Departure

I taught my last class on a Wednesday and my flight out of Moscow was the next day at noon.  After the final class I had dinner with ''Vasya'' and here is what my last supper was:

Although I got picked up at the airport by a taxi when I arrived in Moscow, I did not want to take a taxi to go back to the airport when I left, since I still remembered the terrible traffic problems I had in the taxi on the first day because of one road accident.  It used to be the case that the only way to reach the airport from elsewhere in Moscow was by a road vehicle, either a taxi or one of the airport vans at the Rechnoi Vokzal metro station. Either way, if I got caught in bad traffic I could miss my flight.

Fortunately two years ago an alternative form of transportation to and from the airport appeared: Aeroexpress.  It is a train that goes between Sheremetyevo airport and the Belorusskaya train station for 300 rubles, which is about $5. (There is similar train service on Aeroexpress to other Moscow airports.)  The train ride to Sheremetyevo takes 35 minutes and is much more reliable than a car since it won't have any traffic problems.  Of course you still have to get to the Aeroexpress train, and with large suitcases it may be easier to get to that train station by car or taxi than by taking the metro.  (Note: if you bring a very large suitcase on the metro you have to pay an additional fee to use the metro.)  I wound up having a friend with a car drive me to the Aeroexpress early in the morning and there was no traffic at all.  There might not even have been any traffic all the way to the airport at that hour, but why introduce more risk of getting caught behind a car accident?

Here is the Aeroexpress train at the departure point in Belorusskaya station:

You can pay for the ticket by standing in line, but you can also buy it from an electronic ticket machine, and some of the machines indicate that they give exact change. However, it's easy enough to carry 300 rubles that it shouldn't be necessary to make sure the particular machine you use gives exact change. I used a ticket machine and avoided the ticket line.

Thirty-five minutes after the train left Belorusskaya station, it arrived at the airport:

Terminal F is the same thing as what used to be called Sheremetyevo-2, which is where international flights at Sheremetyevo are located.  Here is the Aeroexpress train at the airport:

There are two levels of service: economy class (300 rubles) and business class (500 rubles).  The difference between those prices is about 6 1/2 US dollars.  What are the extra features of business class?  Let's take a look.  First let's see what economy class looks like:

You can see above the seats in economy class.  There are overhead bins to put luggage, but the aisles between the two sides was wide enough that a lot of people just left their luggage in the aisle.

Now let's see how business class looks:

So business class has exactly the same seats as economy class, but they come with an extra white cloth.  In the middle of the business class car were bottled water and newspapers:

Of course nothing stops economy class travelers from bringing their own water and newspaper.  And with a piece of white cloth you can duplicate the entire amazing business class experience. Since the whole ride take a little over half an hour, I can't figure out why anybody would bother with business class.

Once I got through security and luggage check-in, I could see my plane at the gate:

From my seat on the plane I could see the snowy airport tarmac on the outside

and important airline flight information on the inside, like a map.

Shortly before takeoff we were reminded to put on our seat belts.  More precisely, we were told that the plane could not take off without all of us having our seat belts on.  Oh really? Do the airline engines run on seat belt power? The plane was barely half full, so would our seat belts generate enough thrust to take off?

After we somehow managed to take off with so many unused seats, and unused seat belts, it turned out to be very cold outside the plane, in both Fahrenheit and Celsius:

It was a long flight.  There were four movies shown and there were two meals served, one at the start of the flight

and the other near the end:

The sandwich you see there was very hot to touch when the stewardess gave it to me, and I told her that. She said it really wasn't that hot, but then I heard her tell the passengers behind me "Be careful, it's hot" when she gave them the sandwich.  The Russian-made Baskin Robbins ice cream on the right has a slogan along the bottom of the container: мороженое, которое любит весь мир.  Read from left to right, that says "ice cream, which loves the whole world", but Russian word order is more flexible than English, so you can guess what a better translation is supposed to be.

As the plane approached New York, I saw another plane coming in to land at the airport:

 Finally we landed

and at that point I turned on my cell phone to tell family members I was on the ground. Although the phone had been shut off for 2 1/2 months, it still worked, but it was at Low Battery level.  Later that day I arrived at my dad's house:

The next day I went up to Connecticut by train.  The Long Island Railroad arrives in New York at Penn Station, where I found someone looking at a subway map:

This didn't look quite as nice as the religious guy looking at the metro map in Moscow. And the New York subway platforms are a lot less elegant than those in Moscow:

The trains in New York leave for Connecticut from Grand Central Terminal, not Penn Station, so I took a subway from Penn Station up to Times Square, where I caught the cross-town shuttle train to Grand Central:

Unlike Penn Station, Grand Central Terminal is actually attractive on the inside:

My train here was located just slightly underground, but it was enough for the cell phone to have trouble working:

In Moscow, by comparison, cell phones worked in all metro stations even though they can be located very deep underground.  New York should learn a lesson from that.

Although many tourists were taking photos inside Grand Central Terminal, when I took photos near the train one of the train staff told me it is not allowed.

The train has reminders about avoiding slipping on the gap between the train and the platform.

The gap is hardly as large as the one pictures in the diagram.  But if they're so concerned about people slipping they should also post warning signs about slipping on spilled coffee:

You can see the person who spilled the coffee through the window in the next photo (look on the left):

He was quick to throw away his coffee cup.  A few minutes later one of the train staff came walking through the train, saw the spill, and immediately called several of her colleagues about it. They cleaned it up while hypothesizing when it could have happened. The coffee spiller just kept quiet the whole time while sitting right next to the scene of the crime.

