Thursday, May 3, 2012

When Life Gives You Lemons... Reinvent Your Blog!


Okay, so not to harp on the obvious, but I am no longer in Denmark. Which, sadly, means no more touring around Danish museums, events, or poking fun of the culture with quite so much regularity. Lacking the source of my subject, I have decided to branch out to being an "expat" in my own area and doing the tourist thing in the name of blogging. Still trying to figure out what to do about the blog name issue...

So here was my first documented Stateside outing. The Corning Museum of Glass!


While moving to Denmark might have been a head-scratcher for some of my more geographically-challenged American friends, I think Corning might actually be worse and warrant the posting of a map. For reference and orientation, that's NYC/Long Island, "the center of the known universe," in the lower right portion of the map.


I am amazingly fortunate and lucky to have a friend who works at the museum as an instructor and glass artist and who gave me a wonderful tour around the studio so I could get a firsthand look at how glass is actually created.


I then headed into the museum itself, which is divided into different sections covering glass as art as well as the history and evolution of glass and its many uses.


Below on the right is Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who hand-crafted his own microscopes and is credited as being the "Father of Microbiology." On the left is some dude who made telescopes and who made me realize that I should have brought a notepad to jot things down. Like his name. Which was not Galileo... that I might have remembered.




After chiding myself for how little of my high school/college chemistry and history I still remembered, it was on to the art. The iconic Mr. Chihuly was everywhere, as expected.

In the entrance...

...and overhead.

Some surreal, some ethereal...





And finally, my quick whirlwind tour concluded with a rush through the historic glass gallery. Some classic examples...

Roman
Islamic
...and finally some German forest glass.

Forest glass

Which was about as close to Danish as I was going to get this trip. Except for maybe the Design House Stockholm glassware for sale in the gift shop...


Stay tuned for more (American) adventures, like spring at the farmer's market and  waxing philosophical about the heavenly big box store that is Target.