Staatliches Museum fur Naturkunde Stuttgart (or in English: State Museum for Natural History Stuttgart)

The State Museum of History in Stuttgart is broken down into two different museums. The Schloss Museum and the Museum am Lowentor. The Schloss Museum contains nothing but information and models of prehistoric animals. The Museum am Lowentor contains models and information on modern animals.

The Schloss Museum

When we first arrived at the Schloss Museum (name of dino museum) Shaelyn was greeted by three life size outdoor dinosaur models. She was in heaven. I have to admit that they were pretty cool myself.

Shaelyn enjoyed the inside of the dino museum also. Here are some of the pictures we took.

Wooly Mammoth

Real Wooly Mammoth Tusk

Wooly Mammoth Skeleton. It's much larger than it looks. It was so large that we had to be so far away from it for the whole skeleton to fit in the frame that the perspective was lost. I think you guys get the idea of how large it is though.

Prehistoric moose

Deinotherium ("terrible beast"), also called the Hoe tusker,[1] was a gigantic prehistoric relative of modern-day elephants that appeared in the Middle Miocene and continued until the Early Pleistocene. During that time it changed very little. In life it probably resembled modern elephants, except that its trunk was shorter, and it had downward curving tusks attached to the lower jaw.

For the life of me I can't remember what this thing is but is some sort of prehistoric fish. It was the most vicious of sea animals alive at it's time.

Mr. T-Rex please don't eat me!!

Museum am Lowentor

After we had finished visiting the Schloss Museum we ventured across the street to the Lowentor. Well, actually it was on the other side of the train tracks and we had to walk through the train yard. It was a little weird since the brochure stated that you could easily travel from museum to the other. I guess if you consider a 1 mile walk and a venture through the train yard easy then, yes, it was an easy walk from one museum to the other. Enough my frustrating long walk in the rain with a 6 year old.

I some how ended up with very few pictures of the Lowentor Museum. I could have sworn that I took more pictures. They had some really cool life size models of different parts of the jungle and all kinds of stuffed animals.  They also had a a life size model of a blue whale which Shaelyn thought was the coolest thing (she couldn't decide if she liked it or the dinosaur models better).

Blue Whale

Inside of a Blue Whale

The Stuttgart Zoo!

In Stuttgart the tourist baureau has a discount ticket you can buy called the Stuttcard (cute little play on words). It includes 3 days of unlimited metro rides and free or discounted admission to several of the museums, plus free food and coffee. On our way to the m-punkt (tourist beaureau) which was only about a 20 minute walk from the hotel we passed the Rathaus or Town Hall. Above is Shaelyn pictured in front of Town Hall.

The Zoo is actual an arboretum, an aquarium and a zoo. We saw some pretty strange plants in the arboretum including the climbing cactus pictured below. Weird Huh? They also had the beautiful blue flowers whose name escapes me.


They had a cool little orange grove with all kinds of different oranges from around the world. Did you know that oranges originated in China and are not native to the States? I didn't know that. You learn something new every day. They even had banana trees. Who knew you could grow a banana tree indoors?






The aquarium was much smaller than the aquariums that we have in DC or Chicago but it was a nice little aquarium with some cool looking fish. Shaelyn enjoyed it and that's really all that matters. I enjoyed it to just not in the same way a 6 year old does. She took pictures of everything. Everything tank and every sign had it's picture taken. They had the normal fish plus a few cool things like the giant lung fish pictured below. I didn't know that lung fish got so large. Just in case you are wondering a lung fish really does have lungs. It can breath out of water for a number of years if need be. It's meant to strive in areas with long periods of draught.

Of course, being a Zoo they had a lot of the same things that we have at zoos here. One of the coolest things that they had were a bunch of baby gorilla's. The video and pictures below will show you just how young they are. Shaelyn loved them. She found the zoo keepers playing with the animals the coolest thing in the world. I did also. It's not everyday that you get to see person playing with a baby gorilla.