The train should have had a warning sign in the bathroom, since their "Keep Clean" sign in the bathroom was not working:

I took this train to New Haven, where my friend Dave picked me up and we went to his office at Wesleyan for a few hours.  Nearby we bought sandwiches at the Neon Deli:

Why is it called the Neon Deli?  They used to have a neon sign out front with the word "Deli" on it.  At one point the sign was broken, so they switched to the plastic signs you see above.  Would anyone consider buying food at the Plastic Deli?

Here are two of the staff making sandwiches inside, with the menu behind them on small blackboards:

Dave ordered the same sandwich there so many times that they named it after him.  Look on the right board below for ''Dave's toasty turkey, provolone, and hots (that is, peppers).''

I had no interest in peppers, so I asked the staff to replace the peppers with tomatoes (tvorog wasn't really an option).  In a sense that makes the sandwich something Dave would never actually order, because he hates uncooked tomatoes.

While preparing this blog entry I found out that the free storage space on my Picasa web album is nearly full (I had to delete a few earlier photos to fit everything in). A new blog about my visit to Berkeley for the next semester is here.

Paleontology Museum

The last museum I visited in Moscow was the Paleontology museum.  It turns out to be located pretty close to my apartment. Although the museum's website says the best way to reach it is to go one metro stop away from Konkovo (my stop), when I did that and then reached the museum I could see the shopping center at the road intersection close to my apartment. So when the museum visit was over I just walked back towards Konkovo.

The website of this museum has no English version, and Wikipedia doesn't say a whole lot, but UC Berkeley's Paleontology museum has on its website a description of what makes the Paleontology museum in Moscow so special.

The entrance to the museum has dinosaur images on the gates:

At the entrance to the exhibits is a large wall illustrating the development of life on earth, organized from bottom to top (with man on top). Look at the next two photos together, which have some overlap.  These are enormous images, at least 3 stories tall when taken together.

At the start of the exhibits, to get people's attention, is one big dinosaur skeleton:

Other fossils nearby are smaller, such as a turtle:

Here's the underside of a horseshoe crab:

The next object was very exciting to see: a coelecanth!

These were believed to be extinct for millions of years until one was caught alive in the 1930s.  I guessed this was a coelecanth before I read the information card.  What other fish (with skin) could it have been?

The museum had many examples of impressions of very old plants or small animals left on rocks, or small petrified samples of turtle turd, but let's get back to the dinosaurs.

The next display must be showing what a skeleton looks like at the stage before it is put together in 3 dimensions.

And we end with some mammoths:

Here is a baby mammoth on its side (click on the photo for a better view; the head is under my right hand).  I hope I don't get in trouble for touching the sign that says "Do not touch".

The display case says that that this mammoth is named Dima.  I wonder how they figured out what its name was.

Finally, parts of this museum were brought to you by Chevron

which very much appreciates all multimillion-year-old dead plants and animals for decomposing and providing it with the fuel it needs to stay in business.

State Darwin Museum

In Moscow is the State Darwin Museum, which was founded in 1907 (note: before communism) starting with the stuffed animal collection of Alexander Kots. Its purpose is to document the range of living things and also present a discussion of how it all developed.

Kots and his wife took a chimpanzee into their house and for many years tried to determine what it liked to eat and do.  Then when they had their first child, his mother ran the same experiments on the child:

They turned the results into a book, "A Chimpanzee Baby and a Human Baby".

Here is the Darwin museum in its current (as of 1995) building:

At the entrance is a statue of Darwin in thought:

One part of the museum shows a scale model of the Beagle and Darwin's room on it:

The museum has had logarithmic or square root growth in attendance over time:

Note the Red Army soldiers being taught about natural history in the upper right photo.

Here is some indication of the range of stuffed animals that can be seen in the Darwin museum.

The last two photos show how dogs evolved over time from wolves to your typical range of domestic dogs.

Some animals agreed to have a photo with me:

Skulls from different cats:

Models of horses:

A worker preparing a new animal model:

The hall on evolution of man ends with the following display (haven't TVs evolved some more?):

In addition to the stuffed animals, there were some temporary exhibits showing live insects. In some of the photos below, my finger gives a sense of scale. Click on a picture to get a bigger image.

The next two photos are "stick insects".  They are the light green things, where the apparent branches move like legs.

Darwin of course had his critics.

In the 20-th century the mechanism for evolution was understood better in light of genetics, leading to the "synthetic theory of evolution":

Would a museum in Russia about biology have a discussion of Lysenko, who was supported by Stalin despite having no real credentials or track record to back his wild agricultural theories, and then proceeded to kill off a generation of Soviet biologists? Yes, there was one wall display. Here is a picture of Lysenko (on the right) and Khrushchev (on the left) with newspaper articles related to the controversies around Lysenkoism:

Here are four of the biologists who met an early demise by continuing to do orthodox work, which did not agree with that of Lysenko:

In order they are Nikolai Vavilov (died in 1943 in prison),  Nikolai Koltsov (died in 1940 of a stroke according to the display, but poisoned according to Wikipedia), Leonid Govorov (shot in 1942), and Georgii Karpechenko (shot in 1942). The Darwin museum is on Vavilov street (number 57), which sounds like it might be named in honor of Vavilov, but apparently the road is actually named for his brother.  Also on this street are several scientific research institutes, including the Dorodnicyn Computing Center (number 40), which is where Tetris was created.

The museum has some temporary exhibits that have nothing to do with the goals of the museum but are promotions for a company. For example, there was a hallway with pictures of mothers and their babies. Would you like some baby soup?

In the basement, near the coat check area, were some gift shops.  There were some sensible gifts, like  models of real animals

but they were also selling the Russian version of Winnie-the-Pooh

as well as a toy gun.