Steel City

After having such a lovely visit with my Grammy, I headed into Pittsburgh to meet up with Jay. I got to his house and we headed out to the Duquesne Incline for a beautiful nighttime view of the city. I had read about the incline in a NY Times article and was excited to see the view for myself. It was a beautiful night and it was actually pretty crowded, so we decided not to ride the trolley, but just to enjoy the view.

We drove down the hill and through the city and ended up at Point State Park where the rivers meet and had a great view looking back up the hill at the Incline. And since it was such a warm night we decided to go get ice cream at Oh Yeah! where you can add things into your ice cream. I got pretzels, peanut butter and banana blended into vanilla ice cream. It was really good. Jay got some crazy mixture that involved grape jelly and some sort of breakfast cereal. It sounded kind of gross, but he liked it.

We had big plans for Sunday and got an early start by heading down to the Warhol Museum. This is something I've been wanting to see for quite a while and it was totally worth it. You weren't allowed to take photos in the museum, except in the activity area, but my favorite part was a piece called Silver Clouds. It was truly magical.

They had a screen printing demonstration going on, so Jay and I painted our little templates and then got to screen print over them - just like Warhol! Here they are before the ink:

And after:

It's hard for me to see a cardboard cut out and not get a photo with it, so here I am with Mr. Warhol:

After the Warhol Museum, we headed to another museum called The Mattress Factory. It's housed in an old mattress factory and it has huge gallery spaces. The most impressive and memorable part for me was on the 2nd floor where they have permanent installations of James Turell pieces that are created by light, so the whole floor is pretty much dark. The art creates optical illusions and it was fun to figure out how it worked.

This is an installation piece where you have to take off your shoes to walk inside of it:

So after taking in so much art, we decided to head to the National Aviary. This was a lot of fun. I especially enjoyed feeding the Lories. At one point I had 3 of them on my arm. It was really quite exciting:

They also have a newly opened penguin exhibit called Penguin Point and one of the coolest features is that they have these little tunnels where you can poke your head up in the middle of the exhibit. Here's Jay getting an up-close view of the penguins:

And on our way back to the car we stopped to see some of the outside exhibits including a California Condor. When we got to the cage he was just sitting there and I started asking him to open his wings (since they're kind of famous for their enormous wing span) and lo and behold, about a minute later he was sitting there with his wings open. This isn't even as wide as they get, but you get the idea that this is a HUGE bird:


After the Aviary we drove to the Pitt Campus to see The Cathedral of Learning. It's a really tall, beautiful building.

And this is a shot of the inside, which offers space for students to study and hang out. There are also classrooms and offices in the building.

We decided to head to Monroeville for an amazing Indian dinner at Udipi Cafe. We ordered so much food and all of it was wonderful.

Sri Venkateswara Temple is just down the road and many people come from very far to see the temple, and then conveniently stop by the restaurant for dinner. There were cars in the restaurant parking lot from Delaware, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Here is a view of the Temple:

After seeing the Temple we played a round of Mini Golf (Jay won) and then went home and played Scrabble (I won). It was an amazingly full day and I had so much fun! There are still things on my To Do List for Pittsburgh, but I feel like I did everything I could do in the short time I had to spend in town.

On Monday morning we had a nice breakfast and then I headed out to drive to my parents' house for a Memorial Day BBQ. On the way I noticed a billboard on I-76 for a vegetarian/vegan deli called Maggie's, so I had to take a small detour. It's off of Exit 91 in Donegal, about 2 or 3 miles from the highway in the middle of farm country, but it's totally worth it! I got a lovely fresh brewed iced tea and some rice salad to have for lunch on my drive. I'll have to remember it's there the next time I'm in the area.

I logged over 700 miles in the car this weekend, which is a little bit much, but it was totally worth it!