Po Dog, Burke Museum of History, Museum of the Mysteries, and Pumpkins

In keeping with our theme of museums in October (Royal BC Museum, Museum of Flight), we decided to spend another weekend in October at the Burke Museum in the U-District and then the Museum of the Mysteries in Capital Hill. We had a quick stop at Po Dog first. I believe I've told you about this hot-dog restaurant before. I tried a hot dog with BBQ sauce, melted cheddar, and crispy onion straws. Robb's dog had cheese sauce, mustard, ketchup, and crushed potato chips. Both of those were good. The last hot dog that we shared was not! A hot dog, wrapped in bacon, deep-fried, and smothered with raw onions and chili is not good - now that I write it out, I can't imagine why I thought it would be good in the first place. But we're weird like that and like to try "new" things.

The Burke Museum of History, housed at the University of Washington, is a place we'd been wanting to visit for awhile. But maybe because we were so impressed with the last two museums we'd been to, the Burke Museum was a bit disappointing. The natural history part of the museum had lots of fossils and skeletons, but we wished that there was more information about the exhibits. The exhibit about peoples from the Pacific Rim seemed a little forced. There were little displays about culture in China, Hawaii, Japan, Philippines, etc. But it seemed like a lot of the displays were reproductions and pretty generic. The temporary exhibit on display was about weaving. Several woven fabrics from around the world were displayed, but most of them were actually woven in the past 50 years - while beautiful, not exactly historical. No photography was allowed, so you'll just have to imagine our disappointment in the whole museum.

We next went to the Museum of the Mysteries fully expecting the kitsch to overwhelm us. While we didn't have high expectations, we were still a little disappointed in the lack of information. This museum displays foot print castings of Bigfoot, pictures of crop circles, and a discussion of ghosts. And randomly there was also a display about Bruce Lee and artifacts from various World's Fairs. As weird as all this stuff is, I felt the museum could have done a better job of providing more info and pulling everything together. If you're going to have a weird museum, at least do a good job at putting it together!

That night we went to a pumpkin carving party. Our hosts provided those patterns and tools so you could carve cool pumpkins. Although I chose a two star (our of four), it ended up being the most difficult pattern I could have ever chosen. It took me hours to complete this stupid pumpkin! But it did look pretty cool!