Monday, April 14, 2008

More MOVIES

This is obviously borderline illegal, but who am I to judge? Besides, the last "movies" link I put on here was shut down.  

http://www.surfthechannel.com/

Trip to Pittsburgh

Trip to Pittsburgh


A couple of weeks ago, Justice and I drove to Pittsburgh to meet Songhua, who was taking a mult-state tour of the East Coast in a rental car. It is only a 3 hour drive for us (10 hours for Songhua) so we packed up the car and and left Mom at home to get some work done. It rained most of the way, but it was a reasonable drive and we it with little more than half a tank of gas.

If you have never arrived in Pittsburgh by car on I-70, I highly recommend it. There is little evidence of a city and though you know it is near because the map tells you it is, you are left wondering where the hell it is up to the last couple of miles. Finally, you enter a long tunnel and without warning you come out into the heart of the city. It is really a striking entrance to the city, especially at night with all the lights, and you are literally eye level with the skyscrapers and lights of the city. I highly recommend this entrance.

Fortunately, the rest of our time in Pittsburgh was perfect weather. We stayed until Sunday and walked just about everywhere we went--Pittsburgh is a very walkable city so bring some walking shoes if you go. Since we arrived late Friday, we didn't do anything Friday night except order room service, which I think Justice fell in love with because he kept asking for room service. Saturday we got up and walked to the National Aviary. This is pretty much a giant bird cage that you are allowed to walk around in, though some of the larger birds are kept behind glass in their own enclosures, perhaps to avoid small children from being dragged away to their nests for feeding. I have to say it was a very impressive place, and about the perfect size. In addition, Justice got to feed some of the birds by hand (Songhua tricked them into landing in his hand without food). I left with a couple of questions though. First, why is there a three-toed tree sloth in the Aviary? I'm no expert, but they don't look like birds. And more importantly, the most amazing thing about the Aviary was the bird shit, or should I say the absence of it. Where is all the shit?

After the Aviary we went across the street to the Pittsburgh Children's Museum. It is your typical children's museum with hands-on exhibits and a place to play with water. They did have a giant rat cage looking thing (in the picture) that the kids seemed to love and they had a cool exhibit that reproduced the effects of the Mystery Spot (see picture of Justice and Songhua leaning far forward). And it turns out that it just happened to be International Marrionette Day so we got to watch some cool little puppet shows and Justice got to make a dragon puppet from construction paper.

Next, we went to the Andy Warhol Museum (he is from Pittsburgh). Justice got to make some art there and do a screen printing of a dog on a t-shirt. Songhua bought a Campbell's Soup print, and we all got to see a video demonstration of some guy doing paintings with a paint brush in his ass (yes, that is not a typo)--some of which were pretty good given the constraints. Jsutice said "oooohhhh, gross!" I was neither shocked nor impressed.

After that, we needed to go back to the hotel. Instead of walking we took the hotel's shuttle. Swimming! Justice loves to swim, so we spent the rest of the afternoon swimming and hanging out in the hotel. Finally, before bed, Justice demanded we order room service so we ordered some Haggen-Daz ice cream and called it a night.

Overall, the trip was great. We got to see Songhua and the drive was the perfect length. Pittsburgh is a fun town for a couple days. I do not know how much longer we could have spent there though. There were still a few more places we would like to visit (maybe next time), but after that I think we would have exhausted just about everything there is to do there. I would definitely recommend going there to watch a baseball or football game and maybe spending a few days just checking the place out on foot. The town was very quiet, and almost had that eery feel that Detroit has, of a once great city that has been hit hard by a changing economy. There was once over 600,000 people in Pittsburgh, but it is now down to about 300,000. Apparently, it is in some sort of economic revival lately in financials and robotics (Justice was impressed with the robotics stuff), but it hard to tell by the looks of the city.