Can’t not visit a museum: Yorba Linda Day 4 (19 April 2014)

Readers of our previous travel blog know we love a good museum, and while LA County has some wonderful well-known ones – think Getty for example – Orange County also has its share. One such is a favourite of Carolyn’s and one we had visited when we lived here two decades ago, the Bowers Museum. It’s also where Carolyn’s eldest son celebrated his wedding two years ago.

Bowers Museum

So, once again, Len took to the wheel and off we headed down the freeway system – 14 lanes wide in places – to Santa Ana. We found a park easily in the admittedly not-free museum parking lot and entered through a bright new courtyard entrance not known to us. The museum generously allows non-local Seniors their Seniors’ rate, easing the parking pain somewhat.

The Bowers Museum was established in 1936 by the City of Santa Ana using a bequest from Charles and Ada Bowers, and is now one of California’s and Orange County’s largest museums. It has a couple of gorgeous courtyards, the new one including a small sculpture garden, a stylish restaurant, and a more-than-decent shop.

They had three rather eclectic temporary exhibitions, which we visited before lunch:

• Beethoven: the Late Great. Curated by the Beethoven Center, San José State University, this exhibition commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. It focuses on what scholars call Beethoven’s third stage when he wrote the Diabelli Variations, Hammerklavier Sonata and the Ninth Symphony. It includes a letter and drafts of personal scores in Beethoven’s own handwriting, some from the Library of Congress.  We liked the gorgeous porcelain piece depicting Beethoven playing for others, two ear trumpets, and a framed lock of his hair taken from his body after he died in 1827. We particularly enjoyed it after seeing the museum in his birth-house in Bonn last year.
• Soulful creatures: Animal Mummies from Ancient Egypt (from the Brooklyn Museum). Comprised statues and mummies of birds, cats, dogs, snakes, and other animals preserved from over 30 Egyptian cemeteries. We were astonished to read that there were over 7 million mummies of ibises alone! Who would have thought? Some were buried with their masters, but many they believed were animal votives. Not all of these mummies – as the CAT scans suggested by Bowers staff revealed – contained the complete creature. Mummification is a drawn out process, so not always carried out fully.
• The Lure of Chinatown: Painting California’s Chinese Communities. Comprised 40 works by 23 American and Chinese-American artists and included images of communities before the earthquake in San Francisco in 1906, and urban renewal in Los Angeles in the 1930s, as well as later works. There were many large colourful watercolour paintings as well as oil paintings, and both realist paintings and more idealised, exoticised images. We particularly enjoyed works by Jack Laycox, Jake Lee, Florence Upson Young and portraits by Alberta Binford McCloskey.

We lunched in the museum’s Tangata restaurant, with Sue having salmon again, Carolyn a salmon sandwich, and Len a hanger steak. Have you heard of “hanger steak”, because we hadn’t – and nor had our server. He had to go ask! He told us it was from the throat, making us all want to hide our double chins, but Wikipedia says it is from the diaphragm of a steer or heifer, and somewhat resembles the skirt steak, which is what it looked more like. Wikipedia also says it is usually the tenderest cut on an animal which accords with Len’s assessment – and that butchers often kept (keep?) it for themselves!

After lunch we went to some of the permanent exhibitions, including the Pacific peoples section about Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia. We all enjoyed that, particularly the maps showing the migration patterns, and the wooden boat sculptures.

Old Town Orange, or Historic Plaza District

Since this area is near Bowers and was one of Sue’s favourite places we went there for our afternoon cuppa. It has a gorgeous park in the middle of the roundabout, and more antique stores resulting in more trips down memory lane as we looked at items from our parents and grandparents days now consigned to antique stores, but no condiments dish in Sue’s desired colour.

Carolyn cooked up a lovely dinner of Asian flavoured chicken, rice noodles, rice flavoured with kimchee, and salad. We are eating way too well – and then, after more round-the-dinner table chatting we watched the first episode of Breaking Bad, which Len and Sye hadn’t seen, before going to bed.

Another busy, lovely day in sunny California.

And some slides from that day …

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