Our first day in the city was very full of art, pizza, and Korean food, and hence very perfect. Chad and I first walked from 120th and Amsterdam to the Met on 82nd and Fifth. As we are calorie-burning, exercise-loving fools, walking through Central Park was the ideal way for us to start the day. It was fun too, to see all the kids playing soccer, people running, biking, playing tennis, squatting Asians collecting acorns (?!).
We went specifically for the show, Americans in Paris, 1860-1900, but ended up staying for a few hours wandering about the whole place. I don’t know whether it was the refreshing equal representation by women artists or simply a factor of the era’s fasicination with scenes of domesticity, but there were portraits of babies and children galore. And not just fancy, dressed-up kids on show but naked dreamy babies just after being bathed or chilling on the living room furniture with legs akimbo and bloomers showing. Very adorable. I especially enjoyed John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882) and Elizabeth Nourse’s La Mere.
Robert Polidori’s large-scale photos of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath were expectedly sobering, and much more beautiful than I had anticipated. There is one great shot of a white car sitting askew in a yard with water mark rings from top to bottom, as if it had been sitting a large dirty bath that had drained very slowly.
And we also enjoyed checking out the reconstructed Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing. We could really enjoy it knowing that it wasn’t a stolen or looted building, but actually a saved temple gifted by Egypt. There were hierogyphs all over the walls; in one section there were butchers depicted ceremoniously cutting the meat and the hierogyphs had been translated for us. They were saying things like, Hold this and I will saw, and Take this piece.
Next, we met up with Bella and our friends John and Joe at MoMA. Turns out an out-of-town membership is great deal. For $60 I get free admission for a year and up to five $5 tickets for my guests each visit. Pretty good considering that regular admission $20.
Luckily for us, Joe couldn’t find the Chinese restaurant, and we ended up at a Korean place, called Cho Dang Gol at 55 West 35th Street. Chad and I shared an old Korean health specialty, which is basically chicken soup made with one cornish hen stuffed with ginseng, rice, pine nuts, soy beans and those red date things. All the ban chan (side dishes) were excellent, as were the appetizers – especially the ha mul pa jan, which is literally translated, seafood green onion cakes. Everything was good; I was only disappointed to find out today that the restaurant specializes in homemade tofu – which none of us ordered… (soon du boo = spicy soft tofu soup would have been a good choice I bet).
Then to top off an already practically perfect day, John treated us all to the movies: Casino Royale! It was the best James Bond movie yet – and the chase scene in the beginning one of the most inventive and agile I have ever seen – although I hear that it is actually derived from a French chase style previously used in a movie called District B13.
I’ll have to write about our second very full day on the train down to D.C. tomorrow.