Philadelphia

We got to Philadelphia on Sunday night. We stayed in a hostel with four beds and we were told that if another couple came they would put them with us, but we ended up having the room to ourselves both days.
We had a shared bathroom, and the other guests were mostly this group of middle school students on a field trip. The hostel was this great old mansion in the middle of Fairway Park.


We had planned to go to the art museum on Monday but we forgot that most museums are closed Mondays. Then we were going to go to Gettysburg but their was 100% chance of rain and it had rained for a couple days before that and there were flood warnings so we didn't go at all. So Monday we ended up going to the Mutter Museum, which "was founded to educate future doctors about anatomy and human medical anomalies"! And there were a hell of a lot of anomalies! When I saw the Bodies exhibit a couple of years ago it was really impressive but somehow those bodies seemed like fun and playful and the poses were like playing sports or something, but these bodies were more scientific. There were fetus' in jars and all these weird things and medical instruments lying about. They also had a lot of stuff about conjoined twins and they had the growth that was removed from Grover Cleavland's jaw and a piece of John Wilkes Booth! It was really impressive and crazy. You should check out the virtual tour: http://www.collphyphil.org/virt_tour/museum_5.htm
You weren't allowed to take pictures in there but the virtual tour is pretty good.
After that we just drove around because it was raining. We went to some thrift stores and then we met up with one of Natan's friends at the bar he works at which was a really great place called Johnny Brendas. It's a stupid name but the food was good and they had only local beers and good songs on the jukebox.

So these are pictures of a restaurant that we ate in called The Spaghetti Warehouse in Philadelphia. They had a trolley car inside! And an old timey phone transfer system. It was cool, I've never seen one up close and all the cords still worked and you could plug them in and they still had the labels for the different lines.



Tuesday we went to the Philadelphia art museum.

Natan really wanted to see the Marcel Duchamp stuff they had, which is basically all of his work. It was awesome! Two of his largest most impressive works are the large glass, which actually broke while in transport while Duchamp was still alive and the Museum was of course freaking out but he thought it was great and pieced all the glass back together.

and one called Given 1. The Waterfall 2. Illuminating Gas, which is a door that you walk up to a door

and look through two peep holes and see a woman lying in a field by a stream.

It was so fantastic, when it was first exhibited you people didn't know what it was and there was a foot pedal that you stepped on and a light came on behind the door and illuminated the scene. Now they keep it always lit up and the foot pedal is gone, but I like to think of people might accidentally step on the pedal.
These pictures are all from the Philadelphia Museum website.
Here is a statue of George Washington outside the Museum.

Philadelphia was pretty good, it was raining pretty much the whole time we were there and we didn't go see any of the historical American sites so I would definitely go back there. Also we also only went to one gallery on one floor of the art Museum and that was amazing so I would want to go back.