New York Day 3

The weather started cooling off and things were looking a lot better for me.

I started the morning with a cupcake from the famous Magnolia Bakery.




I saw Maggie Gyllenhal on the Isaac Mizrahi show having a cupcake tasting contest and Magnolia won by far. It’s Maggie’s and now my favorite. I found a spot in the Gay Movement Memorial park to enjoy its pink fluffiness.



Then I headed downtown through Soco. I stepped in to many cool shops such as this Girl Stuff shop that was full of awesome cheap girly accessories.



I stopped in fcuk, the apple store, and found a new shopping love at H&M, cheap trendy (but not too trendy) clothing, both sporty and business-y. Why don’t we have this in Austin? Ditto for Strawberry. I also passed this cute boutique where they were selling clothes to benefit a pro-democracy group.



After shopping in Soho I headed to the South Seaport district. I heard it was awful and touristy, but I really liked it. There’s a pedestrian area with stores and restaurants.






Plus I went to the TKTS booth there—no line!—and bought tickets to see the play Frozen that evening for $43 a ticket—not bad. I had lunch down there and then headed to the Upper West Side.

I went to the American Museum of Natural History. I really enjoyed it. The first part I explored was the Rose Center for Earth and Space. I got a free audio guide—my fave—and headed around. The first floor was about the different levels of space—planets, stars, galaxies, and the universe. Along with exhibits, there were young museum workers demonstrating hands on experiments. Like this one where they put a marshmallow in a container and create a vacuum. The marshmallow expands. And then when the air is let in, it shrivels.



I was surprisingly moved by a display explaining that “Every atom of oxygen in our lungs, of carbon in our muscles, of calcium in our bones, of iron in our blood---was created inside a star long ago.”




I was uplifted but then disheartened when I found out how much I weighed on a neutron star.



So much for the South Beach diet.

Then I headed to the Earth science room. Aside from the stunning collection of rocks they had, the main thing I learned was that rock, instead of being solid as it appears, is really fluid when you look a geological time. I doesn’t break. It actually flows, like a liquid. So that’s cool.



But the coolest part of the exhibit is yet to come. When I was a kid at the Smithsonian Museum, the Power of 10 movie made a really strong impact on me. The lesson about the scale, pattern, and emptiness of the universe hit me again in my college physics class. The museum had a great exhibit about the exact same thing. In this humongous glass box, there’s a large spiral descending walkway winding around a huge sphere.



As you walk along the path, with each meter, you are decreasing the scale of the universe by a power of 10. At each step, the huge sphere in the room becomes a point of reference. For example, a ways down the path, if the sphere was the sun, then in front of you is a basketball sized model of the earth. Later on, if the sphere is an atom, then a small ball in front of you would be an electron and so forth.



Then you get to enter the sphere and there’s a 360 movie about the big bang narrated by Maya Angelou. I’ve always known about the Big Bang, but what I never realized was that right before the big bang, the entire contents of the universe fit into a space smaller than a grain of sand. And now the universe is expanding at the speed of light. It’s mind boggling.

The second half on the walkway helps you understand the timeline of the development of the universe since the big bang. You walk about 30 meters and at the end there’s a strand of hair, the width represents all of man’s time on earth.

After a break in the museum café, I headed to the evolution area. Its layout is also really interesting. The path you follow is the path of evolution. As you follow the path, there are displays pointing out the evolutionary steps being made and see the genetic departures of later animals. A new hip joint that makes standing upright possible, amniotic sacs in eggs so that animals can lay eggs on land.

There were some awesome dinosaurs and prehistoric sharks and turtles, and ground sloths. Check it out.







I was almost out of time, but I quickly checked out the hall of biodiversity, which was awesome, and the underwater life exhibit with the famous full size blue whale suspended from the ceiling.



That evening Jon and I went to go see Frozen and the Circle in the Square theatre starring Swoozie Kurtz. There was some excellent acting and playwriting involved, but the play was pretty heavy in subject matter.