The sixth day of my vacation was spent on my own personal walking tour. I decided that I'd do a big loop and try to take more pictures than I have been. I'm just not good at taking pictures. By this I mean that I don't take many of them. I'm also not a professional photographer, so even with my cool camera not every picture turns out the way that I'd hoped.
I started off with the Manitoba Museum. It's a nice place with several sections and I decided to try them all.
There's a planetarium at which I caught the show "Are we alone?" referring to the possibility of intelligent life on other planets. The general scientific consensus was "probably not," which was a change from the theories of the odds that I remember reading about and watching on documentaries. The idea was that with all of the stars out there and then take the probable percentage of those that had planets, then the probable percentage of those planets that could support life, then the percentage of those planets that could support life that did, then the percentage of those planets that did support life that then supported intelligent life. Given the billions and billions of stars (thank you, Sagan) odds were very good that there was other intelligent life out there. The more recent hypotheses are that there are so many factors that are required to not only have life on a planet at all, but to protect the planet long enough to develop intelligent life that odds are that we're all there is. We'll have to see how that one goes.
The science section turned out to be very much like the one at the museum back in Milwaukee - lots of hands-on experiments mostly aimed at kids and young adults. Still fun to play around.
The natural history portion was very nice. It focused, not surprisingly, mostly on the various aboriginal populations of Manitoba and the early fur trade. Both of these topics are pretty new to me and definitely not covered at my own home town's museum, so this was definitely worth my while. Did you know that the fur companies themselves minted their own coins? I did not know this. There was also a large exhibit on the Métis, which I found intriguing. When fur-traders (specifically the French) came through the area and had children with the local aboriginal population, their children were called Métis. The intriguing thing is that these Métis were able to band together and form their very own culture. I had no idea that such a thing happened. From what I know of the US frontier, any such child would be labeled a half-breed and the only culture they would then have to pick one culture or the other and certainly didn't band together to form their own. The Métis, it seems, took the best of both worlds and made it their own and formed their own communities. You learn something new every day.


I was originally going to title this post "Winnipeg Ho" but then I figured someone would see it and assume I had met some slutty Canadian chick and not even read the post. "Winnipeg Bound" sounds better, but it still sounds like some north-of-the-border S&M thing going on. Oh well.