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Snakehead Buddha?
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Awesometown. It's always so rad to see all the mythic creatures that have evolved out of other country's religions and culture.
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...we went over to Thailand's National Museum to get our art and history on!
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The museum is also filled with all sorts of huge dioramas that depict all sorts of epic battles of yore. (They used elephants as battle tanks! Elephants!)
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...all over the place! Pretty!
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And then after we left the museum, we walked around the grounds and admired the blossoming cherry trees...
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We spent a few hours checking out the exhibits.
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...The Museum of Natural History!
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The museum also documents the behavior of Americans not-so-happy with the recent arrivals. How fucking insane is this pic?
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Don't worry, it's not racist or anything. the guy took off the hood and he was totally a Leni Lenape.
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It was teeny tiny, but still really interesting!
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After the rain had subsided, Meredith and I walked down into Chinatown to check out the MoCA Museum (Museum of Chinese in the Americas)
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Bingo! Pretty neat, right? So his name was Karol Miskovics (which was later anglicized to Miscovich).
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This is a photo of the (long-since defunct) synagogue on Rivington a few blocks from Meredith's apartment back in 1910 when it was the heart of the Jewish lower east side.
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Old school street signs from the Lower East Side.
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The rest of the museum documents the development and evolution of neighborhoods in New York as a result of mass immigration. A clamseller in what would eventually come to be known as Little Italy. Mulberry & Grand (circa 1890).
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Oh, wait. In Longbranch, New Jersey? Whaaaaaat?
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A full-on Ku Klux Klan march through a town. Oh, those wacky southerners!
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An entire African tribe that emigrated.
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A Romanian woman with pretty much the biggest baby I've ever seen. (Who sorta looks a bit like my friend Rachael, no?)
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This guy should've shaved that stash, put on a little rouge, folded up those hairy legs COMING OUT OF HIS ABDOMENT and hid them under a dress. He could've easily passed as a hirsute preggo chick.
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The Immigration Museum is pretty amazing. If you live in NYC, or are ever here visiting, I strongly recommend it. These next few pics are all from a few photographers who spent a lot of time photographing portraits of all the people who were either held aside at Ellis Island for being strange or different, or documenting people that had be rejected entry and were about to be deported.
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"Tattooed German stowaways deported May, 1911."
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Just some tall dude. No, biggie.
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Remember how on my trip to Thailand I was complaining about how loud the gecko in my room was? Well the museum likens the noise it makes to "the bark of a small dog." Hahah.
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Hahaha. Look at the model of the prehistoric crocodile! They've existed as a species (practically unchanged) for 90 million years! (Or at least that's what GOD wants all you SINNERS to believe! Everyone knows the planet's only like 6,000 years old, duh!)
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The Placoderms are my favoritest!!!
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Totally badass, huh?
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Afterwards, we went and checked out the awesome dinosaur fossils room. Despite the fact that I've been there tons of times, I'm always amazed at the lengths God went to to create these skeletons of creatures that never really existed and then buried them to test our faith. Man, God is AWESOME!
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...that has hundreds of real butterflies and moths flying around in it. This moth here must of had a wingspan of 10"! It was amazing!
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...butterflies exhibit!
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On Wednesday Sarah and I went up to the Museum of Natural History to check out the new dinosaurs exhibit. But we ended up spending way more time checking out the...
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And then after you've finished looking at all of them, the exhibit hall leads to a huge room...
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The exhibit was crazy! They had literally hundreds of cases of these huge butterflies and moths.
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On Sunday, Meredith and I went to some museum in Newark with my parents. They had a rad collection of some truly scary African masks.
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A baby cotton-top tamarin!
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But the best part was the little indoor zoo they had upstairs. Here's a dwarf mongoose!
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...The Exploratorium! Which is this totally huge hands-on science museum where you get to play and experiment with stuff.
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And then on Sunday, I Paul invited me out again to check out the "Beautiful Losers" art exhibit at one of the local SF museums. I asked him for the address and he was like "Oh, it's on Mission and 3rd St." I was like "Oh, new place is 2 streets over and 13 blocks away - so I'll walk over and see you in like 15 minutes." Yeah, too bad that's an estimate based on the size of city blocks in NYC - turns out that "blocks" in SF are like a 1/4 each and so it ended up taking me just about an hour to get there. Hahaha. Doh.
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At the entrance to the gallery, they had a kidney-shaped "swimming pool" made out of wood and plywood. Here's the view underneath. Pretty neato.
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On Thursday morning I headed over to the Metropolitan Museum to check out another Watson Adventure scavenger hunt.
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I'd been living in NYC for almost five years and this was only the second time I'd ever managed to make it to the Met (which is embarrassingly criminal). The "arms and armor" display there is one of the craziest things I've ever seen in a museum.
