The Metropolitan Museum of Art...NYC



Outside the Met...rather like the bouquinistes along the Seine, n'est-ce pas?



Inside the Met....a good way to view the paintings and listen to the commentary.


And the final pix I'm going to post for NYC are of the absolute jewel of the city....Central Park.
Some of these pix almost have an impressionist painting quality and this is with no special effects..
.just the very specialness of the park.






And I loved this "cougar" in the park...

More pix from NYC.


That wonderful Chrysler building in the background.



The New York Public Library and one of its famous lions.



The Bryant Park Reading Room of the library...they even have carts of books you can borrow
to read while you're there.



Rockerfeller Centre



Little Italy on a balmy spring night.

This little table is my latest Oak Bay Dump conversion along with a footstool Mary gave me a while ago.

And more pix of NYC....


Lincoln Center



Art in the Metro



We noticed a lot of these what seem to be towers for water storage on a lot of apartment buildings.
I wonder if they were originally for fire protection?



And speaking of fires...this one was right by our apartment. The fire and police
department were right across from us so got to see them in action.



Jim and the Hudson River



Dog socialization area.



World Trade Center site



The "Winter Garden" in the World Financial Center across from the site.

More pix of NYC.


Cheese shop...yum...


Around Columbia University....could be Paris, n'est-ce pas?


The Guggenheim


Licorice exhibit at the Guggenheim. You were invited to take a piece...it was
part of the "art work"...however, taking pictures was forbidden but I managed to get one anyway...

Some pix of Washington, D.C. today. We really enjoyed being in Georgetown and it was very convenient for Jim since Georgetown University was right there. Very expensive real estate. John Kerry owns a home there worth 7 million US. Where JFK lived as a senator and when he was first married to Jackie before becoming president. Also where Jackie bought a home after his assassination but soon fled to NYC because of security concerns. I can see why they referred to the village as their "beloved Georgetown". Wonderful restaurants and shops...almost no chain stores.


Georgetown University. The only university on our travels where there were loads of empty computers with internet access.


Some colourful townhouses in Georgetown.


Some shops and restaurant fronts in Georgetown.


The house Jackie K. bought after the assassination.


Lincoln Memorial.


The great man himself...what a fabulous statue!


Don't imagine there's much joy in this building these days.

The hallowed halls of Princeton University


Quite the gift from the class of 1879.

I loved these no parking signs!

I was very impressed with this war memorial at Hampton Beachfor those residents lost at sea in the various wars. It is designed so that windblown sand collects around the bottom...really adds to the whole impression.

Lobster traps in Portland, Maine.



A great fish store. Portland, Maine.


The most photographed lighthouse in Maine.


This is around the area of the lighthouse. The weather here is very changeable and I can see there would be shipwrecks. Just a short time ago we were sitting by the docks in the sun with shirtsleeves eating fish and chips and suddenly the wind got up and the temperature dropped 20 degrees.

When I was in Boston I visited the main headquarters of the Christian Science Church. On our tour of Boston, the guide mentioned the famous "mapparium" (a 3 story stained glass globe you can walk into) and that intrigued me. Also, when we were poor students the Christian Science Reading Room people in Vancouver gave us a free subscription for years to their excellent newspaper and I was interested in seeing the where it was produced. They have quite a neat display for the newspaper. You can look into the offices and they have a computer program which allows you to track what is happening during the daily production in all the various areas. Plus you can create your own new story...it was all quite fun.

Take a look at the mappariumwebsite for pix.

Some other pix of the church building and reflecting pool.

And here's a site for more pix (professional ones!) of the Gehry building

Here's the pix of the famous Media Lab. According to this prof I was asking directions from they are currently working (among other things) on armour for soldiers that is like gel so comfortable but will harden when hit.



MIT Media Lab

And another really cool thing was the "Kendall Band" that was in the subway station for MIT. The students had designed this giant wind chime sort of thing between the tracks that waiting passengers can twist a handle to begin. I tried it of course! It really gets a neat sound going through the underground station...very interesting echo effects.



Kendall Band (Kendall is the name of the subway station)

Back home now after a wonderful trip but as much as we enjoyed the big cities of New York, Washington, and Boston it is great to be back breathing this wonderful west coast air and in a quieter place. Sorry for those big pix that made the print very hard to read since you had to scroll so much. I just couldn't seem to resize my pix on Jim's laptop. Great to be back working with Photoshop. Will be posting lots of pix of our trip over the next while.

First up is a shot of Harvard. I lucked into joining a tour that was in progress while Jim headed to Special Collections to do his usual gig. It was really interesting and learned lots of things.



* That Harvard chooses the best people then finds money in grants, work study, etc. to make up the $40 K US tuition for those who don't have parents that can pay the whole shot. Also, new this year is that anyone whose parents make less than $40K will not have to pay anything.

* 97% live on campus for the entire 4 undergrad years

* most classes have no more than 14 students

* As one would expect, they want students to take a broad range of courses outside their specialty but what was rather cool is that instead of things like Biology 101, they will design directed studies courses for you. For example, the student giving the tour took the Physics of Musical Instruments".


Then on to MIT to take a pix of their Media Lab for my son, pick up a souvenir from MIT for him, and to see the new Stata Centre (not quite finished) by Frank Gehry that is getting lots of press because it is so wild in design. Gehry says the inside of the building is more important than its striking outside. The MIT faculty, he says, wanted to "produce collisions of people by accident".

I thought this building was a total "WOW" inside and out. Everything else there is sooo.... boring that this building comes across as absolutely brilliant by comparison. This opinion probably isn't shared by everyone. The person I asked directions from on campus (probably a prof) referred to it as the "drunken building" but did admit that now they had something (like Harvard does) that people would want to see.