My friends and I took advantage of spring’s temperate weather last weekend to take an overnight getaway to Kansas City, Missouri, which has much to offer, too much to explore in a weekend, but we had a wonderful time visiting a few of its cultural spots.
On our way into town, we stopped at the IKEA store in Merriam Kansas, where I learned that all IKEAs get their own street name, Ikea Way! Obviously this was my first visit to an IKEA, and I was also surprised by another IKEA fun fact, that they have their own cafeteria where they serve (apparently famous) Swedish meatballs!
IKEA is its own clean, crisp magical world filled with sample “rooms” to shop through, where the stock items are not even displayed in the store because that would be too cluttered (you have to go to the warehouse for those), and is full of adorable housewares at affordable prices. They even have a little grocer section in case you want to take their Swedish meatballs or some other Swedish delicacy home.
After IKEA, we arrived at our hotel in Kansas City on the Missouri side, and just took a walk downtown to get a feel for the city. The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema was one of our favorite buildings, a theater famous for requiring cinema etiquette and offering activities like game nights.
I’m sure we could have done some searching to find hidden local restaurants to try, but we were traveling by foot and didn’t have a lot of time between our planned activities, so we had dinner at downtown’s Yard House, which was near our hotel and had a variety of different items to choose from, from steak to pasta to sushi, and had a very nice beer selection. I had a pretty amazing ahi tuna poke bowl with a Walnut River coffee porter. After dinner we went to see a show at the Truman Theater, an intimate venue on KC’s Truman Road.
Kansas City also has a rich arts district with several art schools and two museums, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which is where we spent Saturday exploring. Both museums greet their guests with larger-than-life fantastic sculptures, “Spider” at Kemper and “Shuttlecocks” at Nelson-Atkins. Our first stop was Kemper.
I loved the Kemper, which was adorned with Chihuly glass in front of the windows, had an incredible modern collection of art from international artists, and had a Garry Winogrand photography exhibit on tour.
And I decided to make myself a figure in this artwork because I couldn’t really escape the reflection!
After this, we went to the larger Nelson-Atkins museum, which houses a wide variety of items spanning the world from ancient hieroglyphics to modern art.
I also loved the massive sculpture at this museum’s entrance, which is just to the right of the photo above, called “Shuttlecocks” by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.
After our second museum tour, we had a delightful brunch in the sunlit restaurant back at Kemper Museum and then headed home.
