it in?

She asked where I was from, I said Canada, and she said, Oh isn't it nice that your dollar is the same as ours now. I said, Not anymore, it's gone down!

She said she'd been in Victoria for her wedding anniversary last February and it had been so expensive because the Canadian dollar was worth more than the American then. I said, Too bad you couldn't postpone till now, you'd have saved a bunch!

As it is, I'm paying pretty high prices for groceries here. The prices of things in Seattle are much the same as in Vancouver, but the dollar is just worth more (or less, depending on your perspective).

I looked at the weather map of the US on a website that showed what the predicted temperatures and precipitation will be for almost a week ahead. My big concern is cold temperatures at night and possible snow on the road in the Rockies. It looks like I can minimize both if I leave here Thursday morning. Even so it will go below freezing at night in the Rockies, so I will have to try to stay at lower elevations at night.

My hope is to get to Toronto around the 28th, leaving on Thursday gives me ample time. I'm probably going to take I-80 rather than I-90 across, but we'll see.

A Canadian in America, attack ads and initiatives

Dave works during the week but I decided to stay on for a few days to cook some food for my trip home, do a little laundry, and catch up on my blog. Dave's cat Diamond is not sure what to make of me, she is not used to other people being around but she hopes that I might be good for opening doors and putting out catfood.

On Monday it rained most of the day so I stayed indoors. When Dave got home we watched some TV. I am amazed at how different the political ads on TV are from the ones in Canada. Our election was quite brief in comparison, less than two months. But we don't have primaries, each party already has its leader going into the election. I don't know how Americans can keep up their interest in an election process that takes two years!

The ads I saw on TV were all negative ads. You only know about a candidate through what the opposing candidate says about him or her, and of course it is quite bad. So you never hear much good about anyone! Washington State is I gather supporting the Democrats unequivocally (for President, that is), so neither party has any Presidential ads on TV. That is a done deal here, the ads are all for Governor and members of Congress. Lots of Obama bumper stickers around. Dave's next door neighbour supports McCain, but he has no lawn signs for him. Instead he has three lawn signs for other Republicans running for Congress and Governor. Dave figures his neighbour is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican who has doubts about McCain.

Another interesting thing, Dave gets an election pamphlet that describes every candidate running for every open office, and all of the referendums and initiatives being voted on as well. It's huge! Almost a small novel! The information is quite detailed, so I guess if you never saw a TV attack ad you could still make up your mind on the basis of the less biased information in the pamphlet.

I found the initiatives quite interesting, we don't have initiatives in Canada. I am still not clear on what the difference is between an initiative and a referendum, but referendums are pretty rare in Canada too. Each initiative is described in detail, including background history of the initiative, lists of pro and con arguments for it, the exact costs of each initiative and even rebuttal arguments for the pro and con arguments. There is one for opening up HOV lanes during off peak hours, one for assisted suicide, and I forget what the third one was about.

There's a huge emphasis here on taxes. It's all about reducing taxes, or at the very least not raising taxes. I find it odd that the richest country in the world is so hung up on not spending tax money. Dave explains it to me as a fear of "Big Government", somehow government is viewed as a necessary evil and god forbid it get any more money or else it will become even more evil. Somehow, in spite of this fear of Big Government and rising taxes, the US administration still manages to spend huge amounts on war and subvert the American constitutional separation of powers and protection of civil rights.

A country of contradictions.

Lucy's Legacy

On Sunday we planned to go see Lucy's Legacy at the Pacific Science Center. On the way we passed the Seattle Center and there was a Turkish Cultural Festival going on there. I was hoping we could get some Turkish food as snacks before proceeding to the Science Center, but there was none there. We had fish and chips instead. There was however Turkish dancing which we watched a bit of.

I took some photos, but they did not turn out well, not enough light. According to the program, we had already missed the Whirling Dervishes (which I would have loved to have seen) and the Belly Dancing (which Dave would have liked). We proceeded on to the Pacific Science Center.

You're not allowed to take photos in the exhibit, so instead I am showing the Space Needle which we passed on the way to the Science Center, and the towers at the entrance to the Science Center.

Lucy is the name given to an ancient hominid fossil skeleton found in Ethiopia. Her official Latin name is Australopithecus afarensis, it means "southern ape of Afar" (Afar is the nearest Ethiopian town to where her bones were found). One skeleton is not much to make a full exhibit out of, so the display is fleshed out with a history of Ethiopia and some background on the evolution of hominids.

Ethiopia, in brief

The part of the exhibit about Ethiopia itself is rather interesting. Ethiopians trace their history back to Solomon. The last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, is considered to be the last of Solomon's line, via the Queen of Sheba. Whether this is actually true or not is another question, but Ethiopian has certainly been ruled by a long line of emperors from several centuries BCE. Back in the nineteenth century (CE), when European countries were carving up Africa into colonial empires, Ethiopia (then known as Abyssinia) was the only country that maintained its independence. All of the rest of the African continent was divvied up amongst various European colonial powers.

Italy tried to claim Ethiopia by a rather devious method: they signed a trade treaty with the emperor of Ethiopia but two copies of the treaty were prepared, one in the Ethiopian language and one in Italian, and they were worded differently. The Italian version called Ethiopia a "protectorate" of Italy, the Ethiopian one did not. When the Ethiopian emperor Menelik found out about the discrepancy, he called on the Italians to fix it, the Italians refused, and the upshot was that Italy sent an invasion force into Ethiopia. The Italians were beaten soundly by the Ethiopians at Adwa in 1896. This battle is celebrated in a mural showing ranks of Ethiopian soldiers and royalty on one side, and numerous Italian body parts on the other.

