The Boston Mapparium: Walking into the Center of the Earth

Posted on March 13, 2012 by lisafindley

“You get to walk into the middle of the world! You can be inside a map! This is basically all I’ve ever wanted out of life,” I said with only slight exaggeration. Luckily, my friend Mike agreed that a three-story glass globe sounded like a good tourist destination, so I put the Mapparium on the itinerary for when I visited him in Boston over Labor Day weekend in 2010.

tourist pose!

The Mapparium is housed in the Mary Baker Eddy Library, part of a collection of buildings that make up the Christian Science Plaza in Boston. They only allow visitors in small groups at scheduled times, so you buy a ticket and mill about til your appointment. The lobby is set up with large posters depicting the highlights of Mary Baker Eddy’s life and the early years of the religion, such as charity projects and the Christian Science Monitor. The posters don’t dwell on the specifics of the religion, such as the basic tenet that the material world doesn’t exist and we are all spiritual beings. Funny that a religion with such beliefs erected a permanent tribute to the physical earth.

Christian Science headquarters

Once your group is called, you gather around a tour guide, who does a little intro and then asks you to be super quiet when you enter the Mapparium. This is because the acoustics of the room are like those giant whisper dishes in science museums; you can stand at one end of the room and whisper something, and someone standing at the other end will hear it as if you whispered right in their ear. This means only one person talks at a time. The tour guide talks a bit about the construction of the Mapparium–the 608 panes of glass, the hand-painted maps–and then turns on a recorded message about what the maps mean.

Journey to the center of the earth

The Mapparium was finished in 1935 and has been refinished but not changed since then. This means that the map shows the political world as it was pre-World War II. Many countries that don’t exist anymore appear: the Soviet Union, the Belgian Congo, French Indochina. Many countries that now exist didn’t then: Israel, all the ‘stan countries. The recorded message man talks about the decision to keep the map as an historical document, rather than updating it when wars and politics redraw the borders.

And then the propaganda sets in. The recorded guide describes the story of modern history as one of humanitarian triumph and progress. I’m not against this idea on principle (although a healthy dash of “and things are messed up too” would help). But the Mapparium takes a pretty selective view of what that story arc looks like; the disembodied voice talks about how democracy saved the world, and the map lights up with democratic countries. Then we hear that some countries still need to join the democracy train, and the map lights up behind those benighted countries. Democratic countries: the United States, the UK, and… Iraq. Non-democratic countries: North Korea, China, and… France. Hmm.

France, the non-democracy

But the slightly silly presentation aside, it’s awesome to be inside the Mapparium. Rather than being in the center of the earth looking out, we’re looking at a globe turned inside-out. The colors are deep and the writing is a little like calligraphy. And it’s endlessly fascinating to look at the changeable borders from eighty years ago. Being literally surrounded by the huge, colorful world was just as lovely and strange as I’d hoped. If you’re in Boston, I recommend it!

First two images are mine. Image 3. Image 4.

Share the World: The Suggestions Page

Posted on July 6, 2010 by lisafindley

Hello, dearest fellow travelers, and welcome to a short post that is INTERACTIVE. Exciting! In the 6+ years I’ve been planning this trip, I’ve received numerous suggestions from many people on specific places I should visit, restaurants I should eat at (or at least food to try), and bedbug-ridden hostels I should absolutely avoid. I welcome all of this advice; I’m fortunate to know so many people who’ve traveled and lived abroad and who have insight into what to do and where to go in places as diverse as Tibet and Cape Town. But it’d sure be helpful to have all that advice in one centralized spot.

Lucky for you and me both, I’m brilliant, so I’ve put together a couple tools to aid in this venture: the Suggestion Box and the Google Map. Head on over to the Suggestion Box (which is now the first tab at the top of the page, on any page on the blog) and leave a comment with tips on what to see, where to stay, etc., and then go to the Google Map and mark the spot. Now I can keep track of all these great suggestions, and when I actually go on my trip, I’m going to mark out my route on the map too, so you’ll be able to see where I go and how I get there in just about real time.

Here’s an example of what the map looks like so far:

See? It’s all bare and sad, with just a few sights and sites, and not a single eatery to be found. Don’t let this map continue in this way — adopt it today and shower it with love and helpful icons.

