Museum Hopper

i was in seattle a few weeks ago to visit one of my really good friends, Jessica.  she suggested that we go to the pacific science center to see their exhibit, the photography of modernist cuisine: the exhibition.   our friends, priscilla and jen, joined us as well.  it looks like the exhibit will be traveling after this to a few different cities in the united states and then potentially heading overseas. the museum itself is made up of separate buildings and so we quickly headed over to the building that housed the special exhibit.  the photography was pretty spectacular.  it was photographed by the chef, Nathan Myhrvold , who i recognized from his appearances on top chef!  his full cookbook costs $00+ the photographs were pretty spectacular.  to a certain extent, i almost felt like we should have been visiting the art museum to view them.  the preciseness of the images and showing how food looks in the process of cooking was so cool. ...

i have been sort of waiting to visit the seattle art museum until some of the new exhibits opened.  it seemed fitting to do it my last weekend in seattle, which coincidentally ended up being a mildly rainy sunday!  perfect activity. i was very excited to see the beauty and the bount y after walking by the publicity signage every day.  it was pretty magnificent.  the best part though, which was key, was that the exhibit was not crowded.  each painting had plenty of space around it.  this was so important for setting the mood of the entire exhibit.  they grouped the paintings (from what i could tell) by geography and sort of ending with the westward expansion.  landscape paintings are always so peaceful.  even the scenes with huge storms blowing through seem to have some tranquility to them.  this exhibit was no exception.  it reminded me a lot of j.m.w. turner's work that i saw at the metropolitan museum of art and the tate brit...

on the first thursday , my classmate, priscilla, and i went to the burke museum of natural history and culture up on the university of washington campus.  it's considered one of the better museums in seattle. we headed up after work on the bus to check it out.  priscilla has been living up near the UW campus and knew where to go.   it was an interesting combination of stuff like the royal bc museum .  the artifacts and exhibits definitely overlapped between the two museum.  i enjoyed the photographs of the owls .  i would have loved a little more details on how many hours or shots they had to take to get some of these amazing action shots.  the wolves exhibit was pretty neat, a little simplistic, but interesting to learn about the wolves.   the downstairs is the "culture" part of the museum.  it had a section of the "first nations" that had a number of the same or similar objects from the royal bc museum including a sectio...

on the fourth of july, my boyfriend and i rode the ducks of seattle .  i booked the tickets in advance and we left from the westlake location in downtown seattle.  i figured it would be a good way to get us around seattle, end the weekend and get on the water for a little bit. we arrived at the stop a half hour early like we were supposed to and waited in a line a bit to get on the duck/boat/bus.  we were a little late taking off since two ticket holders arrived late to westlake.  this was the beginning of a not so great ride with these two.... we headed directly from westlake up towards the north side of lake union, hopped in the lake there, boated around, then headed down on the pier, up 1st avenue past pike market to wrap up the ride.  we spent about equidistant time in the water and on land, which i was really happy about.  it was great to be on the lake on the 4th of july.  we could see everyone gathering to watch the fireworks as well as the ...

this week, our internship company hosted a happy hour (or welcome event) at the seattle aquarium.  we had the entire place to ourselves after it closed, which was fantastic.  they nicely invited our managers, significant others if we have them and any children.  the size of the party is significantly less than would normally be at the museum.  they were serving us fish (along with meat) which was sort of an interesting twist on eating in an aquarium. the museum seems to be quite spacious with a large area when you walk in and then more of the exhibits in the back with the large mammals (the best part) in a second building.  the second building was pretty interesting.  it was designed to be "half open" as parts of it were open to the exterior.    some of the tanks were visible from the top and below, which is a great viewing point.   i also enjoyed looking at the octopus and the sea stars, which you can touch (gently). most im...

for my birthday this year, i decided to go on the underground tour with some friends, jessica, pascal and sarah!  i had really good things about the tour from both seattle locals and nonlocals, so i figured we should give it a go! i bought tickets online although the website was not very quick and took 15 minutes (and counting) to process.  i ended up calling to confirm that the purchase went through.  it had, but did with the wrong date.  they quickly fixed it and i was still given the student ticket price. on the day of, we arrived at the ticket building (for lack of a better word).  they did have a nice little restaurant in there with decently priced drinks.  it looked quite quaint and fun.   at tour time, we were all shepherded into a large room with seating to get the kick off of our tour (~20 minutes).  this gave us the foundation of what we were going to see in the underground.  after this, we left the building and headed ...

