why the samurai armor at the Walter's Art Gallery is less intimidating than it should be

Emblazoned dragon,

Angry grimace. WAIT, what's that? 

Bunnies are not fierce.

Turkey Hill experience

One of the very best things that happened in 2011 is that fTM Matt and his lovely wife Sara returned to the East Coast.

Yippeeeeeee!

The first thing we did together after they arrived waaaaaaay back in August was visit the newly opened Turkey Hill experience in Lancaster, PA. For those of you not from around these parts, Turkey Hill is a dairy that makes wonderful, wonderful ice cream. They also make fabulous flavored teas and have their own min-marts.

Matt and i tried to visit the dairy a while back, but they didn't have factory tours. ...so sad...

But as soon as i read that they had opened an off-site visitor center, i texted Matt and we made a pact to go once he was in the correct timezone.

Any place that has a giant cow overlooking a giant container of ice cream outside of the front door has got to be good, right?

Let us in!

please show some restraint

Built in an awesome old brick factory, the museum portion of the experience was upstairs. After some history of Turkey Hill and some biology of dairy cows [with Matt and Sara saying we have some of them and some of them and a calf of that... remember, Sara was raised on a dairy farm in PA] we got to the entrance

First up was the tea room where we learned all about brewing tea, different types of tea and why the machinery used in a dairy is well suited to be modified for making and bottling iced tea.
There was a fun interactive to find out what type of tea would be your favorite based on your personality; no lie, it picked the correct tea for all three of us.
Then there was the tea tasting area; you could try every single variety of their iced teas. It was fun to taste flavors that i would never normally buy.

The best place in the tea room, though, was the chill zone. Painted sky blue, there were cloud screens on the ceiling projecting a short film about Turkey Hill tea that you had to lay on your back on squishy beanbags to watch.

Very relaxing. 

Onto the ice cream discovery section we go -

right through a giant ice cream container.

This was an amazing exhibit.

Working in a museum i really pay attention to signage and flow-through and line facilitation and on-floor staff - probably more than your average guest.

I was impressed.
There was a ton of information, but all sorts of interactives as well.

First you have to make sure the milk is safe to process so we learned about microbes, both good and bad,

and then played a game to destroy the bad bacteria while cultivated the good.

After turning the milk to basic ice cream, there was a fabulous interactive on how to mix flavors. At these columns, you could emboss scents onto a card, mixing them in different ways to find ones that you liked.

Then it was time to make your own imaginary ice cream at a bank of computer terminals. Our tickets had an activation code so that once you were happy with your flavor and named it, the computer remembered it for the next station. Matt tried to recreate something like a flavor called Moose Moss that he'd had in Canada, Sara went with a coconut and pretzel mix (i think) called Quirky Lou and i created Nikilicious.

On to mixing, with a giant walk-through Disco Blender and i really hard game about the precision it takes to mix industrial amounts of various flavors. 

Time to create the packaging for our ice cream. Again, you just entered your code and up popped all sorts of designs that you could use. I'd never thought about how big the picture should be on the box or whether to have it in a bowl or on a cone. Very enlightening.



mmmmm... looks delicious
i'd buy it

As we waited in line for the last station - making a commercial for your product - i noticed a monkey sitting way up on a display. Why in the world would there be a monkey in a place all about cows?

A staff member told us that the managers place the monkey in a different place every day and the employees have to find it during the shift; so, basically all museum people are weird, not just me.

Once you were done with your commercial, there was a tasting area. they didn't have all of the flavors that Turkey Hill makes, but they had several that you could try.
There were also some mechanical cows to practice milking that were an engineering feat. Matt and Sara were both impressed that you had to use the correct finger rolling motion; I was just impressed that i managed to get it right.

Finally it was time to go downstairs to the gift shop and creamery for some treats!

All of the things that you did in the exhibit were put on a website and the address was mailed to you, which is how i have all of my Nikilicious stuff. Unfortunately, they only keep it posted for a certain amount of time, so when i went to pull Matt and Sara's things, they were gone.
But, because you've waited so patiently, here is me interviewing a cow - my hat was making me insane throughout the shoot, but you only got one take.

If you ever find yourself with a free afternoon in Lancaster, i highly recommend the Turkey Hill Experience.