Suggestion Box: https://lisafindley.wordpress.com/suggestion-box/

Google Map: Lisa’s World Trip 2012-2014: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=110828102940815708391.00048a592ae072ccc0b8e

Redrawing the Maps

Posted on October 20, 2009 by lisafindley

Two weekends ago, I went up to Michigan to visit some friends and admire the autumn colors. I went to the Barking Tuna Fest in Kalamazoo on Friday and walked around Lake Lansing North on Saturday. I grew up in East Lansing and went to college in Kalamazoo; I go back to visit my family five or six times a year, but I haven’t been to Kalamazoo in a couple years. I have some complicated feelings about my four years at Kalamazoo College, and no strong affection for the city. So when the train pulled into the station that Friday, I was a little unsure how I’d like it. Would I see the city as it was, or as I remembered it?

Lake Lansing North

I have maps of all kinds tacked up to my walls at home — subway maps, walking maps, maps of the world. I think of my relationship to any given place in terms of a map. I see the layout of the place, major landmarks, and a “you are here” star for myself. I like to be oriented in time and space, and maps are the perfect way to do that; they anchor you in a place, but only as that place was conceived by the mapmaker at the time it was made. A map is an artifact and only a guide — just because it’s been printed with in ink and paper doesn’t mean it has marked the landmarks you need. Your reading of the map is what fixes you in time and space. When I run one finger down a street and another finger along the cross street, I pinpoint myself at that place at a time of my choosing — either in memory, or in a daydream about the future, or in the here and now.

As I walked down a rainy Kalamazoo Ave last week, I was thinking about the night before, when I’d met up with some friends at a bar in Chicago, but the act of walking down that street brought to mind other thoughts, memories of trekking out to Bell’s or Kraftbrau for a rare night out during college or driving back into town after a weekend at my then-boyfriend’s place. Being in the physical space that I used to call home didn’t throw me back into that older time, more like they just layered on top of one another. I was 26 and visiting a friend for the weekend, but I was also 19 and venturing downtown for the first time, and I was 21 and going to see my English professor and her husband in their rock band, and I was 22 and amazed that it was time to leave town. The memories and attendant emotions layered on top of one another like onion-skin paper maps laid carefully one over the other, the old feelings of newness and vulnerability running in shaky pencil under the steady brushstrokes of confidence and age.

So I saw the city both as it was and as I remembered it, and I suppose this is true of any place that was once familiar and is now a travel destination. No wonder people get anxious about going home for the holidays; that’s years of maps layered one on top of the other, a lifetime of landmarks lost, wrong turns taken, street names changed over to honor new heroes. Orienting yourself in the vast time and space of a place you knew so well is a dizzying task. For those with unpleasant or seriously complicated memories of home, it’s not even a welcome one. Sometimes it’s easier to spin a globe and stick a finger on it at random. “Here. Let’s go here. I’ve never been here before. I don’t even have a map for this place.”

Still, I’ll continue to go home for the holidays and I’ll probably visit Kalamazoo again in the next couple months. It’s partly the place and partly the place as I know it through people. The love of my family and friends draws me daily, but I see them all too rarely. When I do visit home, however, all sorts of maps get pulled out and re-drawn. There are hundreds of spots all over town that signify whispered secrets, blowout fights, midnight moonlight dances; a joint snuck behind the pine trees here, a naked encounter with the cops here.

One swing set at the park near my parents’ home reminds me of: the day we moved to Michigan from Illinois and my sisters and I had to play at the park but I really had to go to the bathroom and I was sure I’d pee in front of all these kids who were about to be my classmates; the weekend my three surviving grandparents and six aunts and uncles flew in for my sisters’ birthday and the whole family went on a glorious walk of silliness in which my grandpa did pull-ups and my mom walked on the balance beam with me; prom night junior year, when my friend K and I were the only ones without dates, so we dressed up and ran around town golfballing people’s houses and having a whole lot of fun; the night I pushed my curfew past its breaking point by staying up til 6am in the back of T’s station wagon in the parking lot of our elementary school playground; and the night, not long after T had broken up with me and I had graduated from college with no plans, that I sat on a swing right here on this swing set and sobbed at 2 in the morning, feeling more lonely and lost than I ever had before. One swing set.

Of course, on this last trip home, I saw that they’ve torn down that particular swing set to put up a plastic one. I was disappointed, and it’s harder to draw up memories without the physical reminders, but really, none of the maps are gone. They’re just redrawn.