On Monday I was thinking. My last final of the semester was Wednesday night (6pm-9pm, yuck), and Lauren had a long weekend - Thursday, Friday, Saturday off. I was thinking we could take a short trip somewhere. Neither of us had been to Nashville (or Tennessee at all), and it is only about 4 hours away, so that's what we picked. Good thing too, we had terrific weather. Friday it was sunny and it hit 70 degrees. It didn't feel like winter at all.
We saw a few things of note. Thursday we went to the Grand Ole Opry, they weren't any shows, but they had some neat Christmas lights inside and outside.
The Opryland Hotel was
staggering, several adjoining six story rooms, large enough to put a football field in each.
Friday morning we saw the
Tennessee state museum. It was all about the history of the state of Tennessee - which is to say it was all about Andrew Jackson and the Civil War, with a small exhibit on the Native Americans. I'm sure several of you would've liked it. After that we took a long walk around downtown Nashville where we saw some excellent architecture including: the capitol building, a former post office (now a visual arts center), a former customers & tariff agency (now an impressive high school), gorgeous churches, a huge former railroad station, and several sculptures of dubious quality (I don't get post-modernism).
Friday afternoon we went to a park across from Vanderbilt University which had a
full scale replica of the Parthenon in Athens. Going inside they had a full scale replica of what scholars and artists think the statue of Athena looked like inside the Parthenon. The walls were lined with casts of the surviving pieces of sculpture from
the pediment of the Athenian Parthenon.
Saturday we went to the
Frist Center for Visual Arts. It is a neat art deco building that had been a post office. They had two main exhibits, one showing many sculptures of Rodin and one showing the best of Photography from the George Eastman House. No pictures were allowed of either exhibit unfortunately, but I learned quite a bit about Rodin I hadn't known, and given I recognized several of the pictures from the Eastman House, sometimes you're much closer to home than you think.
For lunch, we went to
the Loveless Cafe. It is a tourist trap way out in the middle of nowhere. It took a considerable amount of time to get there, and then we had an hour wait to be seated. Lots of celebrities have gone there, I think the reason we went was because Lauren picked up a pamphlet for the Cafe which had an endorsement from Conan O'Brien. The food was quite good, the biscuits were defintitely better than average, and some of the jams were excellent (especially the peach & blackberry preserves). We bought a jar of fig preserves to bring home with us.
We skipped the Country Music Hall of Fame (neither of us are fans), we skipped the Botanical gardens (nothing growing now), and didn't have time for the haunted Belmont mansion or plantation. The hotel only had about a dozen channels but two of them were Fox & Fox News. I thought that said something. The city was a bit trashy too, more so than even NYC I'd say. But the people were very polite & helpful over the phone and in person, the food we had was good, and downtown was fairly accessible. We had a good time, and here are some pictures:
