Category: travel

A Sunday Afternoon on a Saturday afternoon for a Friday endeavor (friday foto finder: art)

Post-holiday sluggishness has set in, likely fueled by too many holiday treats.¹ In any case, I am slow to post. My photo library is full of photos of all kinds of art this week’s friday foto finder theme. Here it is Saturday afternoon, and I am finally getting around to posting some photos of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. This famous painting by Georges Seurat is located in The Art Institute of Chicago, which I visited during my May, 2010 trip to Chicago for a conference.

I hadn’t seen the painting before in person, though I had seen various reproductions, as it is one of the most famous works of pointillism.²


I know some people would find that these people are in the way, but I like photos of people interacting with art


The painting has lots of interesting details to explore. Click on the photos to embiggen them a bit.


A monkey! (Also a little dog.)


There is also this pointillist border all around.

To see what art others have put on display, please check out the friday foto finder blog.

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¹ Can sluggishness be fueled?
² I also remember the painting from its noteworthy role³ in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off. [youtube]
³ It was not a speaking role.

3 butterflies

Here are 3 butterflies I’ve encountered in the last 3 years.¹


Butterfly in the butterfly garden at the Boston Museum of Science, Boston, MA. June, 2010.


Butterfly on a window, in The Butterfly Pavilion outside Denver, CO. April, 2011.


In the wild on the grounds of the De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, MA. August, 2012.

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¹ I don’t come across butterflies in the wild nearly as often as YTSL of Webs of Significance, whose photos of her hikes around Hong Kong regularly include butterflies (among her other critter sightings).²
² I looked back at my photos from the hike we had together when I visited Hong Kong in August of 2011, but it would seem that I found no butterflies that day!

Photos from the Musée D’Orsay (friday foto finder: station)

The Musée D’Orsay in Paris is a remarkable building. It was built as a railway station around the turn of the (last) century, but only used as a rail station for a few short decades. The large and impressive building was converted into a large and impressive art museum in the 1980s, and it houses, among other works, a very large and impressive collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces. (Most of which are impressive, but not very large.)

When we visited Paris in 2007, I made my first visit to this museum. It might seem surprising that I had not been there before, especially given my love of art and the fact that I had lived outside of Paris for 2 years. However, the first year I lived in France was 1980, and the museum would not yet be open for another 6 years. I’m pretty sure I heard of the museum when I lived in Paris again in 1988, and I’m not sure why I never made it there then. I certainly remember going to other museums. (I particularly remember the Rodin Museum and the Orangérie.)

In any case, I was very taken with the museum, as much (if not more) for the building as for the art. I loved the grand arches, interesting use of glass, and many other details.


I love the tunnel-like effect of the main hall.


This gigantic clock faces inward.


This gigantic clock faces outward, and can be seen from inside the café.


People and sculptures.


Looking up.


Multiple levels.


High vantage point.


My rosy-cheeked little one in front of some of Renoir’s famous rosy cheeks.

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This week’s friday foto finder theme was “station.” Given my love of rail travel, it might not surprise you that I have many photos of train and subway stations in my photo archives. However, this was the station that came to mind first.

To see what other stations are being shared, please visit Archie’s friday foto finder blog. Won’t you consider participating, too?

basket (friday foto finder)

This was one of the first photos I took when I arrived in Macau, an excursion I made on the last day of my trip to Hong Kong in August, 2011. These large baskets were stacked near the sidewalk under a pedestrian ramp. I’m not sure what they were for.

I do wonder if they belong to some sort of produce vendor, as they look similar to the baskets in the photo below, which were in use at a Hong Kong street market.

This week’s friday foto finder theme is “basket,” which led to me rummaging through my virtual basket of photos. This time, after much rummaging, I did end up going with the first photo that came to mind.

To see what other baskets others have shared, and to find out how to participate (it’s easy!), check out the friday foto finder blog.

the great tomato debate

In the US, we are frequently subjected to the debate over the tomato’s status: Is it a fruit or a vegetable?

The answer, of course, is “yes.”

Because the real question is whether you are asking the question from a botanical or a culinary standpoint.

Botanically, it is unquestionably a fruit:

In botany, a fruit is a part of a flowering plant that derives from specific tissues of the flower, one or more ovaries, and in some cases accessory tissues.

But so is a bell pepper. Or zucchini. Or a butternut squash. But because these things are regularly cooked or included in savory dishes, they are considered vegetables. Culinarily, at least in the US and many European countries, tomatoes are treated as vegetables. You find them cooked into sauces and stews, roasted with garlic, or you might eat them raw, chopped up with herbs and olive oil on bruschetta. They go in the salad with lettuce and onion, not the salad with strawberries and melon.

