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Tressa and I finally got home to Iowa City on Monday, August 31st after a less than smooth trip back from Vienna involving a long delay in London and an extra night spent in Chicago. Hannah Marsh picked us up at the Cedar Rapids airport and brought us home, where we anticipated the usual shenanigans played on us after a long absence... the gang put forth a pretty solid effort this time.

Greece

Tressa and I rolled into Thessalonica (Thessaloniki), Greece in the early hours of August 26th after a 17 hours train ride from Bucharest, Romania (complete with a 2 hour layover in Sofia, Bulgaria and a couple of fun 3 am passport control stops along the Buglaria-Greece border). While riding through Bulgaria I couldn't help but notice the hundreds (maybe thousands) of rock shelters littering the mountainsides along the train tracks. I could only wonder how many Neandertals used to live in those valleys. After waiting in the Thessalonica train station for a few hours (we watched CNN at a cafe, Ted Kennedy died while we waited) we headed to George Koufos' lab at Aristotle University so I could study the Petralona cranium. I had saved Petralona for last, primarily because of the geographic difficulties in getting to Thessalonica, but also because it gave me something to look forwards to the entire trip. It was everything I had hoped for and more. Having previously studied a number of Petralona casts, this is definitely one specimen where nothing compares to the original, there's all sorts of little epigenetic features that casts just don't pick-up. After taking all my measurements and pages of copious notes, I finally had to acknowledge that it was time to get my very patient wife to a shower, and we headed off to our hotel.

Our hotel was exactly what we needed, a small relaxing place right on the Mediterranean. After enjoying a long awaited shower, Tressa and I headed out to the beach for a drink and some fresh seafood. We lounged on the beach for as long as we could, enjoying the sunset before crawling into bed to get some much needed sleep before our ridiculously early flight back to Vienna (you can read Tressa's blog to hear about this airline adventure).

Romania

Tressa and I rolled into Bucharest, Romania on Sunday, August 23rd after enduring a grueling 19 hour train ride from Vienna. I had feared that the worst was yet to come, as I had heard some real horror stories about Bucharest hotels, but our hotel turned out to be one of the best we stayed at in Europe. It was incredibly clean, air- conditioned, had super friendly staff, and about $30 a night...it was exactly what we needed after 3 months of traveling on a shoestring. On Monday one of the staff at the the Institutul de Speologie arrived at our hotel and walked us to the institute. Erik Trinkaus had warned me that we would never find the institute on our own, and he was right, it was truly in the backstreets of Bucharest. For lunch, the guys at the institute took us to a fun local restaurant where we got to enjoy a Romanian specialty, Modovian Stew, a unique mix of unidentifiable internal organs, polenta and a fried egg. After getting over the initial idea of it, i actually found it to be really good. Back at the institute I worked with the Oase 2 cranium and Oase 1 mandible, likely the oldest H. sapiens fossils in Europe. It was just another one of those fantastically surreal experiences of working with fossils that I never thought I'd ever actually get to see. At the end of the day, the director, Dr. Silviu Constantin, walked us back to our hotel, where we spent the night anxiously watching the news (the room even came with a TV with english stations!) about the forest fires in Greece... our next destination.

Brno

Tressa and I made a quick day trip from Vienna up to Brno in the Czech Republic on August 17th to study Dolni Vestonice III and Kulna along with some other fossils and casts. For lunch, our host, Jana Klicova, took us out to a great restaurant located in the celler of a building built in the in middle ages. I knew the Czechs liked their beer, but this place took it to a new level. The tables actually had a tap for each person with a meter that recorded how much each person poured themselves. I had hoped to wander around after I finished work at the Moravske Zemske Museum and find Mendel's pea garden, but unfortunatley as soon as we left the museum a torrential downpour began. We rushed back to the train station to get the equipment out of the rain and decided just to cut our losses and catch an earlier train back to Vienna.

Vienna

Tressa and I arrived in Vienna from Berlin around Midnight on Monday, July 27th. As we prepared to get off the train Tressa thought it would be a good time to document how much junk we had to haul all over Europe for three months. I am much indebted to my wonderful wife for carrying various pieces of equipment across the continent, day after day, with nary a complaint...I don't know how I would have done it without her.




















