A Big Apple

The Museum of Natural History is a spectacular place, and while everything I saw was amazing, the gem exhibition was the BEST. 

 Just look at that azurite sample! I was too busy staring agape at nature's splendor to take many photos. Katie snapped this shot on our way out.

 Aquatic dinos? COOL!

I'm not sure what day it was, but there was some attempt to visit Staten Island. The tour ferry was closed, so we wandered around and found this gorgeous building, the American Indian Museum (or something like that. It was closed for the day when we arrived, so we just admired the architecture for a while)

And then there was the Metropolitan Museum. Aside from being massive, crowded, and breathtakingly gorgeous, it housed pretty much every piece of artwork I've studied. 

Rodin! My favourite pieces were the sculptures of hands. I like seeing artists fixations with particular aspects of a body (my own being teeth). Rodin's hand sculptures were so incredibly expressive... AH! Inspiring. 

This is probably one of my most favourite works of modern painting (see how much I like it? My clothes match!), and for the life of me I cannot remember who made it! 

Ancient Peruvian shirt!

It's a gauze weave with supplementary weft patterns, WOVEN FROM THREAD SIGNIFICANTLY FINER THAN SEWING THREAD. This piece blew my mind. All of that insanely fine thread was spun BY HAND on a drop spindle, and then woven ON A BACKSTRAP LOOM OR BASIC GROUND LOOM BY HAND. It's perfect preservation is baffling enough, but the construction is completely beyond my comprehension.

Oh, and I saw the McQueen show. 

That was the highlight of the trip. I actually cried in the exhibition, and I was verklempt for hours (maybe days...) afterward. There's really no way to express how genius his work is, or how wonderfully it was set up here. 

And I'll leave you with something shiny and beautiful: 

A six foot tall Malachite and gold(leaf?) vase.