Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
stripes). I think an even better course of action is to join one of the many regular
tours that provide a useful breakdown of the Asian Art Museum's highlights
(check at the information desk for schedules). Otherwise, you may find the wel-
ter of artifacts to be rather daunting. The Museum Masterpieces tour, usually held
at 11am and 1:30pm, is a good start, but if you miss it, you can also grab a free
audio-tour wand of the museum's highlights. About eight other free tours, focus-
ing on China, storytelling, and the Himalayas, are usually scattered between
10:30am and 2:30pm. On Saturdays at 11:30am and 2:30pm, there are worth-
while tours of the museum that focus on the architectural triumph involved in
converting it in 2003 from what was once the city's main library; Gae Aulenti, the
same architect responsible for the conversion of Paris's Musée d'Orsay also han-
dled this.
While its holdings are among the most impressive you'll ever see in Asian cul-
ture, I do have some tonal problems with the museum. This sign greets guests at
the start of a tour: “Culturally, no 'Asia' exists, and the peoples who inhabit 'Asia'
often have little in common with each other.” It's a message I find insulting—
embedded within is a potentially racist assumption that only the curators have a
nuanced understanding of Asian cultures. Furthermore, it seems a disingenuous
welcome message for a place called, duh, an Asian Art Museum, a name that by
its own rules is faulty. All the same, the artifacts speak for themselves, and the ele-
gant, well-designed gallery spaces are exemplary. If Asian art of any kind interests
you, it's an absolute don't-miss. And even if you don't care about it, the architec-
tural conversion is, in itself, a delight.
GOLDEN GATE PARK
Not just another city park, Golden Gate Park attracts some 13 million visitors a
year (mostly locals), third in the U.S. only to Chicago's Lincoln Park and New
York's Central Park, to which it's most often compared. As late as the 1870s, the
park was mostly ocean dunes, but aggressive planting and design, which were
indeed inspired by the Beaux Arts success of Central Park, have transformed the
area into a wooded escape. Among the attractions embedded in the park are the
de Young museum (p. 118), the California Academy of Sciences (p. 117), the
Conservatory of Flowers (p. 120), and the Japanese Tea Garden (p. 116), all of
which lie on the eastern, or city-side, end of the park and so are easy to visit on
the same day. At the Pacific Ocean end, you'll find Ocean Beach, known not for
sunshine and frolic but for summertime fog, mean currents, and surfers.
To tour the park itself, try the San Francisco Parks Trust ( % 415/263 - 0991;
www.sfpt.org), a free, volunteer-led system of tours, which carves out 14 different
tours for this immense public space alone. Weekends are mostly for historical
tours, while explorations of the Japanese Tea Garden, one of the park's most
notable attractions, are Sunday and Wednesday ($4 to get into the garden). My
favorite title is the Wild West Walk, which brings you to the paddock full of
bison. Unexpectedly, the animals have called the park home since 1892. Among
the other oddities on view in the park and covered by some tour or another: the
Dutch Windmill, which has the world's largest wings; the Conservatory of
Flowers, which is the oldest glass-and-wood Victorian greenhouse in the hemi-
sphere; and the 7 1 2 -acre National AIDS Memorial Grove, a meditative walk where
the names of 20,000 of the lost are engraved in stone; it's still the only national
AIDS memorial in existence.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search