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Adventures in Bad Tourism

I’m a very “bad” tourist in terms of looking things up in advance and planning. But I always enjoy doing things this way — seeing something cool is twice as cool when unexpected. George Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is one of my favorite paintings, well-liked enough that I swiftly made it the wallpaper on my iPhone when I get it. And then yesterday I was ambling around the Art Institute of Chicago and, unexpectedly, there it was! Naturally I then took a photo with the iPhone and set that to be my wallpaper. But wallpaper aside, the point is that not knowing what the collection’s highlights are until you get a chance to look around preserves a certain element of the thrill of discovery even though obviously it’s already a super-famous painting.

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