I know exactly how he feels.

San Jeronimo en su Estudio (16th century), Catedral de Burgos, Spain.

And a HUGE congratulations to Melissa, who not only passed her prelims yesterday with flying colours, but also did her very first-ever keg-stand at the party later that night! Yay Melissa!!!

As I wrote in my last post, I made it to Burgos Monday evening. My flash hadn't arrived yet, and since I couldn't snatch anything until it did, I wandered around Burgos a little bit the next day. I had a meeting with Dr. Bermudez de Castro (Spanish anthropologist in-charge of the fossil I came here to see), but it wasn't until 5 pm.

Burgos is a pretty little medieval town (well, the old part.) Here are some photos:







The Burgos Cathedral:





I really hope that Melanie checks the blog soon and reads this post. I actually ran into some old friends on the street here in Burgos the other day. (Melanie doesn't know who they are, but she'll find it funny because back when we were in high school, whenever we were out somewhere in Toronto together, no matter where, I unfailingly ran into somebody that I knew. And Toronto is a pretty big city. And we lived waaaaay out in suburbia.)

Anyways, on Tuesday afternoon I was walking down the street looking for a place to get some lunch. Just as I'm about to cross the road, I hear these 2 voices call out, "Jodi???" It was these two Georgian girls that I met when I was working at Dmanisi. It's been 3 years since I was at Dmanisi; Annie and Mariam are at least 10 years younger than I am, and they've grown up a bit since I last saw them -- that's my excuse for not recognizing them immediately. (Well, that and I really didn't expect to run into old Georgian friends on the street in Burgos, Spain.) They were on their way to lunch with some Spanish friends (they all work for the anthropologist I was meeting with later that day), so I tagged along.

It was really great to have people to eat lunch with! Well, until they made me eat blood. It's called "Morcilla de Burgos", and it's a traditional Burgos dish. I don't know if even Bernardo would eat blood. (And yeah, jer, I reverted back to the dark side. It was Tim Horton's chicken soup on a long, cold drive back to Toronto, while feeling like I was coming down with a cold, that did me in. I feel your disappointment. Please still love me. I'll never eat a bunny, I promise.)



Mariam and Annie are the 2 on the far left. I'm (in case it's been so long and you don't remember my face anymore) the second one from the right with the huge goofy grin, so happy to have friends for a few hours again (and drunk on blood.)

Later that evening, after my meeting with Dr. Bermudez de Castro (which went well; he's really nice and super helpful), I went over to Annie's apartment (she shares it with the other girls in the photo) for dinner, and Mariam made Khachapuri. I haven't had khachapuri since I was last in Georgia, so this was just so totally great. Mariam is Annie's younger sister, and she was in Burgos visiting for a week or so. She had brought other traditional Georgian foods with her too, including "tkemali" -- a slightly sweet, slightly sour, sauce made from Georgian plums. Aside from the tomatoes (which taste better in Georgia than anywhere else in the world), tkemali was my favourite Georgian food. It was really wonderful to reconnect with old friends, catch up on all the news from Georgia, and just hang out with great people and have fun. (I even tried out some of the Spanish that Martin and Bernardo have taught me. It got the reaction you'd think it would ;)

My flash arrived the next day in the afternoon (thank you again to Dan and Ben!!!!), so this morning I was finally able to go to the Museo de Burgos to shapecam the fossil I came here to see.

Museo de Burgos:



My (little) French has really come in handy here. Nobody at the Museo spoke any English, but a few did speak French. The woman who runs the biblioteca in the Museo took me out for a coffee this morning and we had a conversation in Franish. (Or Spench?) I spoke poor French, she spoke French and Spanish. I think we talked about her vacation to Budapest.

On Sunday I leave for Paris (it's actually 2 trains, not one.) I hope the flash holds up and nothing else goes wrong. Now I'm totally paranoid. I only had to photograph one small and fragmentary fossil today, so I didn't really take that many pictures. Of course, the majority of the fossils I came to Europe to see are housed in the last 2 museums I'll be going to visit ;)

It took over 32 hours, but I made it to Burgos in one piece. My plans with my friend in Marseille fell through, so I made the trip in one shot. Five trains in total. I'm glad I'll be here for a few days; I don't really feel like seeing the inside of another train for a little while.

