Vacation: Trip to Salem, August 13
Aug. 21st, 2009 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kenjariOn Thursday, August 13th, Other Kenjari headed up to Salem. We took the commuter rail, which turned out to be a fast, easy, and cheap way to get there. The T station is a short walk from the center of the downtown/historic part, so you can see pretty much everything without needing a car. Our day ended up being a serious helping of fun cheesiness bookended by serious culture.
We started out at the Peabody Essex Museum, which was really amazing. They have a lot of nautical art and artifacts, mainly from the 19th century. Their special exhibit was The golden Age of Dutch Seascapes, a lovely collection of 17th century paintings of ships at sea and of harbors. I am fond of 17th century Dutch painting, and this exhibit gave me a chance to see a side of that era that I had not had a lot of exposure to previously. We also went to the exhibit of ancient and modern Indian art. The works were paired so that you could see how the modern works drew on and commented on the older, more traditional art. It was quite fascinating. I think the biggest highlight of our visit to the Peabody Essex was seeing the Chinese House, a complete traditional house with furnishings and household objects transported from China and rebuilt at the museum. It costs a little extra to see it, but it's well worth it. This is one of the things I like best to experience - the actual spaces in which people lived their lives. There's something both visceral and imaginative about it, and it provides a more complete sense of another place and/or time than objects in glass cases can. We could easily have spent the whole day there, and at some point we will go back and do just that. However, we also wanted to see other things in Salem, so we opted to only see those few things and then move on.
The next part of our day was taken up with more touristy, pop-culture sorts of things. We went to the Witch Museum, Witches' Dungeon, and the Pirate Museum. They are all follow the same basic model: a brief spiel on the historical background, and then a tour through a series of wax-figure dioramas illustrating the highlights of the subject matter, laid out in a space whose lighting and design seem modeled after amusement-park haunted houses. Production quality is not overly high, and the approach to the history is strictly superficial. The Pirate Museum also includes plenty of pun-heavy humor. The most interesting of the three was the Witches' Dungeon, because it starts out with a witch trial re-enactment taken from the actual transcripts. It seems to be what the local high-school drama club members do for a summer job. These three attractions are entertaining and fun, as long as you keep your expectations at the right level.
The last sight we went to was the House of the Seven Gables, which is a house that was owned by a branch of Nathaniel Hawthorne's family, and did provide the inspiration for the novel of the same name. It's been reconstructed and restored quite nicely. As we found out, some of the restorations are based more upon the novel than historical fact, but I actually thought that that was a legitimate approach. Although I admit that may be because the literary restorations were really cool. Next to the House of the Seven Gables is the house Hawthorne was born in, which is also beautifully restored (it used to be in a different location, but was moved to the present site so that it could be preserved alongside the House of the Seven Gables). There's a lot of information about the author, too. Apparently he was quite the emo/goth in his youth - he spent a period of time after college living reclusively at home, writing, only going out in the evening, and believing that only six people knew of his existence.
We had a tasty dinner at a swanky seafood restaurant called Finz down by the harbor area recommended by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sovay. On our way back, we walked by one of the local community centers and found out via their window display that Salem had a large and active Polish community in the early 20th century. The display caught my eye because in a couple of the photos, the women were wearing traditional Polish dress (I have a traditional Polish vest/bodice that my godmother brought over for me from Poland when I was a kid). We strolled around until it was time to catch the commuter train back to Boston, having had a very lovely day.
We started out at the Peabody Essex Museum, which was really amazing. They have a lot of nautical art and artifacts, mainly from the 19th century. Their special exhibit was The golden Age of Dutch Seascapes, a lovely collection of 17th century paintings of ships at sea and of harbors. I am fond of 17th century Dutch painting, and this exhibit gave me a chance to see a side of that era that I had not had a lot of exposure to previously. We also went to the exhibit of ancient and modern Indian art. The works were paired so that you could see how the modern works drew on and commented on the older, more traditional art. It was quite fascinating. I think the biggest highlight of our visit to the Peabody Essex was seeing the Chinese House, a complete traditional house with furnishings and household objects transported from China and rebuilt at the museum. It costs a little extra to see it, but it's well worth it. This is one of the things I like best to experience - the actual spaces in which people lived their lives. There's something both visceral and imaginative about it, and it provides a more complete sense of another place and/or time than objects in glass cases can. We could easily have spent the whole day there, and at some point we will go back and do just that. However, we also wanted to see other things in Salem, so we opted to only see those few things and then move on.
The next part of our day was taken up with more touristy, pop-culture sorts of things. We went to the Witch Museum, Witches' Dungeon, and the Pirate Museum. They are all follow the same basic model: a brief spiel on the historical background, and then a tour through a series of wax-figure dioramas illustrating the highlights of the subject matter, laid out in a space whose lighting and design seem modeled after amusement-park haunted houses. Production quality is not overly high, and the approach to the history is strictly superficial. The Pirate Museum also includes plenty of pun-heavy humor. The most interesting of the three was the Witches' Dungeon, because it starts out with a witch trial re-enactment taken from the actual transcripts. It seems to be what the local high-school drama club members do for a summer job. These three attractions are entertaining and fun, as long as you keep your expectations at the right level.
The last sight we went to was the House of the Seven Gables, which is a house that was owned by a branch of Nathaniel Hawthorne's family, and did provide the inspiration for the novel of the same name. It's been reconstructed and restored quite nicely. As we found out, some of the restorations are based more upon the novel than historical fact, but I actually thought that that was a legitimate approach. Although I admit that may be because the literary restorations were really cool. Next to the House of the Seven Gables is the house Hawthorne was born in, which is also beautifully restored (it used to be in a different location, but was moved to the present site so that it could be preserved alongside the House of the Seven Gables). There's a lot of information about the author, too. Apparently he was quite the emo/goth in his youth - he spent a period of time after college living reclusively at home, writing, only going out in the evening, and believing that only six people knew of his existence.
We had a tasty dinner at a swanky seafood restaurant called Finz down by the harbor area recommended by
sovay. On our way back, we walked by one of the local community centers and found out via their window display that Salem had a large and active Polish community in the early 20th century. The display caught my eye because in a couple of the photos, the women were wearing traditional Polish dress (I have a traditional Polish vest/bodice that my godmother brought over for me from Poland when I was a kid). We strolled around until it was time to catch the commuter train back to Boston, having had a very lovely day.
