Ten days already? Impressive. And about a week to go; I fly home next Wednesday.
Today was the American Museum of Natural History, an institution I know primarily from Preston and Child’s Relic … a mediocre book (at best) and a trashy movie (re-set to Chicago; the Field Museum more or less) but fun.
Jyoti and I left here and walked south along Broadway until 86th, and then east toward the park, and then south again. It was warm but not unreasonable, and I didn’t start sweating until we got on 86th. There was a slight breeze.
After three and a half hours or so in the museum my feet were killing me, but it was good “exercise” of sorts. The dioramas were awesome and I found myself taking pictures of them — trying to exclude the framing — just to see how convincing they are when mashed onto a 2-D medium (the photo). The mineral collection was extensive, but the audio-lecture sections, while potentially cool, require one to sit there from the beginning, it seems. Much of the museum is geared toward children I find, but that’s part of the magic of it even for adults.
There is little “information” there one can’t get from a book, from an encyclopedia, for example, and much of the information in many areas was not “new” to me — it was stuff I knew from school — but just reading and viewing it in a museum can be magical and attention-grabbing. The pacing is right. The amount of information per chunk is right. And I always want more. Too bad some of the segments required an extra ticket (there were several special exhibits) and we were too late for most of the “space” related stuff (got there about 5pm for that … oops), but all in all it was great.
A massive, vast … just really really large museum. It made me want to go to D.C. and see the Smithsonian again.
On the way back, after pizza, I stopped by the Hungarian Pastry Shop again, this time for chocolate pudding and regular coffee, and I worked on a doodle I started a few nights ago when Jyoti and I went there. It’s a bit abstract and populated mainly by pseudo-plant/branch type constructions. We’ll see where it goes.
Perhaps another episode of Charmed tonight … it seems like a decent enough mystical melodrama.
