Umbrella - ella - ella - a - a - a ....

Post by: Beth

Today was our first big day out with our visitors, and we took advantage of it despite the nasty weather from Hurricane Hanna. Jenny and Mom got in last night, both before 11pm, so we had dinner after they arrived and rested up for the day today.

First up on today’s list of activities… M&J Trimmings! I’d walked by this store many times because it’s on the way to the library, and from the outside, it looked to contain more buttons, ribbons, and trimmings than I’d ever seen in one place before. I knew Mom would love the place, so I’d scheduled that up first for today. Sure enough, it turned out to be great, and we got some fun pieces for making earrings, necklaces, etc. The store is huge, and it’s got so many things to pick from.. We had a great time!








Next up, Atlas Apartments… AKA more Project Runway fun! Atlas Apartments are right around the corner from M&J Trimmings, and this is where the Project Runway designers are housed during their stint on the reality show. We took plenty of pictures, and you can see the revolving door the designers always come out of to go to “Mood” to buy fabrics, or to Parsons to work on their projects.

And here's some pictures on our walk from Atlas to the next place -- Penn Station :)

After Atlas, we took the subway to Central Park West to visit the American Museum of Natural History. We took an hour-long tour there that hit the highlights of the museum. We learned all about the African mammals exhibition and that was actually really interesting: The artists actually went to the part of Africa represented (i.e. the Congo), collected animals, skinned them, then created a plaster of Paris model of the animal… they removed this, and covered this model with paper mache, then covered that with the skin and hair of the animals. So the animals are actually hollow inside, but they are exact models and are covered with the real skin and hair… So some of the animals created are over 150+ years old, and can only “survive” this long due to the type of taxidermy the artists used to preserve the skins and hair fibers.

We also got a lot of history on the dinosaurs and our tour guide gave us lots of information on the paleontologists’ study of these creatures… We learned that the three-toed dinosaurs were the carnivores, and any species of dinosaurs with 4 or more toes were herbivores. We also learned that while walking, dinosaurs always kept their tails in the air… They only know this because dinosaurs left footprints, but no “tail prints.” The tails were HUGE, so if they were dragging on the ground, they definitely would have left a track. It was really interesting to see these huge fossils, and about 70-80% of each fossil structure were REAL bones discovered by paleontologists. The parts that weren’t real were created from casts from other bones that were shared by other museums.

Here are Jenny and Mom on the subway over to AMNH:

After the museum, we headed back home by the subway, and rested for a while before it was time for dinner.

Here's me when I realize that I'm the only one hungry for dinner, so I have to wait to eat:

And finally we got to go to the restaurant and eat... =) =) We picked a Japanese restaurant to eat at, and made our way over in the rain (we were troopers!) for about 4 blocks to “Izumu Sushi.” They definitely don’t “Americanize” the restaurants here… Mom was at a loss without fork and salt, but it was a great restaurant, even she had to admit. J Raja, Jenny, and I all had sushi, and Mom had teriyaki chicken.. Yummy!

So those were our adventures today… Tomorrow we’re heading to “Dylan’s Candy Bar,” some cathedrals for Jenny to photograph, Canal Street for shopping, and Little Italy for dinner. That’s the plan as of now, so we’ll see how far of course we get… :)