NY museums

The museums were my favorite though. I went to the Natural History Museum first and spent a long time there. The aquatics floor was awesome; there was a gigantic blue whale hanging from the ceiling in one room and tons of specimens were together on a wall-- shells, fish, etc. Random trivia fact: Sea turtles have a different swimming pattern than other aquatic turtles. They flap their "arms" up and down, more like flying instead of the scooping (breaststroke) kind of motion used by other turtles.

Then I went to the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art), but I was kind of tired by that point so I only spent a couple hours there. So I only went through three exhibits: Byzantine Empire, Near Eastern (like Syria, Iran, and Assyria), and a Superheroes exhibit. The Near Eastern stuff was cool because I’d learned some history about that area in a Writings of Isaiah class at BYU; Assyria had a lot to do with Israel’s issues in Isaiah’s time. Some of the images of people reminded me of pictures I’ve seen in Primary lessons…

The Superhero exhibit also really swept me away. It focused on Superheroes as icons in our society for ideals of power, speed, and everything that defies vulnerability. Giorgio Armani helped put together the exhibit, so there were several haute couture dresses in addition to actual costumes from movies. The old Catwoman costume was there, as was the newest Batman costume and the Superman costume worn by Christopher Reeves in 1978! Becca, you especially would have loved this exhibit—it made a lot of connections between visual images and the ideals they are meant to represent. It’s interesting to think about fashion as a cycle—ideas from comic books wind up influencing haute couture, but the same ideas trickle back down into the clothing that normal people wear too.