Museum Hopper

our first stop in amsterdam worth any mention was the van gogh museum !  We got into town, dropped our luggage at the hotel, picked up our bikes and headed to the museum in a downpour!   It was great to be back in the museum.  We had purchased tickets in advance and basically walked up to the front of the line.  The other line waiting to get in was very  long due to the inclement weather.  Due to this, of course, the museum was quite crowded.   We did follow the typical route through the museum and it did open up a bit as we got further into the museum.  I think Jason was quite impressed with the museum as well.  He really enjoyed seeing the Almond Blossom .   I really enjoyed the special exhibits in the museum when we visited.  They had an exhibit on Felix Vallotton, Fire Beneath the Ice .  I loved the similarities to Van Gogh's work.  Some of his paintings were so similar in style and feel, but his woodcuts were s...

a few weeks ago, my husband and i went to the detroit institute of art for a date night.  i really wanted to see the latest exhibit, samurai: beyond the sword .  i love learning about the far east.  given that i have not spent much (read: any) time in the far east of china, japan or korea, i have not been too many museums specific to the topic. as usual, the DIA did a nice job with this exhibit.  the exhibit went by really quickly; i was amazed actually.   the first half of the exhibit was about the warrior part of a samurai's life.  we learned about how their swords were made.  they are a truly a work of art. it can take up to a six months to make just one sword.  i cannot imagine working on a single item for that long.  we also learned about their regalia and how it was used in official parades and other engagements. the second half was about how the samurai were actually strong carriers of the japanese culture.  it had all ...

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. ...

over the thanksgiving break, i went with my husband, my parents and my sister to the new detroit institute of art exhibit, watch me move: the animation show .  we were very excited about it - we booked tickets about a week in advance for a 5:00 entrance on a friday.  it seemed like it was a good time to go; it was not as crowded as the exhibits sometimes are.  my husband loves pixar, which was featured on the billboards, so it was given that we were going to the show! i was expecting more movie stills, but it was actually a large number of movie snipets ranging from the expected (disney) to old, controversial films from spain.  the exhibit was grouped into themes by different movie categories.  to watch the movies, headphones were provided.  movies were sometimes shown on loops, but other screens had just one movie showing.  literally, if you watched every movie, you could probably spend all day in the exhibit. i thought it was a great exh...

i really wanted to visit the molly brown house .  i felt like we had been when i was in denver before and it turns out that i had!   molly brown is the wife of a man who struck gold in the denver gold rush at the turn of the 19th century.  she went on to be a colorado congress woman and was nicknamed the "unsinkable" molly brown as she was one of the few who survived the Titanic.   the house is a traditional Victorian built in the stylish part of town back then.  i loved how they were able to restore it using (very) old photographs of the rooms.  it was fantastic to see how they were able to find similar pieces or get them back from the estate.   i thought the bedrooms were the most interesting.  seeing how similar they are to ours now, but also so different in some ways.  there really have been no major changes in the bathroom in over 100 years!   i thought the shop was pretty well done too.  i ended up even getting someth...

as we were heading out of town, for jason, we went to the wings over the rockies air and space museum .  we think it was in an old air force hangar.   the museum was in one huge open space with lots of airplanes. my husband liked some of the airplanes, but was a little disappointed at the overall quality of the planes.  he wished there had been some older planes (war birds).  all of the planes were flown in the Vietnam War or more recently.  we did get to see a Burt Rutan plane though!  jason always likes seeing those!  rutan was honored by the museum and that made jason very proud.     behind the planes, there were a variety of small rooms with particular focuses like uniforms of pilots and nose art.  the rooms were a little dated, but the quality of the material was strong.  i had seen a lot of nose art from world war II, and so it was interesting to see some of the more recent art.  it seems that nose art has dwin...

my husband and i visited the  denver art museum   on our second day in denver.  we really enjoyed it!   the building itself seems like a piece of art.  it is so cool.  i loved the angles and interesting windows.  Each window frames a view of the denver and the surrounding areas. we started at the top of the castle looking portion of the museum.  they had an interesting variety of art work.   each floor in the tower was a very manageable set of art.  i really liked the american art that they had as well as the first nations artifacts.   i also really liked that each floor had sitting areas and places for children to interact with the art!  each sitting area was "themed" to the floor.  we loved peeking out of each window to get a beautiful view of the mountains and denver. we did not go the special exhibit, but it looked fantastic.   overall, it was a great visit.  we loved the sculptural b...