Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art

It is so easy to get into a rut, to think, oh, I want to get home to do this, finish that. Not doing the wonderful things that are on an amorphous "to do" list that just keeps getting set aside. Fortunately occasionally a visitor from out of town appears and we actually do those things. [I had lived in San Antonio for six months but did not visit the Alamo until my parents visited six months later! So typical People joke about not taking the Staten Island ferry until a visitor arrives.]

Today Arthur and Gloria McDonald from Charleston, S.C. met me at the Rubin Museum for lunch and to see the exhibits there. I met Arthur on my trip to Mongolia. I had not met Gloria. I am SO glad they came to town. We had a lovely visit, I enjoyed their almost-British accents. Plus, I got to the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art which is only four blocks from where I work and I am a member, so I have free entry any time. Fortunately the Mongolian exh ibit was still on display on the 2nd and 3rd floors. The wonderful show on the 4th and 5th floor I will write about in a few days when I go back and take even more time to enjoy it. I ABSOLUTELY promise myself I will do that, it's a great show.

The Mongolian exhibit had modern photographs as well as artifacts, all interesting and the exhibit was, as their exhibits always are, highly inforamative. The Rubin is one of the most people friendly museums in the city.l Arthur and I assured Gloria that the inside of the gers we stayed in in the tourist camps were much like the ones in the photos -- only with better beds. What a wonderful, fascinating and, yes, exotic place Mongolia is. I am enormously happy I was able to take that trip. My roommate, Kay, was a wonderful companion. Kay and Arthur and I often played Hearts with a changing variety of other players -- one long midsummer night in the Gobi when the temperature had been in the 100s all day, we sat at a picnic table under the enormous sky, with the desert changing from beige to orange to gray while a jillion stars came out overhead, playing cards in the relative cool of evening. Traveling is among the most wonderful experiences! As Arthur, Gloria and I talked we discovered that, on separate trips to Morocco, we had had the same wondeful, personable guide.

The pictures, of course, are from Mongolia -- thet top one is a ger camp ["yert" is the word the Russians used for gers, which is the word the Mongolians prefer]. The second is a scene from the archery competition at the Nadam festival. Sometimes I am almost overwhelmed at the richness of memories stored up there in my gray matter!