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After spending the night in a hotel by the train station, Tressa helped me carry the equipment to the Natural History Museum. Having spent 5 weeks there in 2005, arriving at the museum felt almost like returning home, some where comfortable with people that you know. Another great benefit of arriving in Vienna was that my parents, my sister Caroline, and my aunt Sandy had arrived from Moscow to spend a week in Vienna. Getting to spend a week in Vienna with family was a lot of fun, and Tressa really appreciated the help hauling all our dirty laundry to the laundromat (by this point we were pretty tired of hand washing everything in hotel sinks). The museum staff had set Tressa and I up in the museum dormitories, which, in addition to being really inexpensive, was conveniently located just across the street from the museum. The dorm was really set up to be shared by two single people, a twin bed on each wall (think college dorms) but after we adjusted the furniture (and bought a fan) we had a pretty comfortable home for three weeks.


Since we were spending so little on housing (10 euros a night), Tressa and I were able to splurge a little on the some of Vienna's wide array of culinary delights. There was the classics, Sacher Torte and Melanges (Austrian version of a cappuccino), Lentils with bacon and bread dumplings, and there was the ethntic food; great Indian food (I can still smell the lamb korma) and then there was the sushi...

On our first Sunday we went to church and met up with Bob and Raija Lojek, who were friends of our Iowa City friends Sara and Jerry Steele when they all lived in the UK. They took us to lunch at a local Turkish restaurant and we began what would become a weekly ritual of spending the entire day together wandering around Vienna stopping here and there for something to drink or eat while enjoying some great conversation on virtually every topic under the sun.


The next Sunday Bob and Raija (who once lived in Japan) took us to a little Sushi restaurant. The sushi was great, but even better, the restaurant had a summer 1/2 off special on mixed sushi sets (10 pieces of nigiri and a maki roll for about $7). Thus, unbelievably, the cheapest food in Vienna was Sushi, and from that day on Tressa and I felt almost obligated to eat there...daily.

There is of course, no shortage of fun things to do in Vienna. In addition to being where I worked, the Natural History Museum in Vienna is one of our favorite museums. Opened in the late 1800's, the museum exhibits a huge collection of virtually everything found in nature.































































































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We're also big fans of the two Habsburg palaces: Schoenbrunn (summer palace) and the Hofburg (Winter palace). One of my favorite things about the Hofburg is that they've excavated part of one of the nearby squares to show the 5th century roman ruins that most of Vienna is built right on top of.

Berlin

On the night of Thursday, July 23rd, we took a night train from Florence to Berlin where I was scheduled to study the Combe Capelle specimen on Friday afternoon. Unfortunately, in typical Italian style, the train ended up breaking down in the middle of the Austrian Alps for about 3 hours. Consequently, we didn't arrive in Berlin until around 6 pm, so I had to call the Museum and reschedule my visit for Monday morning. This "forced" us to spend the whole weekend in Berlin. We spent Saturday at the Schloss Charlottenburg complex, the huge palace complex that houses the the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Museum for Pre- and Early History) where the Combe Capelle cranium is curated. Most of the palace complex has had to be completely reconstucted after being severely damaged by WWII bombings. Interestingly, they have restored different rooms to reflect different time periods, so some rooms are styled in their original 1600's style, while other rooms are restored to their early 1900's appearance.

On Sunday, we walked around some of Berlin's most famous attractions such as the The Reichstag (German Parliament), the Brandenburger Tor, and Potzdamer Platz (where some of the original Berlin Wall still stands). We also visited the Gemaldegalerie, one of Europe's best Art museums, which houses Caravaggio's Amor Vincit Omnia, one of Tressa's favorite peices. Personally, I prefered the museum's extensive collection of Dutch paintings by artists such as Rembrandt, Steen and Van Dyke.

Finally, on Monday, we went back to Charlottenburg and the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte to study the Combe Capelle cranium. This cranium was lost after WWII and only recently rediscovered, so not a lot of current researchers have had the opportunity to work with the original specimen. Unfortunately, since Tressa and I had to catch a noon train to Vienna, I only got to spend a couple of hours with the specimen before having to leave for the train station.