I was sad to leave Torino. I was able to walk around the city a little near the end of my visit -- it's a nice place. Aside from the horrible man at ticket booth number 3 in the Torino train station, who screamed at me in Italian and made me cry, every single person I met in Turin was really nice. Seriously -- super people. Even the men who make kissing noises at you from across the street (hey, at least they stay on the other side of the street, unlike the creepy guy in Nice) were kind of nice when they did it. Anyways, go there. Good place. Here are my best photos from Turin:





Because I had to change trains in Nice, I got to experience the special Hell that is the Nice Ville train station again. Here's an idea of what it was like:





Scaffolding, tons of people, really hot, ugh. If I never see that place again, it'll be too soon. (Just the station. I liked the old part of Nice a lot.)

Because I'm still sore from dragging all my stuff on and off 5 different trains and I want you to share in my pain (or it's just a blatant plea for sympathy), here's another shot of everything I'm carrying around:



I made a friend while waiting for the Irun-Burgos train -- a French student studying something (I don't know what, she was talking very fast in French and I was sooo tired at that point, so I just kept nodding and saying, "oui") in Vittoria, Spain. It was great to have someone watch my bags while I found the only clean bathroom between Turin and Burgos. She was really very nice, but it was soo hard to stay awake and pay attention to what she was saying to me. (Negro, I now totally understand how you feel when you're too tired to speak English anymore.) She just kept talking and talking and doing it so very fast in French. I think she caught on that I wasn't paying attention, because after a while she kept poking at me and asking, "Tu comprendes?" (Or however it's spelled.) Oui? Oui?" I passed out the second she left the train.

Now I'm here in Burgos, but I can't start working until my flash arrives. It's still at customs in Madrid, but the customs guy thinks it'll take a day or two for it to get to Burgos. Hopefully I can get everything done on either Thursday or Friday. I'm meeting with the anthropologist-in-charge this afternoon. So far, they've been really understanding. There are a few people whose schedules I need to fit into, so I hope it works out. I'm glad I scheduled the full week here.

On Sunday I'll take the train back up to Paris. It's an overnight trip again, but at least it's just one train, direct from Burgos to Paris. I'll spend 2 days in Paris, followed by a few days in London (kind of excited to take the Eurostar, but don't like the idea of traveling under all that water), and then another few days back in Paris before flying back home. It'll be good to get back, I think. I've missed my beans.

Oh hey - if anyone's looking for a good book to read, I just read Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I read the whole thing on this last train trip. It was fantastic. I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats, etc. Totally heartbreaking, but really, really great. It's about a little boy who's father died in the 9/11 attacks (tj, you might find it really interesting.) It's actually about much more than that, and you should read it. Go. Now. Stop reading this blog and go read this book.

I like book recommendations from friends, so if any of you do too, two other books I've read on this trip are Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Neither of these are the most recently published of books, but in case you haven't read them already, I highly recommend them. (I also read the Da Vinci Code, but I figure so has the rest of the world, too :)

Technical Difficulties

So yesterday afternoon, just as I was snatching my second-to-last skull, I go to push the button to take a picture, and I hear a very loud, "POP!"

Not a good sound.

I tried to take another photo, but - nothing. The camera snapped a picture, but no flash, um, flashed. The shapecam has a regular Canon Speedlite 550 EX flash (for you photography folks), and this is attached to the particular apparatus that holds the grid pattern I've shown most of you at some point in time. When I take a picture, this flash projects this grid on to the skull I'm photographing. I had a feeling the bulb in the flash broke, so I removed it and looked inside, and, sure enough, bulb gone boom.

I was wondering when something was going to break on this trip, and I was kind of surprised that nothing had gone wrong yet, to tell you the truth. We tried to see if the bulb could be replaced here in Turin, but it has to be done by a specialized Canon replacer person (or something like that ;) A new flash would have cost over 500 Euros, so - no to that, too. Now, if I had listened to Dan in the first place, as he so rightly pointed out to me yesterday, and brought an extra flash with me, this wouldn't pose a problem. But I didn't. I will always listen to Daniel in the future. (You see that, Dan? I've put it in writing. On the web! For all to see!)

But all is not lost :) A replacement is being shipped (again, thanks to Dan & Ben) to my hotel in Burgos (my next stop), and it will hopefully arrive in time for me to start working again next week. Even if it arrives a day or two after I was originally scheduled to start, it'll be ok. There'll still be time. Phew. (But keep some fingers crossed for me anyways, ok?)

