Another American Adventure: Carnegie Museum

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Carnegie Museum - Part 1

The Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh is the best! I don't know why it took us so long to get there. The exhibits, from art to sculpture to rocks to bugs to dinosaurs to Eskimos, Indians and ancient Egyptions is totally mind expanding. If you ever have nothing to do, go to this museum and browse.

Meanwhile, I've decided that I'm not leaving tomorrow. Even though the weather is beautiful here - clear and cold with safe highways - I'm afraid of the ice that they are predicting for North and South Carolina tomorrow. My nightmare is being stuck in the car with Jubilee, and having to wait there for hours until the ice melts. By the time the ice storm in the South clears (Tuesday) the storm will have moved up here.

I'm just going to wait and see.

2 comments:

BarbaraJanuary 9, 2011 at 7:09 PM
Good you are being so cautious. It is a weird winter.

I just love museums! The Carnegie looks like a great one. What did you enjoy most?
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beth cioffolettiJanuary 10, 2011 at 2:10 AM
It's hard to say what I liked best, Barbara - maybe the rocks! If I have time today, I might write more about it. Maybe it was the sheer breadth of this museum that impressed me the most. Everything together. It was all fascinating, and left me in awe of the complexity/simplicity and beauty of life on earth.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.