I often feel that I am in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some may dispute it, and remind me that I live in the Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the electronic world, not to mention that my neighborhood is one renowned for its school district (and according to my father, who has been to Taiwan, even the people there know that our town is home to excellent schools) and my town is the headquarters of a very famous company. But for me, those are not the things that make a place the place to be.

Only a half-hour's drive away is the city by the bay, the place that Tony Bennett, according to his song's lyrics, left his heart: San Francisco.
Read more »

Labels: beach, california, city, confusion, de young, islands, lost, memories, museum, ocean, pier 39, places, san francisco, seashells, silicon valley, surprise, travel, treasure island, tulips

Just the other day, my mother's company was having a party. I'm not sure of the purpose exactly, but it was probably just for the entertainment of the employees, so that they wouldn't lose satisfaction and go to another company. (I mean, I actually heard another company, Juniper, was going to start hiring again or something.) The party was held at the Tech Museum of Innovation. I went to the Tech Museum multiple times when I was in elementary school - in fact, I used to have museum membership. But I stopped going there...I think it was because they didn't really have anything new back then. But when I visited, a few things were different, although most are still the same as always.

I was a bit surprised by the choice of location for the company party. I've heard of hotels being reserved for parties, but never museums. My mom said it was a common thing, though. Museums are apparently better than hotels because there is more to do at a museum. Not only can you eat (there was bread, cheese, meat, pizza, chicken salad, shrimp...Oh, and there was dessert. Too bad some of it tasted like coffee, and I'm not fond of that taste in cake) but you can also explore the museum. My mom's company came up with a "scavenger hunt" for the employees to do. It's actually not that easy but some people were really doing the scavenger hunt. (If you fill out the whole sheet then you can get a raffle ticket) I tried to do it too but it would take a lot of running around the museum. While I was in the IMAX movie theater I noticed one guy who had a paper totally filled out. But then he folded it. I guess he figured out I was peering over his shoulder snooping at his answers. XD

Speaking of which, part of the party was the opportunity to see an IMAX movie. It's called Under the Sea, and as the name suggests, it was about the ocean and the creatures living in it. The animals were pretty violent. For one thing, there were the cuttlefish. They hunt by slowly sticking out a tentacle and then suddenly lashing it towards their target. Here's a picture.

The movie was a bit dizzying, but it was nice watching it. I have been swimming in reefs but I could only see some kinds of animals because there's no way I see the deep-sea animals unless I dive. In particular, one part of the movie was really troubling. A turtle started eating a jellyfish! It was sad watching that jellyfish having parts of itself being bitten off by the turtle. I think I've changed my opinion of turtles.

The sea snakes in the movie were cool, though. Sea snakes are pretty rare nowadays because their skin has been turned into wallets and handbags and such accessories. The sea snakes swim instead of slithering and I like the sea snakes even if they are very venomous. I also liked the eels. There's a kind of eel that submerges part of itself in the sand at the bottom of the ocean. The rest of it sticks up and the eels wait for small organisms to float along, carried by the ocean current, so they can eat them. It looked like a forest or a group of dancers.

Oh yes, and I did briefly mention a raffle earlier but didn't go into depth. There were two raffles at the party. One was after the vice president made an opening statement. (At first I was impressed that the vice president was there but my mom said there are many, many vice presidents so it's not that...significant after all) That raffle was for anyone who had been invited and responded saying that they were coming to the party. (Basically, all the company's workers that attended the party were eligible for that raffle. My dad and I are not really "eligible" to win anything since we are guests brought by my mom) My mom says I should have come to see the vice president's speech and the raffle firsthand; then she would have won something. Her friend once won something from a raffle because her daughter attended a company party with her. But ever since her daughter didn't go to another of the company's parties and so my mom's friend hasn't won anything.

