It was about a one mile walk from the downtown trolley stop to Balboa Park, which is an amazing accomplishment for a city this size. It is a very pretty park right next to downtown with enough activities to keep you busy for weeks. Besides the San Diego Zoo it has 15 museums and several theaters, including a reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. It makes you wish Seattle hadn’t left Seattle Center stuck in 1962.
There were way too many museums interesting to (everything but art, basically) to cover in the few hours I had so I had to narrow my day down to two. I started with the Museum of Man, an anthropology museum. This is a pretty big subject for a fairly small museum, so its exhibits could only cover a few topics. The first things I came across were reproductions of several stelae from a ancient Mayan city. (Stelae are essentially big rocks with pictures and writing on them, frequently used by ancient civilizations to record important events or stories). These stelae were mostly about a king of a Mayan city who had conquered a neighboring city and apparently thought very highly of himself. The pictures and text on the rocks described him as a direct descendent of the Mayan gods. Mayan hieroplyphics looked very complex, so it is amazing that they have been deciphered so well. The Mayans created quite an advanced civilization in the central American jungles, but they were not very nice people sometimes, because they seem to have started wars just to take prisoners to sacrifice at their temples.
Another nice exhibit was a display of pictures and text from the work of Edward Curtis, who in the early 1900’s put years of incredibly hard work into taking pictures and recording songs and stories of every Native American tribe he could find. His work saved a lot of information about cultures that were changing drastically, and in many cases disappearing forever.
The biggest part of the museum was a very well done exhibit on the evolution of modern man, starting with the candidates for common ancestor of all apes, through the split from the gorillas and then the chimps, and all through the various hominds (human-like animals, including us) to the present. It did a nice job of showing the varieties of hominids that have lived over the last 4 million years, and in making clear that many of them lived at the same time and that the evolution from early apes to us was anything but a straight line. There were reproductions of some of the most famous fossils of human paleontology, such as Lucy (3.2 million years ago), the Taung child, and the Neanderthals. (Interested? There is a virtual tour at http://www.abouthumanevolution.org/html/site/intro.htm )
(Side note from Debbie: while you may be interested to go look at this, in my opinion this evolution theory of man from ape is clearly that....just a very misguided theory.)
Next I decided to check out the San Diego Museum of Natural History. It was pretty good, but did not have near as much as you would expect from the size of the building. I saw a very good IMAX movie about amazing variety of sea life in the Sea of Cortez, and there was a very good exhibit on the geology and fossils of very southern California.
After all that my feet were sore and the car was finished, so it was back on The Trolley and home.
While Mike was gone I took each of the dogs out for little walks around the park. On one of the walks I took Wazzu and Sparkie together. As we were walking, a lady was coming toward us and pointed to Wazzu and said "I know you." My mind starts racing wondering what the heck she was talking about. A couple seconds later she said "I know you, you're the window dog." She proceeded to tell me that she thinks Wazzu is so cute in our window and that she is so cute. It's so weird. For two years Wazzu never went in the window. Now she pretty much is there all the time. So thanks to that lady, we now call Wazzu "The Window Dog."
Later in the day I took Wazzu and Boogie on a hike. It was a beautiful day and it was so nice to be out in the fresh air in the wilderness - just the three of us. All three of us were walking along the path so nicely. All of a sudden Boogie does a huge leap into the grass.
He starts digging madly and barking like crazy. At first I was praising him as I want him to do that kind of thing when he is working the rats. But he just kept going and going and going. He just kept flinging dirt everywhere.
He really did make a deep hole. I was afraid if I let him keep going he'd disappear into the hole.
I couldn't get him to leave so I finally had to go over and pick him up and carry him away. But he had a great time chasing some kind of critter. I love seeing him have so much fun. Wazzu however didn't think it was all that much fun waiting for him so we could move on. But she was a very patient big sister.
To me, this was much more fun than going to museums! (But I'm glad Mike had a good time! And I'm really glad we got new brakes on the car - I feel much safer now.)
Debbie
2/6/08
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