Chris Tomkins’ Blog

Exploring the valley

As I had today free before my course starts on Monday I thought I would go and do some exploring. Walked 2 blocks to catch the VTA Light Rail train to down town San Jose (about 3.5 miles away). Learnt my first lesson - never pay for train tickets at the vending machine with a $20 bill (I had no change) - got $15 in quarters - it was like playing the fruit machines!

The 15 minute ride down there was good - it gave me plenty of opportunity to take a look round the bay area and the heart of San Jose. Walked round the down town area for a while and watched some of the veterans parade (a bit God Bless America for my liking - although good to see so much support for the armed forces who give up so much to protect us) before deciding to head into The Tech (the museum of innovation and technology) which was currently hosting the Body World 2 exhibition. I felt the $22 entrance fee was a bit steep but the Body World exhibition was definitely worth it (although it wouldn’t be for everyone). If the only human anatomy you have seen is a skeleton in the school class room then you should definitely see this in my opinion. Just about every organ from the human body is on display and they are pretty much all real, preserved using the controversial plastination technique invented by Dr Gunther von Hagens. Not only are healthy individual organs on display, but examples of un-healthy specimens too - e.g. a smokers lung, an arthritic knee, cancerous organs etc. as well as the stars of the show - the full human bodies in very recognisable poses including the baseball player, the ballet dancer, the skateboarder and even a pregnant woman. There are also unborn foetuses and embryos from women who died before they could give birth. The accompanying audio tour gave a useful commentary to the exhibits but I found it a bit long winded at points and so gave up about half way through.

The rest of The Tech museum was designed mainly for kids and included areas on the environment, silicon, the internet, robots, ideas for the home and a few more things which obviously had a great impact on me Other than the Body World exhibition the highlights were the dust room where you could dust off your clothes and see how many dust particles were on you (over 6000 in my case!), a robot which picked up wooden blocks to spell out your name and a section on text speak (where else could you see lol, brb, afk, etc. in a museum!). A good idea if you have kids, but if you don’t I wouldn’t bother apart from the Body World exhibition.

The rest of downtown San Jose wasn’t very awe inspiring - perhaps that explains why its the safest city in the US (supposedly)!

As I’d bought a day pass for the light rail I decided to go to down town Mountain View (the north end of the valley). On the trip I passed numerous company headquarters (or at least sizeable buildings) including Cisco, Yahoo, eBay, BEA, Sun Microsystems, Canon, Motorola, Lockheed Martin and even the NASA Ames Research Center which looks like it has 2 garages for space shuttles! Down town Mountain View is much nicer than San Jose - much more cosmopolitan with some nice looking restaurants, shops and coffee shops. After taking a walk down the main street (mainly in the shade to avoid the incredibly bright sunshine) and grabbing a drink I headed back. I got off the light rail at theÂ metro/airport station, grabbed a fajita burrito to eat at Chipotle Mexican Grill (highly recommended - plus check out their very flash web site) and then headed back. All in all a good days exploring.

Tags: Observations, Travel

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 5:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Exploring the valley”

Andrew Ferrier Says:
November 13th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Oh, one restaurant recommendation I forgot - try the Japanese place in MV (I think there’s only one). Bit posh by US standards, but nice.

Exploring the valley

One Response to “Exploring the valley”

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