NEW YORK, NEW YORK...

A few days ago we came back from our first trip to New York City. And we must say we fell in love with this city. So majestic and classy...at least Manhattan where we spent most of our time:) Three days in NYC resulted in painful feet. After all we were walking around for 12 hours straight three days in a row as we wanted to get as much as possible from this trip. And we did. Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the New York Public Library, Broadway, Time Square...And our favourite-Central Park.

We also decided to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the MET) where we spent a couple of hours admiring ancient and contemporary art. We could not resist to spend a lot of time looking at ancient and medieval pieces of functional and artistic glass and ceramics. It is amazing that such fragile material like glass survived hundreds 0r even thousands of years. A number of pieces are examples of Roman and Greek art, and are dated to even the Hellenistic era. There was a lot of large footed bowls, possibly used for mixing wine, often belonging to a small group of luxury glass vessels. Some of the glass bowls represent masterpieces of glassmaking from the period when cast glass was beginning to be supplanted by vessels made using the newly invented technique of glassblowing. There was a number of pieces with engraved scenes from Greek or Roman mythology. Besides art glasswork coming from early centuries of human civilization, there are also vessels representing trends in the XIXth or early XXth centuries. One of the examples are beautiful glass vases designed by Loui Confort Tiffany. The shapes, colors, and finishes of Tiffany's vases and plaques were inspired by the natural world and by ancient glass.

Here is a couple of pictures of the pieces we had a chance to admire, as well as a wonderful panorama of New York City.