Ay, Frida!

Well, we finished up meetings Wednesday and Thursday was a free day until dinner that evening.

Some friends and I decided to go out exploring together and our first stop was Mood Fabrics!  Since I'm creating my senior collection this coming school year I was on the hunt for fabrics for that.  Luckily, I already knew what aesthetic I wanted and also what fabrics I was looking for.  Thankfully I found all the wools I wanted there, and my friend Naja was kind enough to let me use her suitcase to get them back home!

After Mood, we dropped our Mood purchases off back at the hotel and headed to our next adventure.

Earlier in the week, we saw an advertisement for a Frida Kahlo exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden.  We hopped on the subway and headed out to the Bronx!

For this exhibit, the Botanical Garden recreated Frida's garden that she enjoyed at her home with Diego Rivera.  Stepping into the conservatory was like stepping into Frida's Casa Azul.  It was absolutely beautiful!

So yeah, now it's time for picture overload of all the beautiful flora and interesting cacti in La Casa Azul.

They even had a replica of Frida's artist workspace.

In the Botanical Library, they had quite a few of Frida Kahlo's artworks on display.  Of course since they were the originals we could not take pictures of them.  They were so amazing to look at, though.

Down on the 3rd floor of the Botanical Library, they had a magnificent paper replica of Frida's The Two Fridas piece.  The details in this piece were amazing!

There was beautiful flora everywhere on the garden grounds.  I especially loved these flower balls.  Yes, they grew like that naturally!

After exiting the library, we headed back around front to enjoy some authentic Mexican food at the taco truck they had.

And let me tell you, these were THE BEST fish tacos I'd ever had!  I could've eaten 10 more.  Well, maybe not that many, but close!

Now about this trip back to our hotel in Manhattan!

You know how you get to a place one way, then you think, well maybe we can get back in a quicker route?  Well, that was not the case in our journey back to the subway.  We decided to go to a different station, but didn't even end up a that station.  We walked for what seemed like hours, somehow missed the subway stop, and instead found the train.  Once on the train we discovered that you really should buy your tickets before you get on, because we ended up paying $13 a piece for a train ticket! At least we were headed in the right direction.  Our stop was Grand Central Station, and from there we transferred to the subway...but not before we had to hike up multiple thigh-killing, soul-shattering sets of stairs!

We finally did make it back to the hotel, but we had to scramble and get changed for dinner and the theater that evening!  Our plan was to take a cab to the restaurant we were meeting at, but trying to hail a cab in rush hour clearly did not work out...and we ended up walking/speed-walking/crawling the 11 blocks to the restaurant.  We all were so over walking and stairs by the time we sat down for dinner.

The shining light at the end of all the walking, though, was going to see The Lion King on Broadway!

I had only seen Hairspray on Broadway before so I was excited to see another play.  The Lion King was ab-so-lute-ly amazing!!  The opening and ending gave me chills.  The costumes were stupendous and the singing was glorious!

Of course we couldn't take pictures of the show, but they did have costumes on display outside in the halls.

6 days in New York conquered!  Come back tomorrow for a final good bye from New York and hear how Friday was!