Later, in the lead-up to World War II, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and carried off many archaeological treasures, including a Stela erected in honour of the Queen of Sheba (Ethiopians assert that she was from there, other sources place her in Yemen). He also used chemical warfare against the Ethiopians, sending in planes that sprayed toxic chemicals on people and crops. Emperor Haile Selassie complained to the League of Nations but he was ignored. Italy and Germany went on to invade and occupy most of Europe and northern Africa shortly thereafter.

Ethiopia is home to strong Jewish, Orthodox Christian and Muslim traditions, the Jewish population dating itself as far back as the time of King Solomon and perhaps earlier. However today they have largely relocated to Israel. The Christian church in Ethiopia has been isolated from both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions of Europe and the Middle East, it is an entirely separate branch of Christianity that still practices rites of the earliest Christian churches.

Lucy, herself

At the very end of the display you get to see the skeleton and a model of what Lucy might have looked like in real life. She stands less than four feet high and appears to be faintly smiling. Her fossil remains were discovered in 1974, the same year that Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed. This discovery is considered pivotal because it answered the question, which came first, bipedalism or large brains. It turns out that Lucy had a brain the size of a modern chimpanzee but walked upright like a modern human. She is considered to be an ape and not a hominid, but there is strong reason to believe that hominids developed from her species.

Lucy represents the first ape that walked fully erect on two feet. Most apes either swing from tree branches or "knuckle-walk" on all fours. They can walk short distances on two feet, but it is awkward and not their preferred method of walking. Lucy was built to walk upright, she would have preferred this over knuckle-walking.

In the final display area of the exhibit is the actual skeleton, a model of what Lucy might have looked like, and a panoramic mural depicting some of Lucy's ancestors and descendents. At one end are great apes and at the other end are humans.

A couple of interesting things about this mural, the different species are somewhat mixed together because in all likelihood they overlapped each other's ranges in time and space, and the humans are brown. How many depictions of the evolution of humans have you seen that show hairy black-eyed brown apes at one end and blond blue-eyed white humans at the other? It was refreshing to see distinctively African facial features on the modern humans.

A ride in the Merc and a walk in the trees

It rained most of Friday but it started to let up a couple of hours before I left New Westminster. When I arrived at the border the sign said there was a ten minute delay, but there was only one car ahead of me in the line-up and the wait was more like five minutes.

I was prepared for a bit of a hassle, what with my "defective" passport and my mismatched licence plates (BC plate on the front, NS plate on the rear). But the US Customs guy did not seem concerned. He asked where I was going and where I lived, shone his flashlight into the space behind my seat and then handed me back my passport and wished me a good trip.

I was able to listen to CBC radio almost all of the way to Seattle. I was finally out of range about half an hour before arriving at Dave's, and then felt incredibly sleepy, so I put on the first tape I could reach in the dark, which turned out to be an old Moody Blues album. Cranked it up and it kept me awake the rest of the way.

I've known Dave for almost ten years, we've visited back and forth between Seattle and New Westminster many times. I've stopped working as a technical writer but Dave continues, currently on contract at Microsoft. He has a little bungalow in a quiet residential area and lives there with his cat Diamond. For almost as long as I've known him, he's been working on restoring a little red Mercedes that he acquired for next to nothing. Finally, it is driveable. Not finished, but driveable. So the highlight of this visit is a ride in the Merc.

Dave has been restoring cars for a very long time, he currently has four vehicles, two of which are licenced and driveable. One is a Rover, one a Lancia Scorpion, one a Toyota truck (the main work-a-day vehicle) and one the Mercedes. The Merc is the only one I have not yet had a ride in.

We spent a little time catching up with each other on Friday night. Dave normally stays up until 3:00am but these days I am lucky if I see midnight, so our waking hours are somewhat out of whack. By midnight I am good for nothing at all so I head for the bed made up for me in his office.

Saturday morning I am up early but Dave does not rise until close to noon. I make coffee and toast, do some browsing on his computer and a little work on my own computer. He does not have a router so I can only access the internet through his computer. When Dave gets up we continue our conversation for the next couple of hours and then I suggest we go out for a walk since it is sunny today. Dave says there is an exhibit at the Pacific Science Center called Lucy's Legacy that we could see, but it would be best to do that on Sunday. For today he suggests a ride in the Mercedes and a walk in the Arboretum. We have walked in almost all of the walkable places in Seattle, and I think we did the Arboretum when we first met, but after almost ten years I don't mind doing a repeat.

The ride is brief as the Mercedes still has one or two mechanical problems and Dave does not want to risk getting stranded too far from home. But it is a momentous occasion and probably my one and only ride in a classic Mercedes.

My memory of the first time we walked in the Arboretum was not particularly great, I mostly remember that it was close to the Interstate and you couldn't really get away from the highway noise. However, it was not that bad and we managed to walk in a part of the park that we hadn't been in before. Many but not all of the trees have little tags on them identifying them, but I was wishing Pat were here to help identify a lot of plants I had no idea about. I saw a Chinese Paperbark Maple that had bark like an Arbutus, very thin and peeling. I saw a fern that sort of looked like the Maidenhair, and sort of not, I don't know what it was and there was no tag for it.


For pictures and more information check out the Arboretum website.

We stopped at a QFC to shop for dinner, Dave picked up a couple of lamb chops and potatoes and lettuce. Great dinner!