Saturday at the Met

On Saturday, I paid 75 cents to get in to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The $12 for students that is written up on the sign is, thankfully, only a suggested price. They don't need my money anyway. They have people who donate millions of dollars to that place every year, and every year, thousands upon thousands of poor tourists don't read the fine print and pay the full suggested price. They really don't need my money.

So Alicia and I wandered around the Met for a few hours. We saw all the famous Monet, Degas, and Von Goethe paintings. We looked at statues, examined photographs, and walked around until our feet hurt. Actually, our feet hurt the entire time, but we just walked through the discomfort. 

My favorite exhibit was the exhibit of American landscapes. I personally think that to paint with exquisite detail a six feet tall by eight feet wide landscape painting takes a tremendous amount of talent. Even more than perhaps the more famous artists who simply slapped paint onto a canvas and called it done. I was sad that this particular exhibit was so small (only eight paintings), because I could have spent all day in there, admiring the incredible amount of work that must have gone into painting a canvas so large with such an attention to detail. Beautiful detail. 

One artist, instead of signing his name traditionally on the canvas, had "carved" his name into one of his trees. Another painting had rushing water that looked so real it could have passed for a photograph. And all had breathtaking views of snow-covered mountains and green valleys. The exhibit was just too short. 

I enjoyed the museum quite a bit, but I was definitely ready to leave a few hours late. All the walking had worn me out completely. 

As we left the museum, it began to sprinkle gently. Neither Alicia and I had brought an umbrella, so we were a little worried, but since it was such a light, misty rain, we decided we could probably just continue to walk (instead of wait for the rain to stop). So we walked back through Central Park alongside a road (so we wouldn't get lost wandering). 

Just as we were nearing the subway station (and I mean, standing on the other side of the street), the heavens opened and the rains came pouring down. And by pouring, I mean pouring. The front side of us (the side facing into the rain) was thoroughly soaked by the time we got down into the subway stop. Both Alicia and I were pretty amused, so we didn't mind the fact that we were all wet (although we got some funny looks from people). 

And its a good thing we didn't mind being wet, because otherwise the walk from the subway stop to home would have been miserable. It was raining lightly when we got out of the subway, but three blocks away from home it started to downpour again. So we gave up trying to scurry from under one tree to under the construction awning to under another tree again. It wasn't working and we were already completely soaked through. 

While I love museums and such, running through the rain was a nice release from the stuffy, cooped up feeling of the museum.