Day 17 - Calgary, Royal Tyrrell Museum Drumheller

We had a beautiful day for strolling along the downtown area. Calgary's downtown is dominated by the business towers similar to Toronto, but you recognize the unique style of this city instantly. Hard to describe, but I think city development is not happening here without much planning and design. Business towers mixed with some old-town architecture, never forgetting about some green area and keeping all this relatively clean. And I didn't even mention the Plus 15 system, a channel of enclosed walkways 5 meters above the ground covering most of downtown, mainly popular in the winter I assume (similar concept to Toronto's PATH system).

Prince's Island Park right next to the downtown is perfectly used by the suites coming down from their sixty-something floor office to have a jog at lunch break, or at least to show off their tanned upper bodies (with jogging being the excuse for it). The park was packed with joggers and walkers seemed to be just an obstacle minority for the flow of the running community, not to mention that particular wood staircase at the end of the bridge, where you are the _only_ one not running up or down the stairs.

About 100 km northeast of Calgary is a town called Drumheller which boasts a renowned Dinosaur museum. They are open until 9pm so it was enough to leave from Calgary in the afternoon and still enjoy the exhibit. Drumheller area is called the badlands and the word describes it well. Nothing really grows here and you can't really do anything with the land (like farming) other than finding the best dinosaur fossils in the world, but you can certainly enjoy the visual beauty and uniqueness of this geography. Small rocky hills kind of layered one above the other and the resident ground squirrels keeping a close eye on you, makes this area just perfect for thinking about the movie "The Hills Have Eyes"

The museum started of with some introductory fossils explaining the story about their findings. I first became critical whether this would be the same in the whole museum. Well, I wasn't quite interested in learning who found the bone on which fishing vacation, but rather to learn about these giant creatures that once ruled the world. My critic became unnecessary as the following exhibits were only about the species, not the finders. They have truly a quite big array of fully available (or partially restored) pre-historic skeletons on display. However, a tattood (what do I say, a paint-decorated) man grabbing the 65 million year old well-preserved skeleton with full hand while wondering "Is this real???", before being limited by his partially embarresed wife saying "Honey, there is a big 'Do Not Touch' sign in front of it" seems to be an evergreen museum cliche.

As every attraction in North America the exit leads through the gift shop. Sadly they had all the useless stuff but they didn't have Darwin's book that was referred in the exhibits multiple times, and that I honestly thought of buying. Useless might be harsh, but isn't it sarcastic that in a museum that houses one of the most prominent pre-historic research lab and emphasises the importance of science throughout the exhibits, your best option of buying a book is Disney's Dinos?