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Sunday, June 29, 2014

I've now seen a part of John Wilkes Booth's thorax

My laundry is tumbling in a dryer upstairs. Once it is done, I shall fold it and put it away and ride off into the day...to a gas station.

I had a big day yesterday! Lots of walking around and enjoyment. I opted to try public transit, as Kathryn's house is near a train station, so that's pretty much the easiest and surefire route to get anywhere. Clearer stops and all that. And with my smart phone, I could Googlemaps public transit options. The train was more train than fancy light rail. I grabbed a spot and waited for the ticket taker to show up so that I could pay. I bought the all day ticket, so I could take any transport at any time with no worry. It was a very pretty ticket, with shiny logos and lots of colors and the date punched out. I love seeing the bonafide ticket punchers, it's so...well almost archaic now with everything being scanable and digital. So I got my pass, and got off downtown and walked in circles a bit before I figured out where I was going.

The start of the day was all about the Mütter Museum. It was a collection of medical artifacts, tools, preserved medical oddities, and just all around... gross stuff. There were many deformed fetuses in jars, fetus skeletons, a whole wall of skulls, an impacted colon, several skeletons including one with a very rare bone disease where the guy spent 15 years pretty much in the same position in care. The artifacts were preserved in a sort of sickly way. They looked more real and organic. Not very dried out and polished. All the bones in the Museum of Osteology were pristine looking. These bones were...not. And the jarred specimens. You just can't get past a cycloptic baby in a jar. Yeah. It was ... gnarly. But I enjoyed it! Because that is how I do. I did need a breath of fresh air in the Benjamin Rush Medicinal Plant Garden. And I caught the Brothers Quay weird art film they made in the museum.

From the gross glory of the Mütter, I walked to the Rodin Museum, which I got free admission for with yesterday's Philadelphia Museum of Art ticket. I checked out all the bronzes and admired the handiwork. Then I was getting hungry so I knew it was time: Philly Cheesesteak time.

I decided to go to Geno's, which I guess is the tourist option. It was a walk aways, but I had my walking shoes on and my mp3 player full of tunes, so off I went! Philadelphia has a pretty good assortment of shops. A lot of times when walking for miles through a city, it seems like once you get past a street it just drops to residential and then that is it. My path went through food stall streets, and upscale shopping streets, and just restaurants and smoothie places and galleries. It was a really nice variety, and I could see myself spending much more time here just eating and checking out art. Philly, parking aside, is great. I like it more than Austin, that's for sure.

So Geno's was across the corner from Pat's and I guess they have a rivalry? Each place has a long line, but I assumed the lines moved fast. Which they did. I struck up a conversation with the lady behind me in line, and she said I was her hero for taking this trip. A hero! Me!

I gobbled down my sandwich on some person's doorstep stairs. Very tasty, though the cheesesteak I had from that vendor in Portland was better I'd say. Then I plugged in the Reading Terminal Market into my GPS because I wanted ice cream, and I grabbed a bus nearby and waved my all day pass, and boom off I went! But oops the market closes at 5 as it turns out. So I just got on the train and headed back, because my dogs were majorly barking!

The train was different from the one I went in on, and it dropped me off at a different Jenkintown stop, so there was a moment of panic of "oh my god please let me be on the right train, please GPS don't have lied to me!" but I got there all right. No problems with public transit whatsoever! And it also made me aware of my skillset of just taking trains and dealing with schedules and all that stuff. I didn't grow up with public transit, so it's all been stuff I've learned in the past 7 years. Anyway, it's good to have a sense of capability, I think.

At the house I snacked and watched TV and slept pretty well, though I slept on my arm weird. It's fine now, but there was a painful bit of it just being sore and stiff.

So I'm waiting on laundry. Guess I'll start loading my car and packin' it up. I'll head off to New Jersey, but I'll try to avoid toll roads. Just go to the beach or something. Princeton's art museum is free, and only an hour away, but it closes at 5 due to it being a Sunday and it's 2:30 now.

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