New York 2009: Final Weekend

On Friday I went to Boston for some meetings. It was a pretty long trip, but succesful. I didn't get back to New York until about 11pm.

The next morning, I got up and went straight to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to meet up with fellow former Vizlab colleague, and current Blue Sky employee, Scotty Sharp. There was a great drawing exhibit with lots of figure drawings and sketches for paintings from the 1400s-1800s that was really interesting. Scotty and I waxed nostaligic about figure drawing and college. I have not seen Scotty in a while, and it was good to see him again.

It was a good day for art on Saturday, and quite humbling. For dinner that night we went to Cafe des Artistes. Mandy had made the reservations, and I was not aware that this was the restaurant that featured several murals by Howard Chandler Christy. I have always wanted to see these paintings, ever since my father brought me an illustration book when I was a teenager that had several of these paintings in it. They are amazing. The food was pretty good too.

This is Mandy, her uncle Glenn, her aunt Nancy and myself tucked away in a corner that had a portait of Christy done by James Montgomery Flagg.

Sunday morning, we drove around the city for and unknowingly bumped straight into the lunar New Year celebrations in Chinatown. There were several lion dance processions going into the various shops.

It seemed like many of the lion dance groups were from praying mantis based kung-fu schools similar to the school that I went to.

There was also a giant dragon, that probably had 50 people underneath it that came through the parade.

We wandered around Chinatown the rest of the day. We had a contest to see who could find the best deal in the markets. I also stumbled across a woman digging through a tub of frogs. She was being very particular, and I think I angered her a little taking this picture.

We had a really good trip. New York feels like the center of the universe and always recharges my batteries and gets me excited for work and projects...that being said, it definately feels good to get back home to Austin. You could almost feel things slow down as the plane landed on the runway in Texas.

Nikita seemed happy that we are home, too...