------------------------------------------------------------

Actually, keep your fingers crossed that I make it to Burgos in time. I just spent the last couple hours in the Torino train station, going back & forth from different information offices & ticket booths. It's going to take me over 24 hrs to get to Burgos from here. I need to make reservations for two of the four (hopefully just four) trains I need to take, but they could only give me a reservation here for one of them. Great. So now I'm going to have less than 1 hr, once I reach Nice tomorrow, to change trains and get a reservation for the night train I need to catch to Spain. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but there were huge line ups every single time I was in the Nice train station last week. Fantastic. Cross whatever you can, please.

Ok you whiners, here's your new post ;)

I went to Cannes on one of my days off last week. Just off the coast of Cannes lies the Ile de Sainte-Marguerite. There's a cool old fort on the island, along with the prison where the "Man in the Iron Mask" (Leonardo DiCaprio) was held captive. I couldn't take pictures inside the cell, but here's a shot of the outside:



His cell was the 2nd or 3rd window from the left.

Here are some more pictures of Cannes:







On Monday I left Nice (and the sea) for Turin. I'm here in order to see a little baby Neandertal frontal bone & a collection of modern human crania. This collection is absolutely amazing. But first, I've got to tell you how wonderful the people in the Dipartimento di Anatomia are.





Everyone here is really great and unbelievably helpful. They all get along really well with each other & go out for lunch together every day. The director of the department actually made my hotel reservation for me, met me at my hotel my first morning here & dragged the shapecam over to the department himself. He has treated me to lunch twice already this week, and offered to contact other people in Italy in order to help me get permission to see other fossil skulls in the country. Oh yeah -- and he's offered me copies of some French dissertations that he thinks may be helpful for my project. So great.

The collection is also fabulous. They have over 1 thousand skulls that were collected in the 19th century from the med school & local prisons. They know the age at death and sex of each skull, and in some cases they also know the birth date & name of the individual. They also have the brains from a great majority of them too (hint, hint, Melissa...) You all need to come here & see this collection. Even if your work has nothing whatsoever to do with human crania, you should still come here. Even if just for the frequent espresso breaks & the great restaurant just down the street where the owner's mother makes all the pasta herself at home.

I don't have many photos of Turin yet, unfortunately. I've been working all day, every day, and I may not get to see much of the city at all. I guess the purpose of this trip is research, so I shouldn't really complain (it's not like I haven't had much time to explore any of the other places I've been to, right?)

The other day I went to check out the paleolithic site of Terra Amata. Terra Amata is thought by its excavators to be a Homo erectus kill site. Evidence of tools, huts & hearths have been found at the site and dated to between 450,000 and 380,000 years ago. Now the site consists of a small museum situated below a modern apartment complex.



Inside the museum they have a huge cast that was made of the site floor, along with replicas of one of the structures that is thought to have existed there:



(Note the wireframe hominin inside.)

There were also a few fantastic small display cases with little H. erectus figures going about their H. erectus lives:



A big part of the museum was devoted to the site of Dmanisi. They had posters on the walls explaining the site, casts of some of the skulls found there, and a reconstruction of 2 of the Dmanisi hominins. Made me nostalgic for my Dmanisi days.

I also took a daytrip to Monte Carlo.



Saw the royal palace:



and the casino:





Outside the Museum of Oceanography:

For David:

People, we need to talk about the commenting. You need to comment!! I'm having fun, but travelling alone for so long can be lonely! Comments on my blog post make me happy. Besides the old man I met at the Menton train station (who told me that it sounds like a song when I speak French. Aww,he was a sweet, but obviously senile, old man) and the creepy guys who hang out by the water and follow me around the old town, trying to get me to have tea with them, I have nobody to talk to. I like my alone time, but I'm a social creature! Talk to me! I'll see friends in a week or so, but until then, post a comment! Yes, I'm talking to you.

Oh yeah -- and I'm totally speaking French. Most of the time I'm making it up as I go along, but people seem to understand me...

The other night I watched the French version of American Idol (it's called Nouvelle Star.) Gael is totally going to win. He sung a Roch Voisine song. Anybody, besides Kevin, know who Roch Voisine is?

This is another long one...

