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.

Posting today from Portland, Maine which we're really enjoying. After a long drive yesterday (9 hours) with lots of delays and tie ups we did finally arrive around 5pm yesterday to this very charming seaside hotel in Hampton Beach. Had a great lobster dinner (with mussels thrown in) while watching the sun set over the ocean from the hotel's dining room. Exploring Maine today, will hit the Kennebuck area (Bush has a summer place there apparently but I doubt he'll be there relaxing....), Portmouth, and Kittery, then back for another lobster dinner (they have lots of variations) for me at our hotel. Tomorrow we head to Boston which looks like a pretty easy 1 hr drive, drop the car at the airport, taxi to our hotel, then Wed take the train back to NYC to leave for home Thurs. Yeah...no more difficult driving! Jim's in a bookstore...have to rout him out.

Princeton is a very beautiful small town with lots of interesting architecture in the town and university. Very small place and lots of large impressive churches and no sign of any pubs or where you can get a drink outside. Good place for these 6,000 students here who no doubt are very serious (physics and all that stuff...where Einstein went, where "A Beautiful Mind" was filmed). 12,000 employees at the U. for these students. Gee, they even beat out Royal Roads Military College which had a ratio of one to one.

Pretty sleepy town...not a lot to do but they did have a rather interesting little local museum on the "lost" Princeton. Looks like they haven't preserved their heritage as much as they could have. Unlike Georgetown that in 1950 made the entire place heritage and put restrictions on everything. It shows....it's a wonderful place.

So now off to Maine and area for the weekend. Will be quite a long driving day...about 7 hours I think. Then into Boston for three days then home. The time has flown by.

Well..I give up...will post pix when I get home.

Arrived (finally...!) in Princeton after getting dazed and confused. Things are not laid out on a grid around these old New England towns to say the least. Talking to some people in a store and they said everyone gets lost around here and regaled me with numerous stories about themselves to prove it. Also, seems they have something called "jughandles"....sort of an involved round-a-about that means you have to keep changing direction to eventually get through it. Guess we'll recognize it when we see it. The wierdist thing is you can (and we did) end up going south back to Washington when seemingly on the road north. My mind is still spinning. What we have seen of Princeton and the area is very beautiful and impressive....wow! The research library was open till 8pm tonight so Jim took the opportunity of getting started on his research. Currently a thunder and lightning storm which is too bad for a Cinqo de Mayo outdoor festival they have going on around here. Have an ethernet connection in our hotel room so will try to post some pix.

At Georgetown University in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. at the moment and overlooking some beautiful trees while I'm posting this. We're staying in Georgetown and it's a great area...very village-like with lots of neat shops, restaurants, small galleries, antique shops, and row housing that's very reminicent of the UK ...probablly dating from late 1800's I would say. Jim is doing is usual library thing...found some great Graham Greene letters yesterday that he will be able to use in his introduction to the the new novella by Greene he is publishing that I'm sure the publisher will be very excited about. We met the publisher/owner of Hesperus Press in NYC just before we left as he was there briefly. A really neat guy and they are very excited about publishing the Greene story and also the unpublished first novel if that works out. Jim had a quick look at it yesterday and he feels it's pretty good.

I went to the National Gallery of Washington and it was wonderful for all the works there as well as the buildings themselves...very impressive even after the Metropolitan Art Gallery of NYC which we also just visited. It's free to everyone and they don't even have a donation box (that I could see anyway) so a wonderful facility for everyone. In addition to loads of impressionist and modern paintings (and of course everything else but you've got to focus on your real interests in these places since I'm going non-stop these days) they had a wonderful Mayan special exhibition with great supporting materials including a really neat guide for children and also around 30 very interesting and impressive cubist paintings of Diego Rivera. He only produced such paintings during a two year period when he was in Paris around WWI. I just loved these paintings!

I think we'll do some sort of tour of Washington later this afternoon since we are very short of time here since we leave tomorrow and Jim really hasn't seen much except Georgetown.

Guess I haven't posted for a while. After Greenwich Village we walked along the Hudson River embankment walk...a wonderful decompressing area for New Yorkers and walked up the the 9/ll site and the winter garden (14 palm trees) in the World Financial Centre. Talking to a woman in Greenwich who really wanted us to see that as apparently they rushed this redevelopment through around the 9/11 site and it meant a lot to New Yorkers to have something beautiful again around that devastation. It's very moving to hear people talk about that experience.

The New York Public Library is also just amazing and I loved the park beside it which is the "Bryant Park Reading Room" where they have all sorts of bistro type tables and chairs along with movable shelves of books that people can temporarily borrow while they're there and even a rack of newspapers on rolls. I took a lot of pictures of that and think I'll try to paint that scene.

With all the frenzy of NYC there are many areas of oasis. We walked to the Frick Collection (wow...more wonderful stuff!)from our apartment via Central Park...another wonderful place where people can relax. Then walked to Zabar's food emporium on 80th and Broadway...can't believe the variety of stuff they manage to sell there from a relatively small space...a foody's delight...just bought a bag there for a souvenir to add to my collection of book/ shopping bags since we were leaving fairly soon.