However, in other parts of the world, the tomato’s status as a fruit is more widely accepted. I remember an occasion where we had a bit of a semester-end party on the last day of a particularly intensive class. People signed up to bring things. A guy from Korea signed up to bring some fruit, and he brought a little box of grape tomatoes, and it led to an interesting discussion.

I remembered this when we were served this dessert at the conference banquet¹ in Shanghai back in May:

The fruit salad consisted of chunks of melon, and grape tomatoes. Aside from my interest in the appearance of tomatoes in a fruit salad, it was a thoroughly disappointing dessert. Which, I suppose, was fitting.³

So, do you want to weigh in the debate?⁴

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¹ Sadly, as is often the case with large-scale meals, the quality of the food was pretty mediocre. Pretty much everything I tried was bland.²

² Of course, my options were somewhat limited by my largely vegetarian diet constraints. So I didn’t partake, for example, of this soup. I did, however, appreciate that I was able to easily identify this as chicken soup. Other items that were served to us without explanation were more mysterious.

³ Did I mention the food was mediocre? The food was mediocre.

⁴ And if so, do you want to weigh in using pounds or kilograms?

wood (friday foto finder)

This week’s friday foto finder¹ theme is “wood.” Having just posted some photos of a door, and given the theme of wood, my brain connected the two by remembering the remarkable woodwork, on the doors and elsewhere in the building, in the Casa Battló in Barcelona, Spain. This remarkable house was designed by Gaudí, and contains very few straight lines. My camera and I visited it (along with other members of my family) in September, 2009. (I even posted another photo of it way back when.)


A detail from one of the doors.


A beautifully carved wooden door.


A slightly more utilitarian-looking door, but still strikingly curvy and carvy.


Another carved wood detail of…something. Possibly a door. Maybe just a wall. But it’s pretty.


Another detail from something. Might be a doorway. I love the undulating border.

¹ Yes, I realize it is still Thursday, but I have my reasons.

Goldsworthy pilgrimage

Yesterday was a gorgeous fall day, sunny and surprisingly warm. We found ourselves with no specific plans for the day, and the kids were starting to go a little stir-crazy in the grandparents’ house. Inspired by the previous day’s leafy homage to Goldsworthy, I felt compelled to visit the large sculpture garden nearby to see one of Goldsworthy’s own works.

I posted a couple of photos I’d taken there last month, at which point I realized it had been 6 full years since we’d been there. It had been when six-year-old Phoebe was under a year old, and if you do the math, you will realize that four-year-old Theo had never been there at all. Clearly, this needed to be remedied.

The Storm King Art Center now boasts 2 large Goldsworthy works. I had seen the first wall before, but hadn’t realized that a second wall had been built only a couple of years ago.


The wall winds through the trees.


It wriggles all the way down the hill, where it dips into a pond.


This is the second wall. I don’t believe that the twig ring is part of the sculpture, as it is not in the description. However, even if not put there by Goldsworthy himself, it was a fitting tribute.

I found myself wondering why it had taken us so long to get back here, especially given how much both Phoebe and Theo love art. But our trips are often too short, often well under 48 hours, and are usually filled with other family-related things.

(Once again, these photos were just taken with my iPhone, as I didn’t remember to pack my camera for this trip.)

sea (friday foto finder)


A beach on the Mediterranean Sea, in Barcelona. From our 2009 trip to Spain. Our visit to the beach was fleeting, as John had a conference call shortly after, and there were storm clouds on the horizon. But Phoebe and Theo had a chance to meet the Mediterranean.

This week’s friday foto finder theme is “sea.”

sky (friday foto finder)

This week’s theme for friday foto finder is “sky.”

These photos are from 2004, taken during a visit to see my mother back when she lived in Colorado. I took these from the highway that runs from Pueblo to Beulah. (Don’t worry, I wasn’t the one driving!)

Montana may be the state nicknamed “big sky country,” but Colorado has pretty big skies, too. Out on the plains, especially, where there are no tall buildings and few buildings or trees of any size, the sky seems somehow more immense than in other parts of the world I’ve seen.

When summer storms come, the sky can look particularly dramatic.


A particularly ominous mass of clouds.


Look up!


I love the way rain in the distance can look like a bit like clouds hanging down in curtains. (Or like the sky is falling.)


I am partial to this photo for the way it captured a very s-like shape in the side road. But the sky looks pretty cool, too.

These photos were from June, which, up in that part of Colorado, is Spring. The bright green grasses you can see in these photos are mostly brown by July.

To see what the sky looks like in other people’s worlds, drop by the friday foto finder blog.