I left Munich Sunday evening on a night train to Milan. It left at 9pm & wasn't scheduled to arrive in Milan until 8am the following morning. The day trains only take 7 hours to reach their destination & I wondered why the overnight trains take so much longer. I thought that maybe they just went slower, or stayed longer at each stop. Maybe some do, but my train went north, all the way up to Strasbourg, France, before heading south through Switzerland to Italy. I had a small "couchette", which is basically a flat bench. I'm short, so I could stretch out fully, but the couchette above me was so low that I couldn't actually sit up at all. This was the 2nd overnight train I've taken; the first was in Georgia, when a few of us took a train from Tbilisi to Batumi. On that train the benches were plastic (or made of some other slippery material), so with each stop (and there were many & most without any kind of warning, like a slowing down of speed, which usually happens when a train is coming to a stop) I had to try to grasp hold of something to stop from sliding off my bench into the middle of the car. That was quite the trip, and I didn't get much sleep, but this train ride was a little more gentle, so I was able to doze a bit.

Once I reached Milan, I had a 3 hr wait to catch my train to Nice. The Museo dei Balzi Rossi is right on the border with France, so I'm staying in Nice this week. Here's a photo from the station in Milan:



The train to Nice took ~5 hrs and stopped in Genova mid-way. The train was packed with people for that first half of the journey -- people were standing in the aisles & stealing seats the moment one was vacated. Trying to get all my stuff on to that train (and trying to find a place to put it once it was on) was the hardest thing I've had to do on this trip so far. I tried to be nice at first, saying "excuse me" ( in Italian, French, English & German) and "sorry" whenever I accidentally hit someone with a bag, but I gave up when it became apparent that nobody cared. Nobody would budge an inch to let me through (even when there was room to do so) and nobody bothered to do the same when they hit me in the head with a bag. So I just held on to my bags, looked directly ahead, & barreled through the crowd (not trying to hit anybody, but not stopping when I did) until I found a place to put everything and kicked the squatter out of my seat. The ride from Genova to Nice was beautiful. The train goes right along the Mediterranean coast (and right through the mountains at times.)

The next day I was scheduled to see the Upper Paleolithic skeletons in the Museo dei Balzi Rossi. There are 4 of them in the museum & they were all found in the Barma Grande caves directly above the museum. The museum is in Ventimiglia, Italy, which is the 1st town immediately across the border from France. I didn't have much in the way of directions to the museum, but I was told that it was only 500 metres from the Menton-Garavan train station and easy to reach on foot. Well, a French-Italian metre must be longer than a North American metre because it's actually a 30 minute walk (longer if you're dragging a big Pelican case with a computer, a shapecam, and a tripod.) The museum is not visible from the station, so I'm eternally grateful to the French or Italian (couldn't tell) guy who not only pointed me in the right direction, but helped me carry everything down the stairs.

The walk to the museum was absolutely gorgeous, and since I had to stop to rest every so often, I took pictures:



Here's one of the French-Italian border:



In-between gasping at all the prettiness, I was cursing the heaviness of the case & the lack of taxis anywhere in sight. When a wave came crashing up & over that wall you see, pretty much drenching both me & the shapecam (good thing the case is waterproof), I had to just stop & laugh at the situation I had gotten myself into. If any of you are planning on visiting this museum in the future, contact me first. I'll tell you to take a cab from the nearest large train station.

Everything was great once I got to the museum. The skeletons were still in their glass display cases though, so I had to wait for them to be removed. Everyone at the museum were really super wonderful & very interested in the shapecam. I had a little crowd around me the entire time that I was working, which was a little unnerving, but everything went fine.



After I was done with the photographing, I was able to go up & see the caves from which the skeletons were excavated. Here are a couple of the Grotta di Florestano:





After seeing the caves, I got a ride back to the station & made it back to Nice in one piece. I really miss the train stations in Germany; every single station that I saw in Germany had escalators and/or elevators, making it much easier to get up & down from the platforms. Traveling with so much stuff has really made me more aware of places that are not handicap-accessible! At this point I'm half-way through my trip. I don't know if I'm any stronger from carrying around so much stuff, but I can say with certainty that I am more bruised ;)

Vieux Nice:



The sea at Nice:



It's nice to be by water again.

In case you missed reading about this in the comments, the bugablog has made the ITG webpage!:

http://www.itg.uiuc.edu

Now I wish I had smiled.

