Back from NY
And there are pictures!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pamgriffith/tags/newyork/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zackw/tags/newyorkcity/
zwol and I spent the last week in New York meeting up with old friends and seeing the sights. solconeja was there too for the beginning of the week, and all three of us somehow managed to cram ourselves into elisaana's rather small apartment. (And many thanks to Betsy's roommate for putting up with it!) After that we stayed with some friends of Zack's from Berkley.
The week is a bit of a blur now, but highlights include the St. Patrick's parade, Avenue Q, the superhero store, Chinatown, and Little Italy (with rice pudding!) with Betsy and Mindy, dinner and the elephant walk with Betsy and Zack's old friends from Columbia, the Frick museum, the Cloisters, MoMA, dinner and a commedy club followed by Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (a "neo-futurist" show) with Betsy and Sumana, a ferry ride past the Statue of Liberty, an abortive attempt at seeing the Old Merchant's House Museum (we ran late and it closed early) then a walk and some tea with Betsy and some of Zack's friends, dinner with Zack's uncle and family, and a walk on Roosevelt Island with Sumana. (Phew!)
It was really great seeing/meeting people there, though I may owe Betsy and Mindy an apology for not being as energetic and enthusiastic as usual--I've just been so tired lately, so everything seems more difficult. I think I need to get some more vitamin B12.
Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and the elephants were really awesome random things to run across. Too Much Light... is a show where the performers try to do 30 90-second plays in one hour in a random order chosen by the audience. The price was randomized with a 6-sided die, and every week between 2 and 12 plays are discarded and replaced with new ones. Some of the plays were good, some not, but it was a really cool show.
The elephants were in Manhattan for the circus. Apparently they cannot bring the train with the animals all the way in, so it is a yearly ritual that they walk into the city every year. It happens late at night so they can close down the entire street. We had to wait for a while, but then suddenly Elephants! In Manhattan!!
MoMA had a great exhibit called Design and the Elastic Mind full of the sorts of things I see all the time at various department demo days here or at conferences. There were a lot of very cool things there, but it was a little weird seeing them in a museum setting where one Does Not Touch. There were so many things just begging to be messed with, all with security people hovering over them to make sure that didn't happen. I can see why they wouldn't want people to touch stuff that's going to be there a while and is probably a pretty fragile prototype not up to the masses of people, but it just feels wrong. They also had an exhibit about color, which was rather less interesting; I kind of wish I'd skipped that and gone down to see the main collection, which I would have liked to spend more time in but we were all getting tired at that point.
I totally recommend the Frick and the Merchant's House as interesting small and less well-known museums. The cloisters were also very cool, though Zack says he found the building built out of the skeletons of other buildings kind of creepy. All of those are the sorts of thing that you can see all of in a few hours, unlike MoMA or the main part of the Met, which is nice.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pamgriffith/tags/newyork/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zackw/tags/newyorkcity/
zwol and I spent the last week in New York meeting up with old friends and seeing the sights. solconeja was there too for the beginning of the week, and all three of us somehow managed to cram ourselves into elisaana's rather small apartment. (And many thanks to Betsy's roommate for putting up with it!) After that we stayed with some friends of Zack's from Berkley.
The week is a bit of a blur now, but highlights include the St. Patrick's parade, Avenue Q, the superhero store, Chinatown, and Little Italy (with rice pudding!) with Betsy and Mindy, dinner and the elephant walk with Betsy and Zack's old friends from Columbia, the Frick museum, the Cloisters, MoMA, dinner and a commedy club followed by Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (a "neo-futurist" show) with Betsy and Sumana, a ferry ride past the Statue of Liberty, an abortive attempt at seeing the Old Merchant's House Museum (we ran late and it closed early) then a walk and some tea with Betsy and some of Zack's friends, dinner with Zack's uncle and family, and a walk on Roosevelt Island with Sumana. (Phew!)
It was really great seeing/meeting people there, though I may owe Betsy and Mindy an apology for not being as energetic and enthusiastic as usual--I've just been so tired lately, so everything seems more difficult. I think I need to get some more vitamin B12.
Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and the elephants were really awesome random things to run across. Too Much Light... is a show where the performers try to do 30 90-second plays in one hour in a random order chosen by the audience. The price was randomized with a 6-sided die, and every week between 2 and 12 plays are discarded and replaced with new ones. Some of the plays were good, some not, but it was a really cool show.
The elephants were in Manhattan for the circus. Apparently they cannot bring the train with the animals all the way in, so it is a yearly ritual that they walk into the city every year. It happens late at night so they can close down the entire street. We had to wait for a while, but then suddenly Elephants! In Manhattan!!
MoMA had a great exhibit called Design and the Elastic Mind full of the sorts of things I see all the time at various department demo days here or at conferences. There were a lot of very cool things there, but it was a little weird seeing them in a museum setting where one Does Not Touch. There were so many things just begging to be messed with, all with security people hovering over them to make sure that didn't happen. I can see why they wouldn't want people to touch stuff that's going to be there a while and is probably a pretty fragile prototype not up to the masses of people, but it just feels wrong. They also had an exhibit about color, which was rather less interesting; I kind of wish I'd skipped that and gone down to see the main collection, which I would have liked to spend more time in but we were all getting tired at that point.
I totally recommend the Frick and the Merchant's House as interesting small and less well-known museums. The cloisters were also very cool, though Zack says he found the building built out of the skeletons of other buildings kind of creepy. All of those are the sorts of thing that you can see all of in a few hours, unlike MoMA or the main part of the Met, which is nice.