After we saw the fish we went and looked at the rest of the animals. It took us all day to go through the zoo. We ate at he zoo restaurant and it was really, really good. I would go back there if it was closer! The rest of the pictures below show the rest of our zoo visit.

Oranges and a Tucan

Jellyfish

Tapir

Plant House

Our arrival in Stuttgart

We arrived in Stuttgart on Sunday February 21st, 2010 around 12:30pm. The first thing I noticed was that it was warm. Well, relatively speaking. It was about 40F, but compared to the 20F in Warsaw it was great. The hotel we stayed in (picture on left) was picked by Chris just on a whim. Chris had to go to Stuttgart for business and we were originally going to stay on base but then that changed and we ended up in this wonderful hotel. Not only was the hotel clean, the staff friendly and scrammbled eggs and sausage offered with the free breakfast the hotel accidentally ended up being next to a metro stop and walking distance from downtown Stuttgart. We couldn't have gotten a better hotel if we tried. They even spoke English at the front desk! Shaelyn especially enjoyed the free breakfast because one of the hotel staff absolutely adored her and fixed her her own private pot of hot chocolate every morning.

Now, we didn't know what kind of rental car we would end up with. We got extremely lucky. We got a mini with extra trunk space. Chris, Shaelyn and I have always been interested in driving a mini. What better luck than to get one that the government paid to rent. I didn't actually get to drive it but it's a very nice care. It was diesel and did this really strange thing when ever you stopped and took your foot off the clutch - the car would cut off. At first Chris and I thought that we had been given a defective car but magically when you pushed the clutch back in the engine would start again. It was a way for the car to save gas during city driving. Chris and I both decided that this gas saving feature was pretty awesome. It also had heated seats which were great for my bum!

Across the street from the hotel was this awesome church that had gargoyles on it. Shealyn had never seen real gargoyles and thought that this was the coolest thing in the world. She wanted to know when they came alive and flew around. She wanted to watch them. Of course we explained to her that that was only in fairytales. I don't think she believed us.

These are two of the gargoyles on the church. The spiky things on their heads are to keep birds from landing and pooping on them.

This is a picture of the church at night from behind. The church has a lake around the sides and back of it. This picture shows the church reflecting off the water at night.

Next blogisode (like episode but because it's a blog - blogisode - I thought it was cute) I'll talk about what we did in Stuttgart and show more pictures some with Shaelyn in them, some Shaelyn took herself. She's becoming quite the photopgrapher. Bye for now. Jen L

Łazienki Park

A couple of weeks after we arrived in Warsaw we went to this wonderful park called Lazienki Park (pronounced wajeankey). We had heard that they had squirrels, cute little birds and peacocks.

We found out that the squirrels are not like the squirrels in the States. These squirrels are much cuter, red, smaller and not afraid of people at all. The Warsaw squirrels will run right up to you and take a nut right out of your hand. If you hold the nut up high enough they will put one paw on your hand so that they can stand up on their hind legs to reach the nut. It is such an awesome experience.

The birds of Lazienki Park are very similar. They are about the size of a canary but they are mostly black with some blue and some white coloring. If you put bread in your hand and stand near a bush of these birds with your hand open and horizontal to the ground the birds will fly to you hand, land on your fingers and very gently take the food out of your hands. It was an awe inspiring event.

The pecocks were not so interesting. Actually they were kind of scary. We fed one (they don't hang out in flocks) and it tried to chase us for more food. It wasn't aggresive like geese are but pecocks are huge so the size makes up for the lack of speed. We didn't feed anymore pecocks.

Chris, Shaelyn and I spent about 4 hours walking around the park and feeding the animals. I don't know when I have had so much fun. Of course, Shaelyn was afraid to feed squirrels and birds but she thoroughly enjoyed watching Chris and I feed the animals. She laughed and giggled the entire time.

My First Blog

February 17, 2010

I am officially a blogspot member! My family and I - my husband and my 6 year old daughter - just recently moved to Poland. I thought it would be nice to have some way for my parents, back in the States, to be able to keep in touch and see what we are doing. So, I joined Blogspot. Keep checking back for updates to our misadventures!