Rats and boats

After a few weeks of effort I am still on the bumpy road to employment. There has been progress, I did tests yesterday, verbal reasoning was a breeze, numerical reasoning was a bit of an effort and the personality questionnaire was just annoying but after 2 hours sat in a tiny room with a computer I was done.  Since I had to drive into town for 9am I planned a little tourist outing to the Auckland museum.  The Vaka Moana exhibition, about the origins of the pacific island populations caught my attention so I went.  It was OK, not amazing, but fairly interesting.

I was cruising around the exhibits at the same time as a couple, they looked like they were recently retired, and were interested in everything but sort of in a hurry.  The guy overtook me while reading one of the exhibits.  I don't mind and I am not a frequent enough visitor to museums to fully understand the etiquette but I am sure that when it is not busy you should respect other people's personal space.  That last inch of air between you and them should not be crossed.  He clearly didn't think this. My new commitment to inner calm meant I didn't scowl at him, in fact I managed a half smile for his wife who looked a little embarrassed.

The reason I went to see the exhibition is that I am reading the Kon-Tiki Expedition at the moment, it was a voyage to test a theory that the pacific islands were populated from Peru.  I was a little disappointed that it didn't even get a mention, even if they don't agree with the theory it would have been nice to at least acknowledge one of the most famous expeditions exploring exactly what they were trying to explain.

However I did learn that the Polynesian rat did not breed with other rats and thus is a useful indicator of human population migration which it accompanied.  Unless, of course, there's a counter theory somewhere that the rats built tiny boats and sailed the oceans on their own, independent of humans - that would be cool.