Tuesday at the Met

Today I went to the famous Metropolitan Museum of Art (aka The Met) with friends Bruna and Beth (above). Both Bruna and Beth's boyfriends are friends of Rich's from the Naval Academy. Since we are all recent transplants to NYC, we thought it would be fun to explore a little culture and spend some time in the company of women.

The Met is a wonderful art museum located on the upper east side of Manhattan, adjacent to Central Park. It houses a wonderful smattering of art from a range of time periods and geographic regions. The admission fee is on a sliding scale, so you can pay whatever donation you can afford. A nice way to help make art and culture accessible for all, no?

Together, Bruna, Beth and I took in a variety of artsy artifacts including ancient Egyptian sarcophagi, African canoe carvings, Medieval unicorn tapestries and early American Tiffany stained glass masterpieces. Also, there was the complete series of photographs from Robert Frank's "The Americans" as well as a special traveling exhibition of Vermeer's "The Milkmaid."

After having the incredible good fortune to spend the earlier part of this year in Italy's Uffizi, Accademia, and Vactican museums as well as France's Pompidou, Picasso museum, Musee d'Orsay and Versailles landmarks, you would think that I would have had my fill. Hardly! The more I see, the more I love and the more I learn about the history of the artistic urge. The desire to create seems - to me - to be as base as the desire to eat, to love, to wage war, and to reproduce. I am always humbled in the presence of so much beauty and inspiration...the lasting representations of the human spirit.

The only disappointment was that the famous Costume galleries were temporarily closed. I guess I'll be going back, because I can't miss that! Now, who's coming with me?