Weekend adventures

I am getting bored with my "tour de senses" so I'm exercising my authorial power and wrapping it up. Only sight and smell were left and I promise that I really do enjoy both of those senses very often.

My computer crashed last week (thankfully, a very helpful local computer guy was able to retrieve all my data and save it on an external hard drive until my new computer comes) so I don't have any pictures today. Sorry.

This weekend my mom flew to Birmingham to visit. We had good talks and fun adventures as I showed her my city! I gave her a tour of campus and the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, and showed her my favorite park where I go for walks. We sipped coffee at my favorite local coffee shop downtown and spent a couple hours browsing at the used bookstore where I've been taking guitar lessons. We found some interesting books (my favorite was the massive collection of "The Idiot's Guide to..." books which featured such titles as The Complete Idiot's Guide to Difficult Conversations, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Starting and Running a Coffee Bar, and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Good Food from the Good Book (recipes from the Bible)

On Sunday after church, we went to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. This museum was amazing... pictures, real-life video footage, donated artifacts, time lines, rebuilt structures and sculptures, etc. The wealth of information left me stunned and somewhat overwhelmed. It's just very heavy to walk through the reality of where this city was just fifty years ago. I loved learning about the history of different parts of town. At one point, we ran into an elderly man named James who was a volunteer at the museum. He sat and told my mom and me stories about how he marched from the local churches in demonstrations, tanks chasing them, police beating them. He shared about being excluded from schools and struggling to learn to read on his own. Tears glistened in his eyes as he talked about bombings in local churches and he spoke with such joy about the changes in the world, especially reveling in the election of President Obama. And as we continued on and stared at the photographs of six children who were killed in the 1963 bombings of the 16th Street Baptist Church, a woman walked up with her young daughter and pointed to one of the pictures. "Honey, that little girl was my 3rd grade teacher's daughter." I don't cry often, but I was so overwhelmed by the realness of the moment that I started crying and had to walk away. I have never been to a museum that seemed so alive.