Monday, July 26, 2010

Wednesday, July 14th - New York City

So Wednesday was a museum day. But the day started off at the Dunkin Donuts in the subway beneath Rockefellar Center. It was an interesting experience. . . let's just say that if you don't know what you want, you better get out of the way. . . which makes it all the more fun to take your time. The Rockefellar Center is probably most impressive because it is such a simple space. It isn't really big and it isn't really fancy. No crazy building geometry. . . but in a city where everyone is about maximizing profits, this space is a gift to the city that people from the city and from around the world enjoy every day.
St. Patrick's Cathedral with the Seagram building in the background.

After we ate breakfast, we started walking up the street toward Central Park.
It started to rain and even though we had umbrellas, by the time we got to the Guggenheim museum. . . well. . . Marthe was wringing lots of water out of pretty much everything.
We enjoyed walking through the museum. . . especially because our shoes were going squish squish every step of the way. The big skylight was covered, so the interior was not as impresive as it should have been with natural light streaming in.
They had a great Kandinsky exhibit, but we couldn't take pictures, so you'll just have to take my word for it.
By the time we finished (which was pretty quick, because some of the exhibits were pretty psycho) it had stopped raining. So we started walking back down the street. I turned around to get the shot of the building.


Approaching the Metropolitan Museum of Art. . . the only think I could think of was "don't eat the pictures, no! no! no!. . . don't eat the pictures no! no! no!. . . . don't eat the pictures NO! when you go to museums"

The MET was interesting because the rooms themselves were decorated and themed to house the art that was inside them. We walked to the back of the museum and down to the cafeteria to eat some nice and bland food before enjoying the museum.






Some rooms had pieces of whole buildings in them.
Some rooms were basically replicas of other buildings, like the one below from one of Frank Lloyd Wright's residential designs. Imagine having this for your living room. Parade of Homes, eat your heart out.
The egyptian exhibit was cool. They transported and reconstructed a small temple complex from egypt to this room in the museum.




We made sure to take pictures of the mummies for the kids.





Below is the main lobby in the museum. . . it was one of the better spaces in the museum.

This is the sculpture court in the greek exhibit was pretty cool.

Here's a corner detail of the greek sculputre court.

This was the Roman sculpture court, patterned after the Roman courtyards.

Monet paintings are always fun to look at.






Van Gough paintings have such wonderful texture.




More Monet


And some Degas
More lobby. . .from the balcony

Suits of armor are always fun too.
Wednesday evening we went to the Broadway show Lion King. Of course I couldn't take pictures, but that is what the Google Image Search is for I guess. So here are some images from the show. We really enjoyed the show. It was really well done and it made me realize that I could be happy with seeing Broadway shows all the time. Musicals are in my blood. This one was a good one to see. I do wish we could have seen more shows, but they're pretty pricy.
Rafiki

Scar and Mufasa
The costumes were part of what made the show great. I couldn't help but wonder if the Disney imagineering crew came up with some of them.

Zazu was one of the great characters in the show. Excellent comic relief.

Pumba and Timon were great too. Timon had a great Brooklyn accent that was really fun.

We walked around some stores at Times Square after the show. . . because I don't think they ever close. . . then we went back to the hotel.

2 comments:

Julie Baldwin said...

Don't eat the pictures...NO!!

Lael said...

Wow! I had no idea there were so many types of exhibits tucked into these museums. Thanks for sharing the great photos. I am also glad to hear that "musicals are in your blood". I hoped for that result as I was raising our family. I'm glad to know it worked!