A tourist in Baltimore, part two

Saturday was our second 'tourist in our own hometown' day, but this time we headed north to Baltimore. We spent most of the day at the Walters Art Museum, a smallish museum established by an art collector in the early twentieth century who turned his personal collection into a museum. I highly recommend it. It's not as big as a Smithsonian - we got through about half of it in a longish afternoon visit. It's entirely free, it has a vibrant kids program (as evidenced by the large number of munchkins running around), and best of all (in my opinion) it has free audio tours. I love audio tours because they let me wander at my own pace but also focus my attention on pieces I would probably otherwise miss. 

The most interesting exhibit was a series of four rooms, the aptly named "Rooms of Wonder," organized as a collector in the 1600's would have displayed them in his own home. Picture lots of wooden cabinets, filled with items celebrating nature, foreign lands, the arts, and science. It was a little snapshot into how people thought back then. For example, the Asian cabinet included items from China, Japan, and India - it was all just "the Indies" back then. And in the nature cabinet, the items represented the extremes - huge alligators and tiny beetles, because science looked to the extremes to make sense of the world, unlike today's scientific focus on the typical and average exemplars of a species.

For lunch, we turned to the best for recommendations. My cousins' cousins (I'm not quite sure how we're officially related) run a blog that reviews restaurants in the Baltimore area, Black Coffee and a Donut, and one of their recent recommendations sounded especially vegetarian-friendly. Baba's Kitchen is a tiny almost take-out restaurant that serves terrific mediterranean food. Andrew had a lamb kebab and I had a sampler platter which included the best spanikopita I think I've ever eaten.  

We had intended to visit Baltimore's Washington Monument, which is a bit smaller than DC's version, but which allows visitors to climb to the top and admire the view for a mere dollar. In the end we had to postpone because the opening times seem to be rather random - it depends if the custodian wants to hang around the whole day or not, I guess. It leaves something to look forward to next time, I suppose.