yesterday, i went to the experience music project with my friend noah from michigan.  we took the seattle monorail there, which was totally worth the $2 to get there!  it is completely unnecessary as far as public transportation, but was perfect for the start of this visit. the museum is laid out slightly unusually.  we had to "leave" the museum to get to other exhibits.  it was all in one building, but at times, you basically had to leave the museum that you paid through, walk through an area that did not require paid admission to go to another exhibit, which required paid admission.  for example, the avatar exhibit was in a completely separate area of the museum.   the museum name is not quite as representative as it could be.  as described on the website, the museum is dedicated to " the ideas and risk-taking that fuel contemporary popular culture."  the avatar exhibit and battlestar galactic seem a little out of place with the muse...

yesterday, i wandered over to the olympic sculpture park in seattle.  it's the first sort of touristy thing i had done since i arrived for the summer.  i liked it!  it seems to have a great view of puget sound.  yesterday was gloomy, grey and cold, but i can't wait to see it when it is a nice day.   i wish there had been a little more description about the sculptures when you either entered the park or near the sculptures themselves.  it was hard to tell which were the exhibits and which were the more permanent sculptures.  time in park: 2/3 hr times visited: 1 overall: B+

this museum was obviously jason's number one choice.  obviously.  after one false start, we arrived at the museum of flight early on friday morning.  we did get a AAA discount on the admissions, which saved us a few dollars.   the museum is basically split into three sections.  we headed over to the general wing first.  this is where most of their random collection of airplanes is kept (versus the other wing has the specialized world war I and II planes).  this section also has their space flight information.  this is where i wish jason would blog for me, since i am sure he would have a much better information and details and excitement about this than i do and would.  i did enjoy the section about the history of stewardesses in the airplanes, style in the aisle .  here are some pictures of the different planes we saw. my neighbor double dated to the prom with him the second wing is mostly the specialized world war II pla...

on this trip, i decided to take in the seattle art museum with my boyfriend, jason.  i was a little hesitant after our vancouver art gallery trip to take him to another art museum.  i even offered for him to view the museum of flight on his own and then meet up with him later!  (post coming later on the museum of flight, so he obviously did not take me up on my offer.   i thought this museum was very well laid out.  it was a few main floors and very easy to flow through each exhibit.  it is structured as you would expect, european art, african art, modern, etc.   i really wanted to go to this museum to see the three paintings they have on my 1001 paintings list!  i was able to quickly identify the museum area to target and was able to easily check the three paintings off the list!  jason also really liked the cars exploding in the lobby .  we were also quite impressed with the large collections of african and first na...

on the first thursday of every month , seattle hosts gallery art tours in the pioneer square district .  since jason and i happened to be in eattle on that date, i just could not help myself. we had to go and "get it out of the way" for my summer in seattle.  we got there as it was starting and i was very impressed at the quantity of galleries that existed in this little area.  i am not sure i would have ever noticed them if not for this tour.  i think we were a little amazed at the variety of people enjoying the art.  we saw serious art collectors to tourists likes us to "hipsters" visiting their artist friends.  it was definitely all over the board.  the galleries also varied from small single artist spaces to large galleries that seemed to have more developed artists.  one of the shows even was of an artist from michigan!  some of the art was quite out there.  jason definitely did not enjoy it.  i would have loved to have spoke...

as soon as we arrived in seattle (just about), we headed to the seattle space needle even with storms rolling through.  it was pretty crazy! the ticket sales are on the outside and actually, sort of difficult to find.  we headed up with just about no line.   it was quite breezy at the top with it swaying back and forth.  the needle has spectacular views at the top.  i also enjoyed that it had sections on the history of the space needle, the different neighborhoods you could view from the top as well information on a number of the different monuments/important places you can see from the top!  there is an indoor portion of the space needle and an outdoor place that is where pictures can be taken.  the gift shop was surprisingly awesome.  i was amazed.  jason bought a ton of seattle stickers for his extra fridge.  i almost bought birthday presents for my father.  the fudge for sale looked delicious.    ...