New York Day 4: Art, Central Park, Best Bbq, & City Lights

Today marks our final full day in New York City and our last museum trip.  We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (aka The MET).  We spent the majority of the time viewing European art from the 1400 - 1800's, modern contemporary art, and some Asian pieces.
The kids recognized some well known artists like Rembrandt, Matisse, Seaurat, and Picasso from art class at school.
I think we enjoyed the modern and contemporary art the most.  We tried very hard to decipher what it meant or what feelings the pieces brought about versus saying it looks easy to make.
I appreciated seeing some of this old Dutch pottery from the Netherlands.  It reminds me of something I might have found in my grandma's house back in the day
We all recognized the Van Gogh paintings.  This one was a particular favorite.

Mattisse became my favorite artist in fifth grade when we studied his work.  I had to make a picture of flowers for an art show in his style.  I loved the variety of Mattisse paintings.
We ate lunch afterwards from a food cart right outside the museum.  The kids thought it would be fun to feed some of their lunch to the pigeons we nicknamed "street chickens."
Then we walked to Central Park and the kids played in their favorite area, "The Adventure Playground" they discovered on Sunday.  I think they liked climbing the rocks and playing on them as much as the play equipment.
For dinner we went to Hill Country Barbeque with Rob's friend Michael, his wife, and daughter.  They live in Queens and Michael is a pastor as well.  Rob and Michael were in the same doctorate of ministry program at Covenant Seminary in St Louis.  It was awesome to finally meet him and get our families together.  The food was amazing as well!
Then we went up in the Empire State Building at dusk.  This was such a great time to go up and get a different view of the city.  Even with it being much later in the day, it was still super crowded and busy.
We tried to identify the various landmarks we have been to on our trip as well as the various rivers and boroughs.  We even saw a helicopter flying at our level.
Thankfully we did not have to walk all the way back to our brownstone.  Our feet were pretty tired!  We made use of an Uber ride.  We kept commenting how crowded and alive the city is even at 9:45 PM.  Downtown Salem can be such a ghost town after 7 PM...though we have seen that changing the longer we live there.

Tomorrow we are here for the morning and a little bit of the afternoon.  Then on to La Guardia to catch a flight home.



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