Legion of Horror

As I mentioned last time, I became a member of Fine Art Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) and Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (AAMSF) as of this Wednesday. I already visited AAMSF on Wednesday, so today I set out for Legion of Honor (LOH) for its Monet in Normandy exhibition as my first taste of LOH. I expected it to be popular, so I intentionally visitec LOH on a weekday. Well, the whole trip, except viewing Monet’s paintings, was a nightmare, and it made me seriously question the idea of becoming a member of FAMSF.

First, it is hard to reach by MUNI. From Downtown, one can take #2 and get off at the Clement and 33rd Ave. It sounds straightforward, but #2 comes every 20 minutes and takes 1 hour to get where LOH is. Then one can either take another 20 minutes of uphill walk (which is fine by me) or transfer to #18 bus. But after the #2 experience, the other passagers were like me, preferred our own #11 buses. By the time I reached LOH, I spent about 2.5 hours on transportation already.

So far I was only happy that I made it to LOH and enjoyed the monsieur’s beautiful music while observing the surroundings. It was windy and foggy and a little chilly, your typical SF summer. It was hard to take good photos of LOH due to the direction of the afternoon sun.

As I walked passed the impressive front gate, I was greeted by this thinker in the middle of its Roman style courtyard. There was even a tiny glass pyramid in the middle of courtyard, reminding me of musée du Louvre but without its elegance.

So far so good. Once I set my foot in LOH, the unpleasantness started. The whole place was swamped by visitors from all over the world, chatting and yelling and bumping each other! And this was just the entrance. Every blue uniformed man (security guards?) wanted me to hold my backpack instead of carrying it on my back, and none of them gave me any explaination. Not until that I spent good 5 minutes explaining about my back problem (I’m in physical therapy right now to prevent it to get worse), he finally backed off and asked me to carry my backpack in front of my chest. Huh? Really, what was the great deal about not carrying backpack on my back? If any of them would provide an explaination, I would be OK and cooperate, but I doubt that they even knew why other than “The people above told us so.”

The Monet exhibition, located in the basement, could not accomodate even half of its crowd comfortably. The space was simply too small for something this major, and Monet’s paintings made the situation even worse. His work requires close examination and distant overservation, but it was hard to do both without thousands of “Excuse me” to fight through the crowd. I didn’t bother to read any of the display text or listen to the $5 ($6 for non-members) audio tape; I just wanted to view all his paintings once and come back later at a school day. I couldn’t deal with the crowd. I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

But I needed a dollar and 2 quarters for my returned MUNI fare. I went to the gift shop (you can’t avoid it, BTW) and picked up a postcard. When I paid for it, I asked the cold cashier that I’d like 4 quarters for one of my returned dollar. He completely ignored me. I repeated it again, he continued ignoring me. I repeated 4 times and he gave me all $19 in paper. I had to took out $1 and told him that I wanted 4 quarters, he finally did it without looking at me. I was mad, but soon forgot about the episode when I saw that their poster was on sale. I picked one and went to pay for it. This time I rememberd that members got 10% discount and I mentioned it to him. He scanned the price from a pre-printed tag, so I thought he did what I said. Not until later I found that he completely ignored my mentioning of my membership. *SCREAM*

So by the time I walked of of LOH, I was in a very bad mood. On top of that, it was completely cloudy and chilly, and I was hungry like hell. All I wanted was to go back to my sweet home, which took me another 2.5 hours.

5 hours on the road and 1 hour in LOH today, not a very good investment I will say. I certainly hope that LOH is not always like this, and that I was just lucky to bump into all the nasty workers and unusual big crowd. My first experiences of LOH and of AAMSF are like 2 opposite ends of my taste spectrum: bitter vs. sweet. *sigh*