Florence & Sienna

On Tuesday, July 21st, we woke up early and took a train from Genoa to Pisa. Mel and Joe stayed in Pisa for most of the day to sight-see, while Tressa and I caught another train to Florence. After arriving in Florence we immediately went to the Museo Fiorentino di Preistoria, just a stones throw from the Duomo, where I studied some of the material from the Romito site on Sicily. The museum was small but clearly well run, with an impressive articulated skeleton of a cave bear at the entrance of the exhibit hall. About a third of the museum was dedicated to the Italian Upper Paleolithic with the Romito 5 and 6 skeletons on display along with reconstructions of several other burials. The museum staff was absolutely wonderful to work with, and extremely interested to see a microscibe for the first time. After a long and lively discussion about microscribes, I finally got to work measuring some skulls. Conversation time however ended up costing me too much time though, and I realized that I would have to return on Wednesday morning to measure the last cranium (I really didn’t mind, it meant I got to see everyone again the next day).

Getting to Sienna on Wednesday turned out to be a real adventure. Since I hadn’t finished with the Romito material on Tuesday, I had planned to return to the museum in Florence at around 8 am, measure the one remaining skull, and then pack up and catch an 11 am train to Sienna. This seemed like a pretty good plan on Tuesday night, as it saved me having to haul all my equipment across Florence to our hotel. It still seemed like a pretty good plan when I got up on Wednesday morning and had a great stress-free breakfast at our “way-to-nice for the money we’re paying” hotel. It did not, however, seem like such a good plan when I got completely lost in the backstreets of Florence with a really crappy map. So… I finally get to the museum around 9:30 am (yeah, I was really lost) with about one hour before I have to leave to get to the train station. I measure the skull, pack up, and at around 10:30 am ask the staff to call me a cab. The cab arrives almost immediately and I’m thinking “I’ve got this in the bag” (it’s about a 5 minute cab ride to the train station). What I didn’t realize was that the museum was on a really long one-way street, and it just happened to be trash day in Florence… and wouldn’t you know it, my cab is right behind the garbage truck, which is making stops about every 50 feet or so to pick up the trash. So after a mind (and budget) blowing 25 minute cab ride, I arrive at the train station with 5 minutes to spare, make a mad dash to the platform and get myself and my equipment on the train just as the doors are closing. So, at this point I’m thinking that the worst is over, it’s all down hill form here… Wrong. I had planned on getting lunch at the Florence train station and eating on the train, but due to the mad scramble, I had to wait until I got to Sienna at around 2:00pm. Turns out the Sienna train station is not full of restaurants like the Florence train station, and I end up with a nutritious lunch consisting of a Snickers and a Coke from the station gift shop. So after “lunch” I grab a cab because I need to get to the museum as fast as possible to have enough time to study the Paglicci 25 specimen.

It is at this point that I truly realize what a fool I was for scheduling stops in Italian cities in July, which is tourist season, other wise known as Hell on Earth. So my taxi driver is driving down these little back streets in Sienna which are about 6 feet wide and absolutely packed with tourists. None of which, apparently, realize that streets are where cars drive, because they are just milling around as if they own the place, and if a car wants to get by, well, they can just wait for them to take their family portrait in the middle of the street. Well, my cabbie completely loses it, and starts screaming and cussing at these morons as we slowly make our way through this town that doesn’t appear to have changed much since the Renaissance. After about 20 minutes I start to wonder if this guy actually knows what he’s doing because we seem to be turning left at every intersection, and don’t appear to be going in any real obvious direction. I can’t really voice any of my concerns however, partly because I don’t speak Italian, but mainly because of the ceaseless stream of obscenities he’s still spewing. Anyways, all of a sudden he hits the brakes, points to a door, and says “OK”. The door has a sign saying” Università degli Studi di Siena” on the door and I’m finally there.

The rest of the day was really great though. The institute staff were really friendly and really, really interested in my work. Several of the people working there were my age and they wanted to know all about where all my research had taken me and where I had left to go. It took my about an hour to finish studying the specimen, which seems like a ridiculously small amount of time compared to how much trouble it took to get there. Luckily, after explaining how I needed to take a train back to Florence, the director, Prof. Ronchitelli, tells me that that she actually lives in Florence, and that’s she’ll be happy just to drive me back to my hotel. Which she does, and for which I’m sure she has no idea how grateful I truly am.

After returning from Sienna, we said good-bye to Mel and Joe on Thursday morning as they left for Naples, and spent the day sight-seeing in Florence while waiting for our night train to take us to Berlin. This was my one real sight-seeing day in Florence, but Tressa (who spent a semester in Florence in College) made sure that I got to see the major interests such as the Ponte Vecchio, the Piti Palace, the Boboli Gardens, the “piggy” market, and the Piazza Vecchio.