Opinionated but harboring no agenda.  Honest, not jaded. If that’s a community of people in America today, sounds like a place I want to visit.

    Kansas seems to be the location, Wichita the destination and here’s how I learned this.

    Went to the movies in Wichita, specifically the tenth annual Tallgrass Film Festival. Independent films filling four October days and 34 of the filmmakers watched too, sticking close for conversations and formal Q & A sessions.

    Questions and comments after thought-provoking films tell a lot about people, and I’d say these Wichitans (yes that’s what they call themselves) are comfortably independent with their own thoughts while accepting of others.

    Another way I drew conclusions about the nature of this place as a visiting destination was walking all over downtown.

    Douglas is a main avenue, wide boulevard, gracious sized sidewalks and non-stop sculpture.

    Public art is something I pay attention to and often I have to hunt it up. In Wichita, life-sized bronzes fill the blocks, block after block.

    These are not formal figures of the famous, but people doing things, acting like the rest of us. Forty sculptures at least.

    A bronze mother pointing something out to her child. A businessman with his briefcase off to the side, pants rolled up, cooling his ankles in a low fountain.

    Look for a medicine wheel and a duckling. Play hopscotch with a bronze girl and her bronze cat. Bullfrogs, prairie chickens, a hawk and fox and a dachshund too.

    Wichita has been serious about funding and sharing art all over town since 1991, and the sculpture isn’t the only place I saw the hand of the city embracing community pleasure.

     Five museums near the river reflect city enthusiasm too. This is the Ar-kan-zis. Say it like Wichitans do. Spelled like a state but pronounced the Wichita way.

    The River District museums are the Mid-America All-Indian Center, Old Cowtown, Wichita Art Museum, Exploration Place which is all about science and imagination, and Botanica.

    Southern Plains Indians lived here, but 567 tribes came together 40 years ago to shape the Mid-America All-Indian Center here. Doesn’t collaboration that huge add to the “no jaded agenda” personality?

    Powwows are intertribal five times each year; gallery exhibits change often and reflect diversity. Flags of many tribal nations hang from the ceiling in a window-flanked room spilling with sunshine.

    Outdoor exhibits include an 1850s village with a grass house, important in this prairie of tall grasses.

    Even the reason this All-Indian Center started is embracing to me. The aviation industry is vibrant in Wichita, and apparently many Native Americans coming to Wichita decades ago for work experienced loss and separation leaving their communities.

    This center created togetherness for them then, and cultural heritage opportunities for visitors like me now.

    Go for the art because paintings, drawings and editorial cartoons by Blackbear Bosin are here; he is the Kiowa-Comanche artist whose 44-foot sculpture towers over the confluence of the Big and Little Arkansas rivers on its 30 foot base.

    This is a Wichita icon, known as Keeper of the Plains.  Experience it many ways, starting from the grassy back yard of the All-Indian Center, perhaps with a picnic.

    Stroll the pedestrian bridge passing underneath the Keeper any time.

Experience the Keeper at sunset when four firepots flame for 15 minutes, expressing earth, air, fire and water as the four elements of life.

      Out your bedroom window is another way if you stay where I did, the 1922 Drury Plaza Hotel Broadview, and if you ask for a room facing the river. A paved walking path connects the hotel and the Keeper of the Plains Plaza.

    Museum visiting is handy with a Go Card. Ask for one the first place you go and get $2.00 off the admission price for nine others. Any or all.

That’s nine museums and the zoo. Think about some meals in between.

     Fine dining, and fun dining, matters when I travel and Wichita and her neighbors know about beef. Sterling silver beef headlines some restaurants; Angus always ready.

    Chester’s Chophouse and Wine Bar is where I ordered filet mignon resting in a port wine reduction, blue lump crab and béarnaise sauce cascading over the top.

    Wall-to-ceiling windows overlook immense green space, park or yard I wasn’t sure. Copper art depicts western scenes above rich wood walls and simple touches are substantial.

    The water bottle left on the table looks like glass milk bottles I remember on the front step when I was a kid.

