43. preservation.

field museum
may 31, 2012

42. i've got teeth.

30. chinggis, not genghis.

http://genghiskhan.fieldmuseum.org/

aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

good thing i'll be visiting home before september.
maybe i should bring my catalog from the chinggis khan exhibit i saw in mongolia.
THE COUNTRY.
what's funny is that they have things on loan from the national museum in ulaanbaatar, so it's possible i will have seen the same artifacts, in two different museums on complete opposite sides of the world, within one year of each other, the second time being quite near my place of birth.
let's all go!
they probably won't be selling any of this though:

27. the pony express.

a visit to the national postal museum, housed in the old post office.

jj: "i try really hard not to collect stamps."

 

practicing sorting by zip code

owney, the offical mascot of the usps.

"So many people added tags to Owney's collar that Postmaster General John Wanamaker had a harness made to help him carry the weight. After Owney died in 1897, his mail clerk friends raised money to preserve their mascot."

even the floor looks like mail!

and a bit of creepy vandalism to finish.

they had a great video showing how mail gets sorted in the modern age, gorgeous old letter boxes, nice docents, and it wasn't crowded at all. definitely worth a visit, and a place many people miss when they're in town.

05. where's waldo?

my sister, brother-in-law, and best dude all came to visit over new year's and part of the weekend was spent at the other air and space museum, the steven f. udvar-hazy center, an enormous hangar next to dulles airport.
it houses hundreds of planes (including the enola gay and an SR-71 blackbird) and thousands of flight-related artifacts (the best being space cameras and housewares associated with the french balloon mania of the late 1800s).
my favorite part was seeing the space shuttle enterprise:

not to be confused with the other enterprise: