So, you may wonder, once one has done the Eastern Market, what else is there to do in Detroit?
Good question. We had 9:30 dinner reservations at Roast (about which we were very excited!) and eight hours to kill. Now what?
Hey! Detroit has a world-class art museum! Off we went.
The place is AMAZING. Chock full of art, with a terrific modern wing. A huge mural by Diego Rivera called Detroit Industry takes up the center courtyard.
The museum is surprisingly well curated and has a fascinating collection, which we'll need to go back to explore in much more depth. And it was almost empty - a nice side effect of Detroit's overall weird emptiness. Detroit's been described to me as a place built for 4 million where only 800,000 live, which is apt.
This, er, "feature" of the city can be creepy at times, though. When the museum threw us out at 5, we drove through streets covered in tumbleweeds (not really, but there was a lot of broken glass) to the nearest Peoplemover stop.
What, you guys don't check out the local public transit when you're on vacation?
The People Mover is a narrow-gauge light railway that runs in a 2.9 mile loop around downtown Detroit. It was opened to great fanfare in 1987 and has a capacity of just under 300,000 people a day.
Currently, it carries about 7,500. And in our limited experience, all of those people are tourists.
David took up a spot in the front of the train. I think here he's staring wistfully at Canada.
We rode the loop to Greektown, because we thought there would be things to do there and that the surrounding neighborhood might be worth a peek.
Turns out the interesting part of Greektown is about one block long. And there aren't really a lot of diversions there, either. There's a cute little bake shop and several restaurants. There is also a large casino, where we thought we'd be able to kill some time, but the place was a freaking maze designed by crazy people, was full of smoke, and had no bar - just a rooftop snack shop that sold Bud Light and nachos like you can get at football games. What the Eff.
Nearby options exhausted, we thought we'd walk around a bit.
We made it about a block and a half from Greektown and were in a new enclave called Bricktown when we heard a lot of yelling. I didn't actually see what was going on, but after a moment the yelling stopped and a manic crazy-looking tattooed dude came running past me, waving around some kind of power tool. I peeked around the corner into a surface parking lot, were a woman was sitting on the ground and holding her head while several passersby asked her if she was OK. When she stood up and walked away, we figured she'd be all right.
Yeah, it was broad daylight out, and the meth heads were hitting each other with blunt objects in the streets of Detroit. Awesome.
We still had two and a half hours until our reservation, but I wasn't about to wander around oustide any more, which sort of limited our options. So we took the people mover back to our car.
Maybe there are more charming areas of the city. I'm still game to find them.
When we got off the peoplemover, we saw these pills spilled out on the ground. Detroit.
Back to food in the next post. I guess I just felt the need to share that sometimes travel isn't sunshine and prettiness... sometimes it's crazy people and filth and boredom and me being angry and swearing off entire cities.
At least until we went to Roast.
