Museum Madness with Mom

March 2017, instead taking a trip to see my parents, my mom came to visit me! (Sadly, Dad had to stay behind this time around.) Since my mom is one of my main inspirations for travelling (her travel stories would make a MUCH more interesting topic than mine!), we fully took advantage of Washington, D.C.  By going to a lot of museums!!

Hirshorn

I’m not usually a huge modern art fan, but when I first saw the blurb online last summer about the Infinity Mirrors exhibit (artist: Yayoi Kusama), I was truly excited!  Being a total math nerd, the concept of infinity is sort of important. The exhibit exceeded even my wildest expectations.  Although we only had 20-30 seconds in each of the rooms that composed the majority of the exhibit, those were 20-30 seconds of pure amazement.  Usually, I like to pick my favorite, or top two, of whatever it is that I’ve been to see. I was unable to for this exhibit…it was all AMAZING!  Here are my favorite pictures from the rooms:

 

African American History Museum

We spent well over five hours at this museum, and I feel like we barely scratched the surface!  For those of you who haven’t been stalking the Smithsonian web-site for tickets, the museum is divided into two parts: there are cultural galleries upstairs and history galleries downstairs.  It’s recommended that visitors start in the history galleries, but when we first arrived, only an hour after the museum opened, there were so many people in the history galleries, that they had closed them to additional visitors.  So we started upstairs!

We found that starting in the cultural galleries was actually a good place to start, as the music, sports, military, etc. highlights in those galleries helped us put in context a lot of the struggles shown in the history galleries.

Here are some pictures from the museum that I thought that you all might enjoy:

One thing that I really liked in the museum was reading all the little “mini-bios” they had for people and events all around throughout the exhibits.  I wish that they had a book in the gift shop that had all that information compiled in one place and maybe with a tad more detail (or selections from the museum) so that I could read more and continue learning about these amazing people!

I felt really lucky that my mom could come up and visit me (and thankful to my dad for loaning her to me for the weekend…we missed him, but my place is a little small for an extended visit from both parents).  I hope that you can tell from the pictures that we had a great time together and that these exhibits were amazing!!  I hope that all of you get a chance to go and see and experience these too!

 

Bonus

Since I’m publishing this on the 4th of July…here’s some fireworks pictures from the 2015 celebration at the National Mall