Lake Lewisville - 2nd week; Dallas Art Museum - King Tut

Ah, what do I recall about this week of our Dallas stay? Thank goodness for photos to jog memories.

We visited Reba every day. I started recording stories of her childhood for a Granma Memory book our kids gave her to complete years ago. They're very fascinating. You've heard the joke of having to walk 2 miles to school in the snow uphill? Well, she seriously had to walk a mile just to get to the bus stop. The "bus" was a wagon that had been equipped with seats. By the time she arrived at school, icicles would be hanging off of them. The parents would get upset because the kids would stick their shoes by the potbelly stove to warm up which would melt the strings holding the soles on.

A number of the ladies would chime in stories of their own as memories came listening to Reba. We were sitting in a common area and I noticed that many of their descriptions of their home matched the photos on the wall. The houses in the pictures look much bigger than the descriptions. The house had two rooms. The front room had a room divider between the parents' room and the kids' room. The 6 kids had 2-3 beds to share amongst them. The back room had a separate divider for grandpa's room and the rest was the kitchen. Most people's barns had a separate room for the grandparent(s). As GG remembers her grandpa she's fascinated that he never got angry with all the kids climbing all over him, stepping on his toes.

I did get to visit a big city museum - the Dallas Art Museum with the King Tut exhibit. The mummy itself is no longer allowed to leave Egypt, but we did see many of the artifacts such as games he played and ceremonial masks. I enjoyed learning about the royal lineage the most. It helped put pieces together for me of other rulers I've studied. The shop had full size Egyptian coffins you could purchase.

We toured the rest of the museum. Very interesting. I enjoy the Fort Worth art museum better, but this was different. The Dallas Art Museum seems to aim toward more contemporary & modern art. They did have some exhibits that were educational. We enjoyed the full-size Japanese warrior, the Meso-American art, and I liked the Indonesian artwork because of the cultural knowledge it carried. The oddest artwork was the light exhibit which included an oscillating fan connected to a wire swinging from the roof. Giant empty rooms with just a light and moving mirrors were the majority of the exhibit. I have to admit the yellow room where our skin looked alien with black blotches was unique and the rainmist with light creating moving rainbows was pretty.

We went on a Thursday afternoon which luckily was a late night with a live jazz band playing in a cafe. We had a great dinner while listening to live music. Very metropolitan. Very different from our days in the woods.

Overall we've greatly enjoyed our visit to Dallas.