Travels of a Fish Nut

I'm flying to the Falklands via Chile tomorrow. The route isn't one I'd have chosen voluntarily as it takes loads longer than flying via Brize Norton and the luggage allowance is puny in comparison. But there aren't any Brize flights until mid- september and I've got to start earning money again so off I go. The route takes me to Madrid airport, Santiago airport and then Punta Arenas where I'm stopping for a couple of nights to recoup before the final leg to the Falklands. As I've not really recovered from getting back from L.A. I thought the stop was necessary. The point of this is that although as far as this blog's concerned I'm still in L.A. the next post about said city will in fact be posted from Stanley. I'm just getting a bit behind in my online diary! So I will write about the Natural History Museum and the Getty Center but it will have to wait until I've caught my breath after all this flying!

The La Brea tar pits are near Beverley Hills and were the first of three tourist attractions Sarah and I went to. They were really good. The outside part reminded me a lot of Rotorua, but instead of smelling of sulphur it smelt of warm tarmac (unsurprisingly really!). The tar pits have been trapping animals for tens of thousands of years. There are models of mastodons about to walk to their death in the main pit which has a layer of water over the tar. One of the pits is being excavated and you can watch. It’s only excavated during the summer because the warmer temperature makes it slightly easier to work although it’s still solid. There are loads of macrofossils but they have become increasingly interested in the microfossils such as rodent teeth and plant pieces which can provide a lot of information about the environment back when they were deposited. The museum is well-stocked with fossils. The highlights are sabre-tooth cats (not tigers), mastodons and dire wolves. These wolves w...

I went to L.A. for ten days to visit Sarah and to go to Mary’s wedding. I had a fantastic time, saw some of the sights and did far too much shopping! I flew with Air New Zealand which was weird but good. It was strange seeing the ‘Welcome to Auckland’ film which brought back loads of memories and made me quite homesick. We flew via Greenland and Arctic Canada. It was amazing seeing the icefields, glaciers and icebergs. Much of Canada was brown rather than white. I’m hoping that that was a normal view for this time of year – I’m pretty sure that Hudson Bay melts in summer. It was striking all the same. As it was summer it was daylight all the way and I had a window seat so sleeping was difficult! I really wanted to see Hudson Bay but it was taking ages to reach it and I finally decided to try and close my eyes. When I awoke we were over the mid-west! We flew over the Hoover Dam and near the Grand Canyon. The landscape was amazing. The rocks were different colours and there were canyons...

My uncle Dave has taken me on holiday several times while I was a poor student and now I’m earning (yay!) I thought I’d try and repay him, so I took him to London for his birthday. We went to the British Museum and the Proms. I had a great time and I think (I hope) Dave did too. We went to the Hadrian exhibition which was fantastic. It went through Hadrian’s life showing statues, models and various other artefacts. They had some Vindolanda tablets which are some of the earliest examples of cursive script. They’re really just everyday notes – lists, bills, short notes – and show the everyday life of people up at Hadrian’s Wall. It’s strange how the everyday, throwaway things really connect you to people who lived almost 2,000 years ago much more than the big monuments that they left behind. It makes them more real somehow. After we saw the exhibition we had a look around the Assyrian, ancient Greek and Roman stuff. The Assyrian section began with wall panels from a palace at Ninevah whi...

Back in July Mum and I went to Bath for the day. We went to the Abbey and the Roman Baths. The abbey was really good. It was pretty much like any ancient abbey with an impressive nave, magnificent west window and effigies around the place. My favourite window was one showing the crowning of king Edgar. I don’t really know much about him but I think he was king a long time ago. After the abbey we went to the Baths. It was good, but very expensive. I’d recently read a book called ‘The Economic Naturalist’ by Robert Frank. It was all about why things cost what they do and why we pay more for certain things than others. It made me think about the cost of the Baths and why they were so high when it didn’t seem to have changed that much since I went there with school over a decade ago. I think it’s because it’s a huge tourist attraction which is internationally famous and full of overseas tourists. If you’ve paid £700 to get to Bath then £12 or however much it was isn’t really that much. It...