Inhaling culture

Being in New York, we obviously had a lot of Culture to appreciate. We did a good run of museums – The Metropolitan, the whole of which would be very difficult to see; the Natural History Museum, whose dinosaurs and blue whale never cease to amaze (though I do have one question: why does the blue whale look so much smaller once you become an adult?? I swear it used to be three times bigger); the MOMA, which has free entry on Friday afternoons (hooray!) and the Guggenheim, which was unfortunately mainly closed due to the installation of a Kandinsky exhibit.
We also spent a lot of time at Bronx cultural institutions, visiting the Zoo, the Botanical Garden and a Yankees game.
This is the Yankees’ first year in their new stadium, which is across the street from the old one. There seems to be a lot of controversy around the team’s new home – like how is the neighborhood benefiting and why is everything so expensive.
My friend Mike Gartland, a high school classmate who’s now an investigative journalist, is actually examining these questions and others in his documentary ‘In the Shadow of the Stadium’.
http://www.shadowofthestadium.com/
I don’t know much about the situation, but I did notice that the people inside the stadium resembled the people living outside it, that beer cost $11 and that sushi was on sale alongside the hot dogs.
Still, baseball – with its songs, camaraderie amongst the crowd and easy-to-learn rules - is a great representation of everything that’s good about America.