Institute of Texan Cultures

Today we visited the Institute of Texan Cultures. No, the waffle above was not part of the exhibits, just part of breakfast at our hotel!

I remember visiting the Institute of Texan Cultures as a high schooler on some school trip to San Antonio (Future Teachers of America? Band? Newspaper? Some other geeky club I belonged to?!), and loving it. I also remember taking my nephew Aaron there sometime in the 90s and loving it. And I LOVED showing it to the girls, too!

The museum honors the contributions of the various groups who settled in Texas – American Indians and African-Americans and Germans and Hungarians and Belgians and Czechs and Chinese (more about that in another post) and Mexican and on and on. The girls especially enjoyed the sharecropper's cabin. . .

. . . and the cowboy campfire.

We also learned quite a bit about textiles in Texas – the girls got to pick seeds out of tufts of cotton, watch wool being carded and then spinning wheels making it into thread. We watched a woman weaving rugs, and two women quilting (I told them about 100 Good Wishes quilts, which they had never heard of. They were very interested to hear about a new quilt custom.)

The Institute is just as much fun as I remember it. I don’t remember if there was a Chinese section before – there might have been, and it just didn’t strike me as important! There was a new exhibit, called Race, and I’ll blog more about it later. If you are ever in San Antonio, I -- and Zoe and Maya -- highly recommend the Institute of Texan Cultures. Zoe says she especially liked that the museum talked about racism and immigration and languages and different cultures. Maya especially liked the exhibits that showed the clothes they used to wear.