A Trip to the Museum
One of my favorite places in NYC is the American Museum of Natural History, and I’m so lucky to live within a few subway stops from it. My husband Sean and I went there this past weekend, as we always do on this particular weekend in April, as the trip to the museum is one of the ways we celebrate the day we first met. Warning: this post might get sappy.
AMNH simply has so much cool stuff that Sean and I are into—the whale (we can’t not say hello to the whale), the displays of taxidermied beasts and of course, the T-Rex. It’s Sean’s favorite dinosaur; mine is the triceratops, unquestionably the more awesome between the two.
Real bones, not a cast
As a point of personal interest, AMNH is the rare place that has an entire section on Pacific Islanders, let alone the Philippines, let alone our ethnic tribes. The museum’s collection is especially meaningful to me because they have artifacts from the Hanunoo Mangyan, the indigenous group from which my father derives his ancestry.
The Hanunoo script of the Mangyan people is read bottom to top, left to right
One of our earlier Valentines’ Day dates was also at the AMNH, particularly at the Hayden Planetarium. Every year, the museum throws the “Romance Under the Stars” event, a cocktail party that centers on a planetarium show featuring astronomy-inflected love stories. They didn’t have that event this year, but they do have a new show, “Worlds Beyond Earth”, narrated by Lupita N’yongo, which we simply had to check out.
We simply love the museum that we’ve made it a more personal part of our lives. I proposed to Sean one springtime afternoon in Central Park, and following the gushing and celebration and photographs taken by friends who were present for the occasion, he and I crossed the street over the AMNH to spend the rest of the day in its halls, high from the exhilaration of our engagement.
One of the spots we always visit is the Hall of Meteorites, because space rocks are cool. We’d always check out the massive Cape York meteorite and after our engagement, the rock gained more significance since our engagement rings are made of meteorite (not the same one!).
You can see the striations (called Widmanstatten patterns) in both
If we could, we would have gotten married there (it’s hella expensive!), though we did end up having our wedding at another geeky museum that we both also love. That’ll be for another post.
Photos from my phone