National Building Museum

The lovely Colleen and I continue to plug away on the Local See and Do List, but i swear it doesn't get any shorter. Of course, since local encompasses parts of 4 states and 2 cities - one of which is the nation's capitol - there are a lot of things to be seen and to be done.
Our latest foray was to the Nation Building Museum. As i mentioned on the Memorial Day post about the law enforcement memorial, all we knew before we left home was the address and Metro stop. As we were looking at the memorial and taking pictures of lion statues we were trying to figure out what street we were on to know which direction to walk to find the museum.

hmmmmmm...

maybe if we can figure out what this huge building right here is, one of us says to the other,

only to realize that this IS the National Building Museum.

That's convenient.

Built in the 1880s, this was originally the US Pension Bureau Headquarters, which is reflected in the 3ft high frieze circling the outside portraying various scenes of soldiers returning from the Civil War.

100 years later, an act of Congress repurposed it from offices to a museum celebrating the environments we create for ourselves.

When we went, there were 5 exhibitions staged: Cityscapes Revealed highlighted permanent collection pieces; Washington: Symbol and City told the in-depth story of the designing and construction of our nation's capitol, as well as describing some of its neighborhoods; Designing Tomorrow captures the design and impact of the World's Fairs of the 1930s (runs through Sept 5th 2011 if you want to see cool early/mid-century stuff); Walls Speak displays an amazing collection of the Art Deco artist Hildreth Meiere (runs through Nov 27th 2011 and is awesome); and, LEGO Architecture. The first four were free, but there was no photography allowed.

LEGO Architecture: Towering Ambition is a touring exhibition, running through Sept 2012 and was a reasonable $5 buy-up. It features replicas of 15 famous building, rendered in LEGO:





cute Empire State Building in the back






Leenie checks out the Chicago Spire

 




Falling Water was my favorite

There was also a building area with so many LEGOs it was mind-boggling. You could build anything you wanted, but there was signage about different urban planning schemes so that your building could be designed to suit various purposes.



the stripey one is mine



Once your structure was done, there was a cityscape where it could live. It was neat to see not only what structures others had built, but where people chose to put them in the city.

Even if you don't have time for the exhibits, you have, have, have to at least walk into the Great Hall:

 words don't even begin to capture the beauty

or the vastness of this space. 

Each of the column is humongous and gives the Great Hall a feeling of an open plaza inside of the building.



i'm so tiny in comparison

There were a lot of people hanging out, reading, and eating in this lovely, comfortable place. Also, there is a children/family area right in the Great Room where folks can build their own structures from all sorts of materials.
BTW, if the room looks familiar to you, there have been Presidential Inaugural Balls here since Grover Cleveland.
I recommend a visit and be sure to check out the super fun sculpture on the far-side from the Metro stop:

and maybe even be a part of it!

[note: there has been a pricing change for this museum since i visited it; info can be found here]

Bishop Museum

The Bishop Museum in Honolulu is part natural history, part local culture and part science center. It is a collection of several different themed buildings situated around a large common area, sort of like a Hawaii-specific Smithsonian.


It is situated on a hillside overlooking the city of Honolulu so you can see the skyline clearly as you move from one building to another or sit and eat lunch on a bench.
You couldn't take pictures in most of the cultural buildings so i have no pictures of the sperm whale skeleton or the feather standards and capes and the thousands of other cool things that i saw, but you could take pictures in the travelling exhibit space and the science center.  
Did i mention that it is windy?
My favorite thing in the science center was its central volcano Obviously, since the entire state is a chain of active and dormant volcanoes, the science of geology is key. inside of this massive model there are text panels and hands-on activities to explore various parts of a volcano and even a way to climb around inside the walls and then slide down.
At the top there is bubbling magma
with buttons to manipulate gas spurts
and lava plumes.
Cool.
Underneath the model there is the Hotspot theater where there are demos on both the cultural/religious explanation of the formation of the islands and the science of a hotspot volcano. In this picture the second performer is pouring lava.
Yes, real, honest to goodness lava.
They heat volcanic glass until molten and then pour it right in front of you. It is amazing. You can feel the heat blast even though the audience is a safe distance away. You can hear it cracking as it cools and they pass around different types of lava.
If you ever find yourself at Bishop i highly recommend this demo. It was one of the most astonishing things i saw in Hawaii.
One of the others was the near constant rainbows in the clouds. The rain would be blown in from somewhere else so it would be wet, but sunny or dry with rainbows.
Amazing.