The Museum of the Moving Image

Yesterday I went with some friends to The Museum of the Moving Image.  The museum is in Queens and is one of the places I can get into for free with my Columbia ID.  This is an awesome museum.  It's probably not one that I would have gone to normally just because it is a little bit farther away, but it was such a cool museum that I'm definitely planning a return trip.

Probably the best part of the museum is that currently they have an exhibit all about Jim Henson and The Muppets!  I love muppets!!  They had a lot of his drawings and storyboards from his earlier career as well as video displays with clips and interviews from his work.  I've read quite a bit about him and I still learned a lot!  They even had a Kermit the frog on display as well as some of the other muppets.

Some of their permanent exhibits include a collection of old cameras, and tons of movie props and costumes.  They even have this booth where you record a 5 second video of yourself doing something and then in the gift shop they can make it into a flip book!  There are other interactive displays where you can make your own stop motion animation film, you can re-dub over the audio of different movies, and change the sound effects.  They basically take you through the different processes of creating a movie.

If you like movies and TV, this is definitely a good museum to visit! ^_^

Culture and Burgers

Yesterday was a really fun day in the world of me.  Even though I've lived here a year there are still things in the city that I haven't had the chance to do and this week is my week to do some of them.  My friend and I decided to go to the American Museum of Natural History.  This is one museum that I've really wanted to go to, but it is also one of the few interesting museums where I don't get in for free with my columbia ID :( It's actually kind of odd though. They run on a donation system.  So they have a suggested donation fee of $22 to get into the museum.  But, you can also pay $1 and still go in.  I guess they want to make people feel like they should pay the full price but they also don't want to limit people to paying the full price or something.  Well anyway, we went, paid our $1 and saw the museum :)

The above picture is an awful picture I took at the front of the museum.  The facade is under construction so there wasn't really a good place to take a picture.  So according to this picture I went to the American Mus.  ^_^  The museum is really awesome.  They have a huge dinosaur exhibit and all kinds of dioramas of the different animals.  I would definitely like to go back again.

After the museum we went to Shake Shack!

The Shake Shack is a hamburger joint that is pretty famous in NYC.  I had been to the location in Times Square but never this one.  The line is always huge, but moves pretty quickly and they have pretty good burgers, fries, and shakes.  My friend had never been at all so we decided this would make a good lunch stop.  After lunch the weather ended up being pretty nice so we walked back to campus.  The museum is at 81st St and I live at 120th.  It was a day of a lot of walking but also a lot of fun!

80's-tastic!

I saw the musical Rock of Ages again!  My friends really wanted to see it and I thought it was a lot of fun when I went so we ended up getting student rush tickets.  Now, funny thing about student rush tickets.  You never quite know what time you should show up.  The tickets go on sale at 10am when the box office opens.  Now when I did rush tickets for How To Succeed, we got to the theatre about 8:30am and were probably 20 people back in line.  Knowing that Rock of Ages doesn't have any particularly famous people in it and it being an older show, I figured well we didn't need to be as early for tickets.  So we showed up just before 9am.

We were the 4th, 5th, and 6th people in line.

Yeah....so maybe we were a little early ^_^  By the time the box office opened, however, the line had grown!

To 10 people total.

Yeah....

Oh well.  It was a lot of fun!  The show was fun and we decided to go 80's in our ensembles for the evening and it's always fun to dress up.  I think in some of these pictures I look super young so maybe the side ponytail is not the best look for me.  But it was definitely fun for one night.

Glee! (Yes, again)

You may have noticed I have a newish obsession...and that is the tv show Glee :)  You may also remember that I went to a live concert of the glee cast and loved it a couple months ago.  Well, what happened is the the Glee people like to make as much money as possible and try and squeeze every last cent out of their fans.  So they filmed the concert and turned it into a 3D movie!  Which I went to see Wednesday night :)  Of course.

Here's the trailer for movie just to give you a feel:



The movie was pretty good. I think the concert was better though. The movie spliced in clips of the actors backstage (in character) and those were really silly and fun. They also spliced in footage of Glee fans talking about their favorite characters and about the show and they highlighted 3 glee fans who had inspirational stories. That was nice and all but to tell the truth I really just care about them. I don't really care about Glee's other fans. I think the movie would have been better if there were no fans and just the Glee cast.

Tonight I'm going to go see Rock of Ages (yes....also again). It's gonna be fabulous!!

Our Nation's Capitol

Last weekend I ended up taking the train down to Washington DC.  We ended up having a little bit of a partial family reunion which was really fun.  It was my grandparents, my mom, my aunt, her sons (my cousins) and their wives, and my grandma's cousin.  So lots of family!!  It was basically your run of the mill trip to Washington DC.  We took a tour bus tour around the city, did a tour of the capitol building, a lot of the touristy things like that.  It was fun to be with family and I was glad to get to hang out with my mom again :)  Also the last time my grandparents had been in DC was 49 years ago!  So I think they had fun seeing all the sights and how the city had changed over nearly half a century.

Since I got back I've been trying to get caught up on all of my homework and my work work.  My final exam is due next week and then it will really be summer, at least for a couple weeks.  There is still quite a lot I need to get done for the fall in regards to prepping my thesis.  Once I have a better grasp on what that exactly will be I'll post more about it, haha.  So anyway, since there is so much going on this will mostly be a pictorial post of the trip.  There were a ton more photos, but these are some of my favorites.

This lady has been protesting since 1981!

The FDR Memorial

The Korean War Memorial

The Lincoln Memorial

I'm trying to push over the Washington Monument!

And now I'm just chilling out, leaning against the Washington Monument

The likeness of Alan Alda on the Korean War Memorial

This is where my cousin works

Oh yeah, and I took my picture with the president ^_^

We were the talk of the town!

So as the photos probably show (I hope!) We had a great time touring around the city and just generally hanging out with family :)