Boulder Colorado -- The City

It's not just the natural beauty of the greater Boulder area that made me fall in love with it. (Here is my brief photographic journey of Boulder Colorado).
This place is an eco-conscious, vegetarian's paradise. Check out the bottled water I bought here!

Now that's green!

The streets were filled with bicyclists and runners and there was even a father with 4 kids, all on a single 5 people bicycle with a large "carrier", who was educating his kids about gun control laws. May be they were discussing the recent shooting in nearby Aurora.

I managed to get fairly decent vegetarian fare at most places (except the place where I stayed *eye rolls* which had only oats, bread and potatoes for breakfast for vegetarians!). But, I did manage to have one awesome dinner at the only full service, sit-down-and-eat-in-style vegetarian place called the Leaf.

This was the entree (Jamaican Jerk Tempeh ) that DH ordered!

Walking on Pearl Street Mall is perhaps the thing to do in Boulder and it didn't disappoint. As it turned out, the day we roamed around on Pearl Street Mall, there was an Art Fair going on where local and nearby artists had gathered to display their wares. And wow! The art work on display was mind blowing. There was glass art, recycled art (of course!), sculptures, stone art, canvas. Everything. Unfortunately, because of the new baggage rules, all I managed to get was a pair of sculpture/wall art in brass from an artist based in Arizona!


The street was alive with performers, general millers-around and tourists like us. And sculptures! This sculpture of a girl on a swing had so much movement in it and the whole thing was balanced on her trailing "dress". Unfortunately, I have only this view of the sculpture, not the part where the "dress" is balancing the entire sculpture.

I loved the motion and the asymmetry of this sculpture

Boulder, the City, also has a Museum of Contemporary art, which unfortunately, was closed on the only day we had the time to visit it. Since we had already fed the parking meter we decided to stop by at the nearby Dushanbe Tea House. A building that was disassembled and relocated all the way from Tajikistan! And.. this tea house had Masala Dosa (a staple of the southern Indian state that I hail from) on its menu! The ingredients list for the masala dosa, though, had some interesting and very un-south Indian spices. The only trouble was, neither of us was hungry, so we just had us some tea. Coloradans seem to be great tea drinkers, if Boulder is anything to go by. While the hotel I stayed in served tepid sugar water under the name of hot chocolate, their teas were Tazo!

Interior of Dushanbe Tea House

What we missed in the museum of contemporary art, we made up at the Leaning Tree's sculpture and art gallery (free admission, with a donation box). Although at first I was very skeptical about an art museum maintained by a greeting card company, I changed my mind once I entered. The gallery itself contained several western themed paintings and sculptures, where the theme of balancing a whole sculpture on a relatively small point, continued. We were allowed no photographs inside, but the gardens did have several large sculptures that we managed to capture onto pixels.

Sakagawea with her child in the foreground and a leaping panther in the background

Details of the face of a woman -- one of the early prospectors

And then the piece de resistance -- this completely "recycled" horse! Built completely out of yard and other junk, welded together to make the most interesting sculpture. I marvel at the amount of planning and vision this sculpture must have taken. It's one thing to sculpt something out of a "blank slate", it is something else (I would imagine) to sculpt something from already existing forms! I imagine that you would need to somehow erase the familiar object from your mind and see it as a completely different piece!

Oh how I love this little town!

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