Until a few days ago, I have never been to Philadelphia, never had an authentic cheese steak, and had never been to love park. Today, I did all three, and in the middle of that, I visited as much art as I could find via my google maps on my phone. The good part is I did all these things, most everything I did was completely disappointing.

First problem, this city has terrible public transportation, so we drove in instead and payed 20 bucks for the day to park; which is fine. We then went straight to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which was the highlight of the day. Just like the MFA in Boston, there is a ton of space and the building itself is astounding. Inside, there is a ton of art to see pre-1950 and for the most part, it covered all aspects of art pre-1950 that I wanted to see. There was a big Duchamp exhibit that had his peep hole doorway fully installed as well as nude descending staircase 2 and 3. There was also a giant room of ancient armor that my girlfriend and I spent about an hour in by itself. There is just a lot too see. Unfortunately, there was almost no contemporary art or photographs aside from one gallery in the whole place. And this seemed to be mirrored by most of the city’s galleries that we ventured into.

After the museum, I needed a break from art. I decided that for lunch I needed have one of the Philly cheese steaks from either Geno’s or Pat’s. This decision was fueled by a documentary that came out a few years ago. We parked nearby and found the corner where they really do sit across the street from one another. We walked to Pat’s first and took a look around and saw that they called themselves the king of steaks. Then we looked across the street and saw the flashy Geno’s sign and I decided that was where I wanted to go. When I approached the window to pay though, I noticed two things.

1: There is a sign on every window with a bald eagle on it that says, THIS IS AMERICA YOU MUST ORDER IN ENGLISH.
2: They call their french fries Freedom Fries. (Yes. Still.)

So after acknowledging the blatant racism displayed on their windows, I said fuck Geno’s and went over to Pat’s instead. They were the king after all. I got mine with provolone and with (which means with onions) and quickly sat down to enjoy my first authentic Philly Cheese steak………..Or so I thought. IT WAS AWFUL. ALL THIS HYPE AND A MOVIE FOR THAT 8 DOLLAR PIECE OF CRAP? I’VE HAD BETTER AT TGI FRIDAYS. Yea, it was disappointing. Maybe I should have went with cheese whiz but I thought that the higher quality cheese would taste better. Maybe I was wrong?

After my authentic lunch, we walked down to the Philadelphia equivalent of SoHo in New York,  Old City. Before traveling over to Old City, I looked to see where the largest cluster of galleries were, and made a decision to go around 2nd and 3rd street. We went to about 10ish galleries and walked by another 5 or so that all seemed to have either really bad photographs or wannabe ABEX painters in them. I understand that I may have just picked the wrong section, but to go to all those galleries and find not a single interesting thing was a bit disheartening. To be fair, we did not visit the ICA Philly because it was closed or some of the other galleries around the city, but I thought the most congested area would be the most interesting.

To wrap this post up, I say if you are visiting Philly stick the the Museum and hope the ICA is open, other than that, good luck!