Museum Hopper

Over the last week, I had the opportunity to go the Cincinnati Art Museum not once, but twice.  My sister, brother-in-law and their two children were in town twice in a week.   The first visit -- I thought we would visit the Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion .  They have a section of the exhibit that allow the kids the ability to touch the clothes and see the fabulous exotic garments.  My nephew really liked talking about what they were made of and what they reminded him of.  The shoes (which I had missed the first time I went to the exhibit) were also a topic of much conversation.  He spoke about how tall they were, how difficult they would be to walk in, again, what they were made of.  He even pontificated on which ones he thought my mother/his grandmother would like best.   As you can suspect with a five year old in an art museum, he did get distracted eventually.  I remembered the children's room, which as I obviously had never been to.  Wow!  What a treasure.  Unfortu

Over Thanksgiving, my family went to do a day in Detroit.  We started with a delicious lunch at Slow's and then headed over to the DIA to go to the joint special exhibit, Monet: Framing Life and Church: A Painter's Pilgrimage .   Monet really broke with tradition when he started painting in the outdoors.  It was really quite revolutionary.     I always enjoy learning about the relationships that the artists had with one another.  In the picture below, you can see Renoir painting Monet.  Monet also has many paintings of this exact garden and landscape. Renoir Monet After the Monet paintings, we went to the Church side of the exhibit.  I did not know much about Frederick Church before the exhibit.  It was interesting to learn about the trip he took with his family.  He took his wife and child on the trip across the middle east.  He did a number of sketches, paintings on site, but also did quick ones to ensure he remembered enough for when he got b

Jason and I knew that we wanted to do a day trip to Nikko from Tokyo.  Unfortunately, Nikko had rain in the forecast for every day we were in Tokyo.   To get there, it required that we took a shinkasen from the main train station and then get on a local train.  It turned out that the shinkasen we needed to take home was a major commuter option, so the original option we wanted was booked.  This is the only time we had any issues with booking the tickets we needed to.   I have bundled three temples that we visited into one larger post for simplicity.  We visited: Toshogu Taiyuinbyo Rinnoji We also visited the Kanmangafuchi Abyss. I will start with Toshogu as this was the largest draw to Nikko and also one of the most impressive things we saw while we were in Japan (and it had pretty serious competition).   Toshogu is the shrine and mausoleum dedicated to Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, which united Japan under a single ruler and moved the