such blog : 09-28-2018

Today was the day I planned to hit the main point of my trip - the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art! Below is a picture facing outside from the museum (because I am smart and didn't think to take a picture OF the museum..)

As I previously read, the Asian exhibit was surprisingly large. More specifically, they divided Asian art into categories based on region, so there were rooms for Chinese art, Japanese art, Indian art, etc. Actually, the whole dang museum was surprisingly large. Granted, I'm the kind of person who likes to take my sweet time and read about every single item, but I was there for about four hours and feel like I didn't even make a DENT in all the items that they had.

above: a book/manuscript displaying grass script (essentially, Chinese cursive). It's beautiful and fluid writing, but even native Chinese speakers have trouble reading it!

Afterwards, I found a bubble tea shop cause I was craving bubble tea. No one was there, which was surprising. I studied a little bit of Chinese here - specifically, I was looking over the reading section from my first practice HSK 5 to look up words I didn't know.

Since the boba place was nestled in a small shopping strip, I went into these shops and actually bought a couple gifts for friends! They were cute, little local boutique kind of shops.

Then, I went to a book store (of course). That's kind of a new thing I've started doing - whenever I visit a place, I like to see if I can find a local bookstore to walk through. And to buy at least one book, of course. I love it when there are just books EVERYWHERE surrounding me, and this store did not disappoint.

I highly recommend the place!

And of course I left with not one, but three books!! ._.

The finale of my night was attending a performance of West Side Story at the Kauffman Center for Performing Arts. My Airbnb host told me that the building is fairly new, maybe about four years old. It was a cool place, and the play was awesome as well. I have never seen West Side Story, but I did sing a couple of songs from the show in my choir class at Southwestern. We also listened to 'Cool' in my Music Literature class. Ironically, 'Cool' was the song that made me cry because of how familiar it was.