27th November, 16:30 (Longest Post Ever!)

Right, that's settled, my mp3 player and I have formed a mental bond. I was thinking, I would jolly like to hear Soca Amaretto Lime. I slammed on Brand NEw and it was randomly chosen out of 48 tracks. I love coincidence.

After waking up a bit late, I slammed a new SD card into my camera and steppted out into the bright chicago mornign sun. More cityscape shots it is then. After enjoying the moderate walk to the Field Museum I soon discovered it had about 3 days worth of content and the Darwin exhibit cost more. After greeting Sue the T-Rex at the front I made my way to the evolution section, was was extremely excellent. Though there was many a school child scrabbling through, they were all moving at about 88mph, so it was fine.

Man, there have been some crazy animals, sharks called Helicoprion have some crazy spiralled bottom lip full of teeth for example. They had some cool dino bones and some itneresting videos on mass extinctions and ice ages. Apparently we're currently in an inter-glacial ice age at the moment, hence the polar ice caps. The human section was also very interesting, for instance, until relatively recently we shared the earth with at elast 2 other hominid species. For example, the neanderthals originated in europe, where as we came from Africa.

More interesting things include about 11% of us are missing a Palmaris muscle, which is a remanent of when our tree dwelling ancestors, tree dwelled. Other remanents of our ancestors include wisdom teeth, goosebumps, ear wriggling muscles, our 5th toe and what's left of our 3rd eyelid.

Returning to mass extinction, the "normal" rate of extinction is one species every 4 years. Currently 30,000 species go extinct every year. Human's are the win! or possible something more apocalyptic. I then went to a random plant section which was empty as there were no dinosaurs for people to gawp at. At this point I was slightly delirious from tiredness, thirst and eating too much when I entered the museum. I still took a photo of a model of a tea growing extravaganza for Rex and Tracey though. And also of a venus fly trap biting a man's tongue....

In my delirium I stumbled into a jade and precious gem exhibit, which was also empty and surprisingly interesting. A few gems of knowledge (haw haw) inclued that emerald's are actually rarer and more valuable than diamons, but they tend to be cloudy and have imperfections when they grow over a certain smallish size. Also, gold "carats" are different from diamond "karats" but I'm sure I'm boring you enough already.

I then crashed through haiwai which seemed a very good reproduction with beaches and markets etc. Soon I came across New Zealand and a Mairu house, which all suspiciously merged into Cheyanne artifacts. Then Asia cropped up and I collapsed at a fountain next to Sue's head. After some thirst quenching, reviving aqua, I entered the also barren (of people) Underground Adventure. Where I was promptly shrunk down to the size of an ant, or possibly smaller. What followed was an extremely good attempt at making soil exciting. Including anamatronic insects, very creepy sound effects as I made my way through some underground earth tunnels. After be regrown I used a crazy comptuer to help plan a town's redevelopment and I wa apparently excelelnt even though I paid no attention to the writing and just chose options according to the pretty map and Year 8 geography - sponsered by Crayola.

I then fond myself in Egypt, with some nice recreations of the nile and a display case of all the fake ancient egyptian things the museum had been duped into buying. They also obviously had many more authenetic items, or they just hadn't tested them yet....

I then ran out of time, lucky for you dear reader, which is probably only me by now, and exited from the building. Sun was setting beautifully and I took some photos of the outside brontasaurus against it.