Now that I have a camera again, I can show you photos of many things, like, the math building here in Munich in which the Ofnet skulls are kept:



The Alte Pinakothek...



and the Neue Pinakothek:



Here are two Bavarian men looking at the Glyptothek museum:



Here's a closer look at the two Bavarians, because they were just so totally cute:



Wednesday night (and most of Thursday too) were spent bugabarfing (or barfabooing, take your pick, but I gotta give Daniel credit for that second one) in my hotel. (I must have eaten some bad schnitzel or strudel, or something. Or maybe it was too much Münchner Bier in the Viktualienmarkt?) In any case, that wasn't fun. But, hey, those were 2 days that I didn't spend any money!

By Friday I had recovered enough to go see the Dachau concentration camp memorial:





Those long rows of gravel are where the barracks used to be.

Yesterday, I took a day trip to Salzburg. It was a gorgeous day, the first really warm & sunny one I've had so far (but it's raining again today.) After 5 years of living in the midwest, it was really cool to see mountains again. I actually shouted, "mountains!" when I first saw them. Good thing my train was full of other tourists who were just as excited as I was. Since my mom has been asking for me to post another photo with me in it, here's a picture I took from the train. I was trying to catch my first close glimpse of the Bavarian Alps:



Pictures from Salzburg:






The Mozart family grave:



Inside Mozart's geburtshaus. Somehow I don't think his name was scrawled on the wall like that during the time he lived there:



Tonight I catch a night train to Milan, followed by an early morning train the next day to Nice. That's where I'll be staying while I shapesnatch some Upper Paleolithic skulls at the Museo de Balzi Rossi, in Ventimiglia, Italy. My Italian is worse than my German, unfortunately, but it'll be nice to be able to communicate in French again! Ciao.

On Monday, I dragged the shapecam over to that pretty yellow building you saw in my previous post, in order to photograph some Upper Paleolithic skulls & the collection of Mesolithic crania from the Ofnet site. That's where I met up with George, an American from Santa Barbara, CA. George has lived in Munich for years now, and he was the one in charge of my visit (showing me around, telling me where the skulls were, etc.) It turns out that the skulls aren't actually housed in that pretty yellow building, but in the cellar of the math department at the university. (Odd location? No?)

Before George took me over to their cellar, I met some of the other anatomists & anthropologists who get to work in the pretty yellow building with all the windows. A couple of them drove over to the cellar with us, and before I started photographing, I showed them how the shapecam worked. That's when I learned the German word for "cool" (I don't know how to spell it, but it sounds like, "klasse!")

It took 2 days in the cellar to shapecam everything. I wasn't alone the whole time; there was one man there who would come by every so often & show me a really cool-looking pathological skull. George would stop by to check up on things & we traded stories of getting injured and/or sick while traveling. He told me a story about his cousin who went scuba diving in the Philippine Sea, which was part Open Water, part Jaws, and part In Harm's Way. (I will never go scuba diving in the Philippine Sea.) George also told me scary stories of getting mugged in Italy, so I'm now convinced that I'm going to get gassed & robbed on the train the second it enters the country. Thanks, George. (Kidding, a little. George was actaully a really klasse guy, in case some of you are planning on visiting the Dept. of Anthropology here in the future.)

When I returned to my hotel today after finishing up with the skulls, I had a lovely surprise waiting for me! Well, ok, it wasn't really a surprise since I was expecting it. But I was happy that it finally arrived. Dan and Ben at the ITG in the Beckman Institute at UIUC sent me a digital camera to use for the rest of my trip! How great are they?! They do have an ulterior motive, as I promised to give a talk after I return about what it was like to shapecam my way around Europe, and when I do so, they'd like to be able to see some pictures. But still -- they sent me a camera! They rock. Thanks Dan & Ben! I'm giving this computer a thank-you hug right now. (But just a quick one. I'm in an internet cafe & who knows what was going on at this computer before I got to it. I really don't want to touch it any more than I have to.) Everybody: hug your computer and thank Dan & Ben!

Because of them, I have some Munich photos for you. Here's a statue that somebody gave some real flowers to hold:



Here's the Viktualienmarkt on a cold Tuesday evening. Not too cold for beer, though:



And here's the fish fountain in the Marienplatz:



I have a few free days before heading off to get gassed & robbed in Italy. Laundry is necessary at this point, but since I'm so close, I'd also like to go spend a day in Salzburg. I'll also go see Dachau too. The weather's been changing here every 30 minutes or so (rain, sun, wind, hail, warm, cold, etc.) I hope I get a couple of nice days!