“Life In The So-Called Space Age”
Incidentally, the app I use to update the blog from my phone ruined itself in the latest update, specifically with regard to images. Blame that for the decrease in image quality these past few entries.
I’m not happy about this, since I blog mostly from my phone these days. Here’s hoping they fix it.
We’re home from NYC now. It was a great few days. We’re very, very tired though. So exhausted in fact, we could use a vacation 🙂
That’s a view of the city from Central Park. We were on our way to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is one of the worlds foremost art museums. I’d never been, and KLS couldn’t remember ever being, and after today we can hardly believe it took us so long!
That’s a Van Gogh, one of a roomful, itself a single room in the modern French section which included many paintings from all the masters. It was mind boggling, and you could spend half a day here alone! But this was only a tiny part of the museums collection of two million items.
They have Asian art, including an entire calligraphy section:
American art including many Tiffany windows:
An incredible collection of arms and armour:
A massive Egyptian section including an entire temple (‘The Temple of Dendur’) that was transported from Egypt and is now displayed in a massive hall:
They have ancient roman sculpture (SO much of it!):
Collections of antique furniture:
Ancient Indian art:
And more, and more, and so much more. We spent five hours at the Met, and maybe saw 25% of the collection. You could spend many days here if you wanted to see everything!
Oh and the cafeteria was quite good!
As I said yesterday, the city is crazy popular this weekend and The Met was no exception. Amongst this crowd of art appreciators was an actual artist:
He was very good!
So what were our favourites? We were both big fans of the hyper-realistic oil paintings, such as this one by Jean Leon Gerome that was painted over 150 years ago:
The paintings are displayed in a way that let’s you get very close to them. In the piece above, we just couldn’t see brush strokes. It was a work of mind-boggling talent!
I also very much liked the decorative armour, including this piece that would look right at home on the pages of the manga Berserk:
But my absolute favourite was this piece, named Springtime:
I liked this so much I bought a poster of it and will frame it. The face of the girl stole my heart 😉
The Met is incredible. Go see it; you won’t be disappointed!
We’re in NYC. We walked and walked and walked today. And shopped. It’s super busy here and we saw many things…
Such as those flowers at a street market near the Flat Iron building. Not far from here KLS ate a shrimp burger from a food stand:
We saw the Statue of Liberty:
And then I ate a sandwich:
We bought many items, mostly for people other than us! KLS did however find a Japanese bead store and went crazy (she’s into jewelry making now). She’ll be back before we leave I’m sure.
The first half of the day was sunny and warm. Around 4, the rain came in and fell heavily. All of a sudden, the streets were full of umbrellas:
Our hotel is fancy. We paid a bit more for a view, and we’re on the 21st floor. Amusingly, the view included the hotel we usually stay in:
I bet that’s going to look good when the sun goes down!
Tomorrow we’ve got some cultural activities planned. Stay tuned 😉