    Croutons on the locally grown Bibb lettuce salad are focaccia bread. Brussels sprouts not little cabbage forms but grated plus Pecorino cheese and a few raisins.        

    After-dinner mint with the check? Oh no, not Chester’s. This was a bar from master chocolatier Beth Golay, Wichita’s Cocoa Dolce.

    A dozen brandies, eight ports and sherries and 12 single malt styles part of the dessert menu here.

    Another way to think about beef is Old Cowtown. Wichita was just that and now the city and its volunteers support a living history museum just off the old Chisholm Trail—25 acres showing the history of 1865-1880.

    Moving immense herds was local business then, and the living history museum shows change the railroad caused here.

    Costumed interpreters stay in character, running printing presses, maintaining the saloon, staging gunfights, offering wagon rides, staffing the mortuary, sometimes offering burlesque and melodramas. Chinese laundry too, veterinarian, carpenter, blacksmith and meat market.

    Only three of the 41 buildings and exhibit areas are new; historic structures dominate, and so does research, staff member David Abbott told me.

    “We have records,” fills the conversation where storytelling is entertaining, and fact based.

    I’d allow several hours and check the website for special events and shows at Old Cowtown.

    Lunch at Tanya’s Soup Kitchen is a good idea. Sandwiches too. Four soups each day and eight books of recipe cards with 12-15 kinds in each.  

    I chose root veggies with cream sherry and a sandwich of endamame, roasted garlic hummus, spinach, toasted almonds and avocado on wheat toast. Familiar foods abundant too.

    Tanya’s a San Francisco culinary school graduate who says, “The best part of my day as a chef is always being alone in the kitchen making soup.”

    Go on Tuesdays for 6:30 p.m. cooking classes including dinner, recipes and a glass of wine for $45.

    The best part of the day for a retired family physician I met in Wichita seems to be sharing treasures with visitors to his vast Museum of World Treasures.

    Dr. Jon Kurdatzke founded the museum in 2001 to share his obvious love of treasures. “I’ve been collecting since I was 19,” he says, “on a six week tour of Egypt, the Holy Land and Europe with my family.”

     Look for him when you go; he’ll be smiling, teasing and delighted to talk about dinosaurs or mummies, Roman coins or palace Buddhas, British royalty and American presidents, sea creatures from the western plains or World War II uniforms.

    Really.  The diversity challenged my ability to transition from gallery to gallery and today challenges my recollection.

    I suspect the Museum of World Treasures reflects our current culture: fast paced, immense change, many ideas at once.

      Old Town is the neighborhood where I found World Treasures and more fine food. Enter under a graceful metal arbor from Douglas Avenue, the wide boulevard teeming with bronze sculpture.

    Galleries, theaters and hotels. Apartments too if you want to move in. Lively district both nights I dined in Old Town. First at Sabor, Latin Bar & Grill, later at Larkspur Bistro & Bar.

    A fiery orange pablano is the signature sauce at Sabor, Chef Steven Cotter told me, but you can tone tastes down if you prefer.

    Spices lingered pleasantly in my throat after enjoying Venezuelan-inspired San Cocho soup with roasted chicken, plantain, corn, red peppers, garlic, cilantro and avocado. A remarkable $3.00 value.

    Mahi crusted with plantain and pumpkin was my excellent entrée, side of rice with coconut and black beans.

    If I’m lucky enough to return, I’ll order Sabor’s polenta tower or the paella with Andouille sausage, mussels, shrimp and chicken.



 

When you go:



www.GoWichita.com

800-288-9424



www.TravelKS.com

785-296-2009



www.worldtreasures.org

316-263-1311



www.oldcowtown.org

316-219-1871



www.theindiancenter.org

316-350-3340



www.kansasaviationmuseum.org

316-683-9242



Public Art Guide

www.downtownwichita.org

316-264-6005



www.tallgrassfilmfest.com

316-303-9292

Oct. 16-20, 2013



www.druryhotels.com

316-262-5000