Meimei Day

I haven't seen Meimei (Megan A) since January 1st, so I was delighted when she emailed me and Josh the other week to say that she would be in town. We scheduled today as "Meimei Day." Since Josh had work, he was with us for lunch and dinner. In between those two events, Meimei and I went to all of our favorite museums and had many adventures. 

First Stop: Native American Museum

The Native American Museum is the most beautiful museum, architecturally speaking, of all the ones on the Mall. It also has the most wasted space and the most repetitive exhibits of any of them. What is there is very nice, but for some reason I feel like they could do better by having more focused exhibits rather than a few snippets from every tribe in the Americas. Still, we learned a lot and even took a few pictures.

This is the dome as seen from the inside.

I told Meimei to stand in a rainbow. Clearly a good idea.

Second Stop: Hirshhorn

We both like modern art and the Hirshhorn always has good stuff, so we went over there. They installed a new exhibit since the last time I had been there- something to do with colors. This was by far the most entertaining modern art exhibit I have seen in a while. Some of the artwork made use of optical illusions and some of it was just an excuse to make an entire room blue. We had to put on special shoe covers to go into these rooms so as to preserve their color saturation.

I'm sure I thought this would look cool later.

Meimei wanted to stand between the green and red rooms so she could re-experience Christmas.

We both thought the green room made us look a little sickly. I am not sure what the looks are supposed to communicate.

There was also a room that was nothing but long blue strands of some rubbery material coming down from the ceiling. Once someone takes a few steps in you can't really see them anymore.  

Well, maybe a few more steps.

Finally, there was an exhibit that I couldn't take a picture of because it is just a room that is pitch black. After standing in it for four seconds the face of a giant tiger popped up in front of us and roared. Thanks, modern art, you are terrifying.

Third Stop: Museum of American History

No pictures from here, but this museum is really great so long as you remember to turn RIGHT after walking in and skip the entire wing that seems to be devoted to dresses that first ladies wore at some point or another. We checked out the Slaves at Monticello exhibit as well as the America at War walkthrough, both of which were highly informative and well done. They manage to present things honestly and in a very human way without propagandizing in any way. American History: some things are good, some things are bad. 

My favorite part of this museum is a house that they moved into the museum. It was built in the 1700's and there are good records as to who lived in the house and what the house might have looked like at that time, so as you walk around the house you see each room as it would have looked in each era. 

Last Stop: Natural History Museum

We were drawn to Natural History for our last stop because they were advertising something called the TITANOBOA: MONSTER SNAKE (I can put it in all caps because they put it in all caps). Having no idea what this was, we went to the second floor to go see. In order to get there we had to walk through a bunch of high-definition photographs that had won prizes for being the best wildlife pictures of the year. They were so good that you could see the pores on a shark. Not something that you necessarily WANT to see, but nice that we have that technology.

We arrived at the TITANOBOA exhibit and saw that it was a giant snake that is now (thankfully) extinct. It was discovered when a couple of graduate students couldn't categorize some vertebrae as belonging to the rest of the alligator bones that they came with. The students slowly realized that the only thing that the vertebrae could belong to was a snake roughly 28 inches in diameter. 

Too big.

After that we went to look at the insects. The coolest thing that the museum has done there is install a live bee colony next to a window. A transparent pipe leads the bees outside, and you can watch their comings and goings. 

Around this time Josh called us and we went to get dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Afterwards we headed to the sculpture garden for the Jazz in the Garden series, where we stayed until they closed down. It was great seeing Meimei and Josh together again (they played brothers five years ago in Tragedy! and still call each other brother- it's sweet) and just having an all around great day in DC.