Fenway stadium
In all honesty, I could not care less about baseball. However, I very much enjoyed my tour of Fenway stadium park. Our tour guide did a pretty great job of selling his enthusiasm for the site, and we got to learn all about the history of the park. One of my favorite fun facts was the green space the stadium owners created to grow fresh produce for all of their concessions. All of the extra produce is donated to local food banks!
other random facts i learned:
- the scoreboard is manually operated
- the newsroom seats are segregated by “priority,” and the decision to leave the windows open has to be made at the beginning of the game. It cannot be changed throughout the game (so if it starts raining, oops!)
- the red seat in the back of the stadium marks the spot of Ted Williams’ longest home run, (502 feet from home plate) that ended up hitting a fan in the head.
Chicago waterfront
Unfortunately, I did not get to spend that much time on the waterfront (it was also like 20°F), but I went on a really nice run one morning. Even though it was like 7 AM in the morning, the waterfront was bustling, and I ran by so many other (freezing) runners. The dock path was also populated by a lot of geese, so half of my run was spent avoiding birds and bird poop, and the other half was spent trying not to slip on the ice. I spent some time walking around the area surrounding Grant Park, and I met up with a former Caltech student at a nearby coffee shop called necessary & sufficient coffee.
Sunset Boulevard (the Broadway show)
Technically, I guess I visited W 44th street (not actually Sunset Blvd, which is LA), but I think that putting the main show in the title is better than listing “W 44th Street.”
Before this show, I had never heard anything about Sunset Boulevard, so I had no expectations for the show. All I knew was that Nicole Scherzinger (the main actress) is very famous (lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls). However, the show blew me away. The show did not use any sets, instead relying on lighting tricks and camera projections, and it was one of the coolest stage performances I have ever seen. I probably listened to the show’s main song (“Sunset Boulevard”) like 50 times in the days following the show (I listened to it so much that it became my top song of the past several months on Spotify…).
Spoiler alert: The second act of the show starts with a like performance of Tom Francis (one of the main characters) singing “Sunset Boulevard” as he walks backstage from the dressing rooms to the street outside the theatre. This show is special because they block off the entire street for the actors to perform this song (its all projected back onto the screen on stage for the audience to watch). The really exciting part is that people on the street can watch the performance live if they get there in time. I became such a mega-fan of the show that I actually came back a few days later to see the live performance of the song. The live performance was fantastic!
The Met
I think I actually went to the Met when I was very young, but this was my first time visiting the museum as a competent (semi-competent?) adult. The museum was really cool! I especially loved the musical instruments section, and it was pretty neat to see how the standards for instruments changed between cultures.
Last term I took a class on “the wild,” and I happened to stumble upon the Met’s exhibit on “the wild.” It was interesting to see how artists viewed the same concept that we talked about in class.
The Whitney
I had actually visited the Whitney several years prior, but, as the Whitney’s exhibits are always changing, the museum was completely different this time around. One of my favorite exhibits was the one on the top floor, which was an exhibit by Christine Sun Kim. This art exhibit was focused on a making a statement about the struggles faced by deaf people. I was especially struck by this exhibit because Kim was able to make her art both approachable and witty. I even chuckled a few times while I was looking through her artwork.
The rest of the exhibits were also really nice. To be fair, I would not really consider myself an expert on modern art, but i definitely enjoyed walking through the exhibits. Some of my favorite paintings are shown below.
I also attempted to draw my own doodle of Andy Warhol’s statement on the culture of rhinoplasty in America. I definitely messed up some of the proportions, but it is the effort that matters.
The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA)
I basically grew up in this museum, learning how to walk roaming around the museum’s exhibits and taking impromptu drawing lessons as I tried to draw my own renditions of my favorite paintings. Over spring break, my dad and I went back to walk around the museum. While I have been back a few times over the years, the museum has looked different every time, and this time it seemed that the recent renovations had transformed the whole ground floor. Unfortunately, they got rid of my favorite exhibit – a collection of mini dollhouses – but some of the new exhibits were still pretty neat.
After our trip through the museum we also walked through the sculpture garden. While some of the statues have always been there, there were a few new recent editions I enjoyed. My favorite was the “bunny on an anvil.”
