Day Two Hundred and Ninety - Crystal Light

I've got a legitimate two for one things-o-the day here today, so hold on to your virtual hats. The first thing is that I finally visited the new "crystal" at the ROM. For those of you who aren't from round these parts, the ROM = the Royal Ontario Museum - it's a museum of natural history/civilization and might be the biggest one in Canada, but I'm not sure. Also, I don't care enough to look up much information on it since I don't really care for the museum. It's too expensive and jammed with kids all of the time and even though I like natural history museums, the ROM has always rubbed me the wrong way. They have continued to rub me the wrong way through their new architecture. They are situated in a lovely "old" building [only "old" because nothing in North America is truly old] and a few years back decided to have some much ballyhooed architect stick some ginormous, crystal shaped partially windowed, lumpy monstrosity on to the lovely old building. From the outside it looks like a hot mess and now I can safely say that it does from the inside as well. There is something though - thar be monsters hanging from the ceiling!


I'm not just saying I hate it because such is the fashionable thing to do...I just think that North America has so little that is old/traditional and we will never have a sense of history if we keep lumping odd bits of aluminum siding and windows onto lovely old buildings. Also, natural history museums tend to be very old timey in nature and I don't think this is the best medium to display the works. The dinosaurs do make some neat shadows and they have some interesting lighting going on - however this also highlights the amount of stupidly wasted space...and stupidly dusty space [lots of inaccessible corners and slanty bits of wall]. I will say something for the ROM though - as annoyingly kid friendly as it is in some areas, they have stuck with a "just the facts ma'am style" through most of the museum proper - BRAVO! Overly kid-ified/edu-tainment museums make me feel like a dumbass for going to them.

And now - the second thing! Following our trip to the ROM we decided to go out for Japanese food to a new and exciting Japanese restaurant. They had origami cranes on the tables! And they also had a more extensive dessert listing than most Japanese restaurants and I was able to try something I had only heard about earlier this week, but was already craving. I ate black sesame ice cream. The colour might be a bit of a turn off [yes, it's black-black - when melty slightly dark green-black, but super inky], but it was delicious. Tastes like black sesame seeds. In ice cream form. Fancy that.


The colour was also extremely transferable - to Joseph's ginger ice cream and also to my teeth and tongue - as evidenced below. I'm pretty classy I know. Now I just have to try squid ink pasta to round out my inky-coloured food list!