Wednesday, September 8, 2010

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and thoughts on Becco for lunch

After my visit to the King Tut exhibit I realized that it's time to get myself out and about and seeing more things in New York City. On my list was a visit to "The Met" or The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since I was meeting my friend from out of town for lunch in the city, I figured it was a perfect opportunity to see a museum.

I met my friend at Becco on West 46 Street and had a great lunch. Becco had really good food (the kind of food that the average eater goes, "Wow, this is why people love food," the service was great. My only complaint about it was that the restaurant was kinda loud.

After lunch I had the brilliant idea to walk to The Met. It was a nice walk, but by the time I got there I was already tired and my feet were already starting to hurt, not a good way to start a visit to a museum.

The museum does not have a required admission, they have a recommended admission of $20 for adults. It mental hurts to give money, but I know it's the right thing to do and is certainly in line with the cost of other museums so I did give the donation.

I first went to the Egyptian exhibit, it took me a few minutes to get into it but slowly I did. What I didn't like about the exhibit was the signage for the different pieces, some were hard to read, others I never found. I also found all the different little rooms made it hard to make sure you saw everything, I think for that reason (and the large amount of stuff they have) you either need to dedicate hours or you need to visit several times to see the whole exhibit. What I liked was the different pieces. There were a lot of pieces of wall, which really surprised me. There were a lot of sarcophagus's too, though not overly impressive ones like you would see in Egypt.

This was the first time I looked at Egyptian art in terms of time period, other then a few little things, I really never knew what might be the difference between art from different dynasties, until now. Unlike the King Tut exhibit I recently saw there were not too many smaller pieces from tombs, the pieces were more ordinary pieces - pieces of wall, statues, sarcophagus's, and pottery are what stick out. It seemed a little more like daily life type of stuff, not just the stuff of Pharohs.

After seeing the Egyptian stuff I headed to the American exhibit, which I really enjoyed. This is my type of museum stuff - stuff that tells me about American life. There was a giant house like exhibit with "rooms," the rooms were all very nicely decorated and gave a nice feeling for how people lived. To add to the experience there was a woman in one of the rooms talking about how the bed reminded her of her bed in her farm house from her youth. I like that real life image that I can picture.

After that I was exhausted and ready to go, but on my way out (since I couldn't figure out how to get out) I walked through the armor rooms - who doesn't like a knight in shining armor? It seemed like cool stuff in there, and I felt bad for the horses who had to wear armor, it looked really heavy!

Overall I enjoyed The Met. It's the type of place that if I lived nearby I could see myself stopping there every couple weeks and checking out a different exhibit.  For those planning a visit I would suggest planning a few hours to see just 1 or 2 exhibits, otherwise you might end up tired or overwhelmed by the museum.