Culture-filled Weekend

A couple of weekends ago, I had 2 meetup.com activities.

The first was with the knitting meetup group (Sit N Knit New York, in case you're interested). We went to see "Subversive Lace and Knitting" - an exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design. This is a small museum across the street from the gigantic MoMA, and was a nice change of pace. The pieces on display were all dealing with lace or knitting, but in new ways. Highlights for me included the BIG and tiny.

The BIG was a video of a performance art piece in which the artist used 2 giant machines (like cranes, but moving things side-to-side instead of up-and-down) each holding a street lamp post. He, the artist, was positioned in the middle in a cherry-picker, looping bolts of fabric and directing the large-machinery-drivers! He ended up knitting an American Flag, and it was such a fantastic deconstruction on the topology of knitting! Now I want to try it! (If you have access to large machinery, let me know!) Oddly, most other knitters didn't seem too excited about this one.

The tiny exhibit showed off a few "to scale" sweaters and a pair of gloves. The gloves were smaller than your fingernail! The artist used sharpened surgical wire as knitting needles and silk thread as her yarn to make these elaborately patterned pieces! This piece garnered lots of "wows" from the knitting public!

There were also knitted reproductions of black-and-white photographs of war-time knitting. Something else I've been thinking about trying - reproducing a photograph as a knitting piece! Guess I'll start with black-and-white first, though! Another really nifty pieces consisted of large hard objects, such as car doors and hoods, with intricate lace patterns cut into them. Another idea I was inspired to try was a crocheted chandelier made from optical fibres! So many projects to work on!

The following day, Toby and I went to the American Museum of Natural History. We were to meet up with a group of Canadians to see the "Yellowstone to Yukon" photo exhibit. Unfortuantely, we couldn't find the meetup group (the meeting place was in a large, fairly crowded room, so we might have missed everyone) but went to enjoy the fabulous photos anyways. They certainly made us miss the mountains so much more! Gorgeous photos of rock formation and wildlife does that.

We also took advantage of our already-paid admission, and explored the early evolution galleries. Made much more sense this time, as we followed the chronological order of development, rather than just looking at dinosaurs! There were specimens on the development of limbs from fins (before coming to land), and we learned that fish swim bladders are actually proto-lungs! There were exhibits on the development of vertebrae, and later on, on the development of various joints, eggs, eyes, etc. It was really neat to see and learn about all these things! So much information though, that I couldn't take it all in.

Anyway, it was a great weekend for cultural enrichment! This past weekend involved culinary enrichment, as Ed and Denise were visiting. More on this weekend another time.

Bronx Zoo

Back in December, we went to the NY Aquarium for Toby's birthday. The aquarium is located right next to Coney Island (which was thankfully quiet at this time of year). And since it was a Monday, we got to get up close to all the tanks and watch basically unhindered. We were the only people watching one of the sea otter feedings, even! Sadly, the aquarium is in real need of a makeover, as many of the tanks were leaking onto the carpet. I do think that a huge remodelling is in the works, with some pretty nifty architectural designs proposed!

Anyway, we realized that if we bought memberships ($90 for both of us), we had free access to a number of zoos in the city for the next year! Hurray! So now we can go to the aquarium any time (though it's about 1.5 hrs by subway to get there), and the zoos in Queens, Brooklyn, Central Park and the Bronx. The only one we'd been to is the Bronx Zoo, but it is the biggest and fairly well-known worldwide for its conservation practices.

A couple of weeks ago, we went back to the Bronx Zoo. One advantage of going during winter months is the lack of crowds. We did get overwhelmed by a group of teachers in the Mouse House, but they didn't stay long. Luckily, as we were able to patiently wait for a couple of baby degus to emerge from their non-exhibit area into the exhibit area. ADORABLE!

We were also able to watch a tiger enrichment session. They have a huge gate that gets lowered, leaving a thick mesh between us and the tiger. One zookeeper talked, giving us information about the tigers in general, and about the enrichment session, while a second zookeeper did the enrichment activities. These included a few jabs with a stick (to get the tigers used to the idea that they might have to get shots or other needles), pats on the ears, and stretching up onto hind legs. All the while, the tiger was fed huge hunks of meat. (The one we watched, Norma, was on a diet, and only ate 7 lbs of meat a day, while the other tigers got 8 lbs!) The zookeeper also had a whistle she blew as a "good girl" signal for the tiger. It was pretty fantastic to see the tiger up close. Norma had adorable round ears, and a fairly slow and easy-going disposition.




We also watched the lone polar bear pace back and forth. I think it needed a bit of enrichment as well! Right next door were four brown bears. We could only see two; one snoozing in the corner, and his brother playing with a discarded Christmas tree. (A whole new view of "recycling" your trees!) It did feel odd to be so close to one, after having been scared of running into any while hiking in the Rockies!



So, we've had three visits to the Bronx Zoo, and all three times our time in the Mouse House was cut short: the first time we arrived just minutes before closing, so we just zoomed through. The second time was during the summer, and the small pavilion was overrun with small, screaming children. As the glass separating rodents from humans aren't soundproof, the rodents were mostly hiding, so we weren't able to watch them. Plus, the sound of very loud children seemed to amplify quite well inside the building! Then there were the schoolteachers, who were nice, but whenever there is a large group of people there also tends to be a general loudness. Maybe next time we go, we'll have the Mouse House all to ourselves and can enjoy watching the tiny harvest mice walk on grass, flying squirrels zip back and forth, and chinchillas taking a sandbath!