NYC and Boston

 I picked the perfect time to go to NYC and Boston for a conference, right in the middle of a heat wave!
My first stop was NYC, which let me get over the jet lag pretty quickly, I wandered around the town a bit but spent most of my time in museums and art galleries because a) I find them interesting and b) airconditioning!! It was 28C at 7am when I was walking around and only got hotter! I walked through Central Park one morning and there were lots of people jogging! It was here that I could make out the faint wisp of horse (but never saw one) and actually hear some cicada's.

At the Met art gallery it was nice and cool, and on the roof they had a fantastic view of the city.

I liked this painting, at first I thought since it was in the modern art section it was mocking the portraits of the past with a cow portrait, but actually it was about checking to see if a cow could be fooled by the nice picture of a bull.

This samurai helmet was a bunny, all the other ones were dragons and tigers. How would it feel to be the guy going into battle with a bunny on your head.

They also had some pretty nice full horse armour.

 And one of my favourites was a wall grotto made by Tiffaney of lamp fame. I guess I was only familiar with the lamps as they were the only ones slightly affordable...

I like this picture I took of an Egyptian shrine. There was lots of graffiti on it from the nineteen hundreds, idiots are born in every century.

The Met had lots of items in a library upstairs, furniture and art and household items.

They also had a version of psyche and cupid, similar to the Louvre, but this time psyche still has her butterfly wings.

I even managed to get to Time's Square in the heat, it was information overload and pointless all at the same time.

One day I made it up to the Cloisters museum which was modelled after a French Cloister. I must say, after being in Europe it didn't have a whole lot to offer, lots of pieces of old stone buildings and smaller examples of what you can see when you are Europe. However, they did have the Unicorn tapestries, which were really cool. I had actually seen them before (kinda) as they are the stylized pictures brought to life in the beginning of the movie The Last Unicorn. However, I never saw the end of the story, with the dead unicorn being brought back to the castle. 

Check out the funky stacked parking lot!

And in MOMA I saw the cans. I am still reminded of that scene (the only really good scene) in the latest Men In Black movie where they are back in time and run into Andy Warhol who is actually a human or alien hiding undercover (can't remember the details). He says "you've got to get me out of here, I'm running out of ideas, the other day I started painting cans of soup for gods sake!"

Also fun to see was down the long hallways of towers, and the Met as the sun was setting.

After NYC I was off to Boston on the bus. First we had to sit out in lines under the really hot sun waiting for the buses to come. Then it was a 4.5 hour ride that took 6 hours, but eventually I made it to Boston.
I had booked my room from Priceline and it was really nice, however, the hotel had overbooked and people were having their rooms changed. I was really worried about being walked, which is when they move you to another hotel. Since my reservation was through Priceline, I would have had to contact them to make alternative arrangements for a room, the hotel would have had no responsibility. Lesson learned, show up early for your room. In the end I wasn't walked, but I spent a nervous half-hour in line and eventually had a really nice room.

The conference was excellent and I even managed to meet up with old colleagues from my PhD days. It was kind of funny how many of us were there. Here's a bad selfie of three of us above the city of Boston.

Emerald Hunting in Austria

On the weekend we went to Austria into the mountains to hunt for emeralds (somewhere near Bramberg and Steinach). We stayed at a mountain hunt and hiked up a steep trail beside the hut to the river where we went hunting. Apparently in 2002 there was a big event (couldn't understand what the event was on the German sign) on the river which resulted in emeralds being washed up in the stream. There is a small mine at the top of the mountain but it only produces enough for a hobby.

The weather was decent and there were tons of waterfalls flowing into the valley.

To hunt for emeralds in the river we borrowed some equipment from the hut.

A tray and a shovel are the essential pieces of equipment (as well as a small well sealing container to carry away any finds). We met up with a friend who had more experience and more equipment. The next best piece of equipment is a hose which you put in the stream so you have water to wash your mud. Otherwise you have to work with less muddy samples and more collections of little stones. We found a few emeralds in the tiny stones, but once we had the hose hooked up we worked with the clay.

It's good looking for emeralds when the sun is shining, you search through the tiny stones looking for the emeralds which look like pieces of dark glass.

And after many hours of work we found some stones. Based on what they were selling the emeralds for at the hut, we figured we made almost 1euro/hour, minus all the expenses.... ^_^
We also found lots of tiny metallic squares and at the end of the day a giant piece of smokey quartz.

It was a great weekend, and decent weather until we were driving home through the pouring rain.

Milan

I went to Milan for a nice 4 day city visit, the weather was so-so, sometimes rain, sometimes nice and warm. I visited with a work friend and we made a tour around the castle and into a few of the museums that were there. Surrounding all the tourist places were men trying to force bracelets on all the tourists. I guess they had more or less given up on selling things. Here they were putting them on people even as they tried to walk away. The scam is to find someone and say they give you the bracelet even for free, then they tie it on. You can't untie it easily and then they chase you begging for money. This happened to me once, but with a flower and at least that you can set down and walk away.

Anyway, we got rush tickets to the Opera, but should have confirmed that you could see the stage! It was Wagner - Siegfried, and lasted 4.5 hours (plus breaks) so pretty soon we could move up to the front of the balcony as the audience in the nosebleed seats were dropping like flies. The opera house was really nice, and they had small screens in front of each chair where you could select the language for your subtitles. However, in the second act the machines didn't work for a good 20 minutes.

I've been on top of the Duomo (Cathedral) before, but the pictures you can take from up there are just so nice!

In Milan there was also a lot of shopping and a few more art galleries and a nice 1930's big villa (art deco).

We were also there to watch the gay pride parade (which was not very big actually). They had a few floats and a few stages on the street at the end with lots of music.