photo: Beyond My Ken, creative commons license
On what seemed like the hottest day of the year, I took the train into Manhattan to celebrate the birthday of my long-time friend Nancy. We plan these excursions for each other instead of another present. We give “the gift of time,” as another friend also named Nancy calls it.
We’ve done all kinds of things and had many delicious lunches in restaurants I’ve returned to gladly. Yesterday we visited two smaller museums 20 blocks up Fifth Avenue from The Met and still across the street from Central Park.
The Museum of the City of New York has three exhibition floors, with rotating exhibits. The new gallery of the Tiffany Foundation, “Gilded New York,” contained a few large portraits, gorgeous jewelry, and ornaments from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Small, but a gem. At the temporary portrait exhibit (through September 18), “Picturing Prestige: New York Portraits, 1700-1860,” we could get in close to see the incredible detail without worrying (or being told!) we were blocking someone else’s view.
“Roz Chast: Cartoon Memoirs,” is a large exhibit of the artist’s original drawings, New Yorker covers, and the like. It includes panels from her book, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant, about the decline and deaths of her parents, showing how she processed that experience through her art. Indeed, much of the humor in her work results because we recognize our own vulnerabilities and absurdities. “We’re not laughing at you, we’re laughing with you.”
There also are galleries devoted to the Yiddish theater (through August 14) and activism in New York, from suffragettes to civil rights, from Stonewall to immigration.
After we were finished there, crossed 104th street to El Museo del Barrio (free entry, because we’d been to the MCNY), which has a major exhibit on the fashion illustrations of Antonio Lopez. I’d read the nice review by Holland Carter in the New York Times and wanted to see it, but wasn’t sure where the museum is. Now I know. Easy to get to. The museum bills itself as “New York’s leading Latino cultural institution.” Only the ground floor of its big building is the gallery space. El Museo also sponsors a wide range of performing arts events, cultural celebrations, and educational programs.
Both museums have small cafés, but they are not up to birthday requirements, so we walked down Madison fifteen blocks or so (in the shade as much as possible) for lunch.
Thank you, Nancy, for being my friend for 43 years!
Museum of the City of New York – 1220 Fifth Avenue @ 103rd Street; small café, nice gift shop/book store
El Museo del Barrio – 1230 Fifth Avenue @104th Street; small café; gift shop
While it may be hard to tear the kids away from the amusement park rides and midway attractions at Hershey Park, near Harrisburg, Penna., don’t overlook ZooAmerica’s adjacent North American Wildlife Park. Originally the zoo had larger acreage and a comprehensive collection of world animals, but styles of zookeeping have changed a lot since Milton Hershey first thought of a zoo to house animals presented to him as gifts.
We fed river otters, a sloe-eyed alligator, and a huge tortoise. In the education center, we “petted” a baby alligator and held a young owl. That was quite a thrill! The highlight was the opportunity to hand-feed bears (grapes on a skewer held through the bars), which the bears delicately removed. These real-life Hershey bears—outdoors in daytime—come into their cages to sleep at night, so kids and bears had bars between them, plus, of course, seven hovering adults to make sure little fingers stayed well away. These were black bears so he isn’t terribly visible in the photo.
Some of them, like the fellow in the photo at right, just fled the balcony of our Costa Rica hotel room. A week in this Central American paradise is an opportunity to see a huge diversity of wildlife. Only about half the size of the U.S. state of Ohio, Costa Rica has 1/20th of the world’s biodiversity: “nearly 8% of the world’s bird species, 10% of the world’s butterfly species, 10% of the world’s bat species and 20% of the world’s hummingbird species,” according to our highly-recommended 
A boating excursion on the Tempisque River in Palo Verde National Park gave us the chance to see the so-called Jesus Christ lizard, whose webbed toes allow it to “walk on water” for distances of 10 to 15 feet, very handy when escaping a terrestrial predator. The real reptilian attraction of the river tour is, of course, the crocodiles. Aided by the low tide, we saw them in grinning profusion. The 12-foot beauty pictured at bottom was quietly sunning, seemingly oblivious to the gawking boat passengers. Then she decided to have some fun by rolling into the river and drenching the humans with muddy water.
Even though I’d spent a week researching, reading about, and memorizing the look of the country’s various poisonous snakes, did not see one. (Yay!!) High winds caused the authorities to close the mountain and volcano parks that were some distance from our hotel, because of the risk of falling trees and poisonous fumes from a rumblingly active volcano. (Silver lining: the winds kept mosquitoes and other bugs away.) These protected gems contain much of Costa Rica’s biological diversity, including hundreds of orchid species. We have to go back!