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baleanopteraThis has been a strange day. I got a mail from the institute in Rome that said my stay could be extended for one week – no extra cost. Which, well, it would rock like a rocking thing. My only reservation is if my job will let me have another week off.
My job is also getting stranger. I work in this old, old museum that looks like time stopped sometime in the 1920’s. Huge old whale skeletons, seals captured by Amundsen when he discovered the North West passage and this ancient rhino whose horn supposedly was stolen to be used in a fertility rite.
A place like this is of course rumoured to be haunted. Respectively by a biologist who died of syphilis, and in the historical section a dead Indian (the local newspaper once claimed he was a Sioux – this has not been confirmed) and little shabti dolls that guarded Mummy tombs. I have never seen any ghosts, I really doubt I will – but just knowing the stories is enough to keep me a little on my toes. Today one visitor could tell me she had felt the ghost of the biologist -and could tell me all he wanted was love. As I was standing there contemplating if I should find comfort in this, she started talking about her art and how she was channelling the essence of the museum into her paintings. I looked at them, and they were these dark, twisted pictures of birds made all in black and red. Now that? Spooked me.
Later I talked with the old timer that works at the ticket counter, and she asked if this visitor had scared me. I said “Um yeah – a little.” Then she told me not to worry, because the world is full of strange people. And if I saw the ghost, she said, I should just talk to it. That’s what she did, and suggested I talk about flowers. “He was after all a biologist.”
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But my favourite visitor is still the one that told me all whales turn into blue whales when they get older. That is why the blue whale is so important. It’s the grand mother whale.
My job is also getting stranger. I work in this old, old museum that looks like time stopped sometime in the 1920’s. Huge old whale skeletons, seals captured by Amundsen when he discovered the North West passage and this ancient rhino whose horn supposedly was stolen to be used in a fertility rite.
A place like this is of course rumoured to be haunted. Respectively by a biologist who died of syphilis, and in the historical section a dead Indian (the local newspaper once claimed he was a Sioux – this has not been confirmed) and little shabti dolls that guarded Mummy tombs. I have never seen any ghosts, I really doubt I will – but just knowing the stories is enough to keep me a little on my toes. Today one visitor could tell me she had felt the ghost of the biologist -and could tell me all he wanted was love. As I was standing there contemplating if I should find comfort in this, she started talking about her art and how she was channelling the essence of the museum into her paintings. I looked at them, and they were these dark, twisted pictures of birds made all in black and red. Now that? Spooked me.
Later I talked with the old timer that works at the ticket counter, and she asked if this visitor had scared me. I said “Um yeah – a little.” Then she told me not to worry, because the world is full of strange people. And if I saw the ghost, she said, I should just talk to it. That’s what she did, and suggested I talk about flowers. “He was after all a biologist.”
----
But my favourite visitor is still the one that told me all whales turn into blue whales when they get older. That is why the blue whale is so important. It’s the grand mother whale.
