A whole lotta walkin'

It's funny how one does things abroad one would never do at home - visiting museums, for instance. I think I've been to the Singapore Art Museum maybe once, and some exhibitions at the Science Centre as a kid, if that counts. I haven't even been to the Singapore History Museum!

But since coming over to the States, I've been to quite a number of museums.
There's the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in NYC of course. Then, there's the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston, the Musée des Ursulines in Quebec City. But this year especially, I've been to so many, probably because a lot of them have free admission, that it's kinda crazy!

On my weekend trip to Pittsburgh over winter break, I visited:
The Carnegie Museums - Museum of Art and Museum of Natural History (free thanks to Weiyi's CMU student pass!)
The Andy Warhol Museum

Spring break trip to D.C. and Philly:
D.C.:
Smithsonian Museums (There're like 100 Smithsonian museums in D.C., all of which have free admission. Really really cool) - National Museum of American History, National Air & Space Museum, National Gallery of Art, National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of Natural History, Holocaust Museum
International Spy Museum (the most pricey of them all at $18. Ouch!)
Philly:
The Philadelphia Museum of Art
Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art
Chemical Heritage Foundation (this one was really random. My friend and I just wanted to pass some time before our bus back to NYC, so we just wandered in to this, as it was near our hostel. It was free, and so we got a crash course in the history of chemistry. lol)

I think my favs out of the lot are MoMA, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Holocaust Museum and the Museum of American History. Also, art-wise, I realise that I find old European art really boring, because it's 99.30492% depictions of Biblical stuff - Jesus on the cross, the Virgin Mary visited by Gabriel or some other angel, Jesus in front of the Roman Emperor - you get the picture. I understand - that was the zeitgeist of the time, so of course artists would be commissioned to produce such works, but there're only so many variations of the crucification you can see before Zzzz... For old stuff, Asian art is more interesting for me. But of course, contemporary art is still the best - for the cool factor (even if it is mostly incomprehensible to me), or the WTF factor (seen most commonly in video or installation works. I recall one in the Carnegie Museum of Art where the room was filled with balls kept afloat by strong fans and then you walk into the room. The interaction of human and ball, whether you touched them or tried to avoid them, explained some sort of relationship between human and space. Or something.)

So new resolution: Visit the friggin' history museum when I get home in the summer!
and btw, museum visiting is ridiculously tiring, thanks to the amount of walking one has to do!