Travel Archives - Bean Sprout Adventures

January 21, 2024January 23, 2024

Trip to Green-Wood Cemetery

We walked around a big cemetery in Brooklyn last weekend (the main point of the trip was to eat Asian food in Sunset Park, but I’ve also wanted to go to the cemetery). There’s a Gothic revival entrance gate, with a huuuuge parakeet nest in the central tower.

Parakeets. Their noise gave them away before we could even see them.

Lots of fancy monuments and grave stones there.

Mausoleums…

With custom gates.

The founder of “The Truth Seeker” (some magazine?).

And a nice pond. Given the temperature, there weren’t many people out, but there were a couple of birdwatchers.

On a previous attempt to visit the cemetery, one group member thought it was creepy and then it started snowing.

February 20, 2023February 22, 2023

Pottery visit

While visiting my parents in Austin for Thanksgiving, J and I went to a local pottery studio and gallery.

We hiked along a harrowing stroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad) to get here. So many driveways for cars to hit you at…

Compared to New York stores, the studio was shockingly large inside, like a small warehouse.

There was quite the variety of ceramic items at the store, decorative, useful, and both. I liked the following items.

The vertical lines are carved into the cup. The artist used a glaze that changes color based on the thickness of the coat, so the lines ended up a different color than the main body of the cup. I also like the particular color combo.

I like the “notches” in the edge and the little diamonds removed from the side. The decoration is nice but not overwhelming, it’s just simple.

J like the size of these teacups. Unfortunately they came as a set with the teapot (plus the colors are ugly!).

December 17, 2022November 25, 2022

Weekend trip to Philadelphia: Urban design highlight

We took a trip to Philadelphia (via Amtrak — woo!) over the summer. There were a lot of cool things in Philadelphia, like Amish pretzels, but I wanted to highlight the charming alleys. They’re residential streets with historic row houses.

The highlight is how narrow the alleys are. Technically, they’re wide enough to drive a car down but they’re so narrow that drivers have to go just about walking speed and there is nowhere to park. They are through streets, but the width keeps drivers from wanting to use them so they remain useful (and safe) for pedestrians and cyclists.

These old streets are really nice to use and the old houses give them extra charm.

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Sadly, streets like these can’t be built under modern road design requirements. (Perhaps private streets with this design would be allowed.)

Philly also has lots of street art. In an effort to reduce graffiti, the city funds murals and mosaics.

December 5, 2022November 25, 2022

A trip to the Cloisters

My parents visited us in New York around Christmas last year. For one of our outings, we went to the Cloisters in Washington Heights.

The museum is an assortment of old European art and architecture that some guy imported. At that time (late 1800s through the 19-aughts), there were a bunch of old abandoned and half fallen-down monasteries and churches that no one was using. I assume people would be more interested in them now, but maybe there are just soooo many old religious buildings in Europe that these would still be considered dregs.

The collector assembled all of the partial monasteries into one eclectic building.

They had an amazing collection of Medieval tapestries. Besides being dyed entirely with natural dyes (!!) and being handmade, this style and era of tapestry is particularly known for portraying real plants with a lot of detail.

From a series about hunting a unicorn. Lots of flower species depicted.

European-style herb garden in the courtyard of one of the monasteries.

It’s a good place to take your parents 🙂

May 11, 2020May 1, 2020

Bay Area adventures with my dad!

My dad visited J and me this past fall in California. Unfortunately, he bowed out of staying with us, and didn’t get to experience that studio life!! But we did a number of other fun activities.

Fixing the sofa with dental floss was just one part of getting ready for the visit.

Peach Dutch baby (fondly called “the big pancake” in my family) for breakfast, recipe courtesy of my mom. We were too ambitious with the peaches – these are supposed to puff a lot more than this usually… I’ll post the recipe on here sometime and y’all can try it out.

Hangar One, completed in 1933, at the Moffett Field Historical Society Museum. Lots of airplanes, old military uniforms, scale models of stuff, etc. There were a lot of interesting older buildings at the airfield. With more time, it would’ve been fun to walk around. Mysteriously, Carnegie Mellon also has an outpost here.

The underside of the Golden Gate bridge!! As seen from Fort Point.

Fancy dim sum restaurant! This is Koi Palace in Daly City. J heard about it from… somewhere. It’s supposed to be really good. We got there pretty early in the morning and briefly had to wait in line.

We got rid of some bad lamps at Goodwill and picked up a new-to-us one! It’s made by Stiffel, my dad’s favorite lamp company. Apparently they’re normally quite expensive ($300) – we got this one for $25!

We also saw this cute replacement shade 🙂

Ate at Original Joe’s, a kinda fancy Italian place in SF.

We went to Santa Cruz and saw some old mission buildings. The actual mission was partially destroyed in a mid-1800s earthquake and replaced by another church. A replica was built in 1931. The only original building was used as housing for Native Americans.

May 19, 2019May 19, 2019