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Back in early March I was being interviewed as a candidate to take over the operations for small NYC company that creates and hosts scavenger hunts around the city. (I ended up taking the job, but was only there for three months before I was offered a job out in San Francisco - which is where I'm writing this from). Anyway, while I was interviewing with them, I was invited out to check out one of their scavenger hunts that they were holding at the Museum of Natural History. So I headed up there to check it out with Grant and my favorite married couple David and Miye.
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After Lee's gallery, we went across the museum and check out Roger Hior's work - he takes metal objects (like this BMW 7-Series engine) and dips them in a copper-sulfate bath
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Lee was one of the first female artists to gain widespread recognition in the 1960s.
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Pretty neat, right? You LOVE art, I know.
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...but then I got caught taking sneaky pics and I had to put my camera away. Her most recent sculpture is some of the most beautiful, striking art I've ever seen and I the exhibit completely overwhelmed. I think I heard that this entire 150+ piece show is coming to New York City this summer - if it does, you should go see it.
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On Friday morning, Jordana (who is a painter) took me to the Hammer Museum to see Lee Bontecou's "Retrospective." Here's a cool, drippy permanent installation in the museum's lobby.
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She become known for creating these super-creepy canvas and wire sculptures.
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I managed to capture a few pics of these scultpures from the mid-seventies, where she was going through a period of creating all these crazy, Egyptian scarab beetle-like scultures...
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These pics are all sorta shitty and totally don't do her work justice - they're absolutely striking in person. (You're not supposed to take pics in the museam and I was forced to snap all these ninja style when the guards weren't looking.) Anyway, towards the end of the 60s, Lee started moving away from the scary-looking scultures that she was known for and started more organic flower-like sculptures that were met with tepid critical reactions. So in the early 70s she stopped exhibiting and pretty much dropped out of the art scene. Well it turns out she's spent the last thirty years working and all of the stuff she'd been working on (that nobody's seen until just recently) is completely amazing.
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I love going to museums, but enjoy them infinitely more if I'm there with someone who knows alot about what we're seeing and can contextualize it for me. Jordana is one of those people.
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The Greek authenticity of McDonald's inspired us to check out the airport's small museum of Greek art.
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The four of us read this truly amazing story and reflected upon it for a few minutes...
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We hit the road again and after a lovely thirty-minute windy ride through all sorts of crazy-ass mountain terrain, we arrived at the Arkadia Monestary: which is one of Crete's most celebrated monuments of resistance against the mid-19th century Turkish occupation.
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How did Megadeth manage to never write a song about this?
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...before racing over to the cases and posing for pictures with the skulls of bad-ass, martyred Cretans who blew themselves up in order to take out some Turks.
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Now this is cool. It's the oldest road in Europe. We followed it away from the tour and towards lunch.
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And a, um, tree.
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More stuff that might be old or not.
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This was the original throne of king Minos where he decreed that no trace of anything fun should be left in his kingdom.
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And nope. No torture chamber either (Turns out the Minoans were an almost entirely peaceful civilization). We held out hope that there was at least a snack bar somewhere, but no such luck there either. There was however, a functional 5,000 year old plumbing system which our 80 year old tour guide told us she would demonstrate. For a second we were scared that she'd pop a squat right in front of us. But she just kind of pointed at it and told us how advanced the Minoans were. Obviously not advanced enough to leave some skulls or a torture chamber to cheer poor Fatty up.
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And nope. No torture chamber either (Turns out the Minoans were an almost entirely peaceful civilization). We held out hope that there was at least a snack bar somewhere, but no such luck there either. There was however, a functional 5,000 year old plumbing system which our 80 year old tour guide told us she would demonstrate. For a second we were scared that she'd pop a squat right in front of us. But she just kind of pointed at it and told us how advanced the Minoans were. Obviously not advanced enough to leave some skulls or a torture chamber to cheer poor Fatty up.
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Okay, so get this. There is no labyrinth, there are no minotaurs and not only that, there never was a minotaur. The myth is really just like a really, really, really long game of telephone. Turns out there was a king, Minos who was strong and possessed a bullish personality. The palace had like tons of rooms. Before the roof was put on it kind of looked like a maze to bemused locals. That's your labyrinth.
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At the beginning of the tour, we were told that the palace ruins that we were exploring were from 3,000 BCE. So the whole time, we're walking around looking at this stuff in awe. Like "Wow this things been standing here for 5,000 years!" Then about halfway through the tour, our guide informed us that everything we'd been looking at was actually all reconstructed from piles of rocks discovered at the excavation site at the beginning of the 20th century.
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After our grodey lunch, we decided to go check out the "Mutter Museum of Medical Oddities" at University hospital...but by the time we got there it was goddamned closed.