While the vice president was talking and picking raffle winners, I was busy playing the Second Life demo they have at the Tech Museum. Second Life is actually an online social game where you have a humanoid avatar and you interact, I believe. (I'm not exactly sure because the demo is kind of...limited, and the demo has been here since 2004, so it's not exactly recent. I haven't ever played the actual Second Life, which you can learn more about on secondlife.com) When I was young I always loved to play the Second Life demo. You can fly around and walk around and ride a jet ski and throw watermelons and make catapults work...And not that much else. (Personally, I just like to try and sit on weird places like the chimney of a house or a volcano or a waterfall or the top of a mountain) It brings back a lot of memories, playing that game again.

Labels: animals, aquatic, company, computer, cuttlefish, eel, games, imax, jellyfish, movie, museum, party, raffle, scavenger hunt, sea snake, second life, tech museum of innovation, turtle, under the sea

The building I am speaking of here is the California Academy of Sciences. It was completely only recently. It's located in Golden Gate Park, pretty close to the De Young Museum. I heard it had started being built ten years ago...Wow, that's a long time.

We arrived at the museum around maybe 11 am or so, I believe. I should've gotten up earlier (I woke up pretty early in the morning, but stayed in bed being lazy) but it's too late for that now. The line was really long...My family had thought that since it was Black Friday, a lot of people would be out shopping to get deals, but it turned out that wasn't true. There were a lot of people there. I guess it's because both the kids and the parents have the day off, so it was a good opportunity for them all to go to the museum. We had to wait for quite a while. Luckily, we made it inside before they started metering. (Metering is, supposedly, only letting people in when people leave the museum. I'm sure that must've been annoying for the people who wanted to go in.)

We started out by going to the rainforest. There is a four-story rainforest in the museum. Quite a few animals were there, such as macaws (which are a kind of bird, they look like parrots), frogs, lizards, butterflies, and other birds. I tried to take pictures of them, but there were kids shoving me, the glass on the cases (some of the animals are in display cases, but the birds fly free inside the rainforest building) was reflective, and besides, the birds and butterflies moved around too much. In fact, I think some of the animals in the museum were mocking me or something, because they would suddenly move when I pressed the button to take the picture. (I couldn't think of how to describe that...I think there was some other term for it, having to do with shutters or something)

Afterwards, we went down to the aquarium. Lots of fish there, some that really huge...My dad was commenting on how it would be tasty to have sushi made out of the huge fish, but my mom said that it wouldn't taste good and would be tough to eat. (Well, there was a term she used, but it was in Shanghainese, so I don't know how to translate it) There were some jellyfish, which I discovered come out nicely in photographs. I will probably upload them somewhere later on, once I get all the photos onto the computer.

Speaking of photos, I ran out of batteries on my camera...I think that my Panasonic Lumix seems to run out of batteries even quicker than my old Nikon Coolpix. I really miss using Nikon. This is a bit off topic, but I heard that Canon and Nikon are the two best brands of cameras...But more folks say that Canon is better. I don't remember whether I've used Canon cameras before or not. If you have a camera, what brand do you have? Does it work well?

Back to the topic...There were other things in the museum as well, like dead animals. I saw some jars with things in them; one jar had a fruit bat, another had a snake, and a third had black rats. The rats looked kind of nasty. You know, I once heard that although squirrels and rats are similar (can carry the same diseases, and both are rodents...or at least rodentish), people tend to dislike rats more than they dislike squirrels. Personally, I just think it's funny how when the squirrels run it looks kind of like a wave. (I mean waves in water, not a person waving their hand)

The museum also had some penguins. They're bigger than the penguins I saw in Australia, I think. When I was in Australia, we saw some dwarf penguins, which I believe are the smallest species. They live in the wild, I guess, but you do have to pay to go see them. It's actually quite interesting. It was nighttime when they were coming in from the ocean, so it was hard to see them at first. But then eventually I could make out groups of penguins swimming to shore. Sometimes, if they got scared (there were a lot of people watching, though from a distance, and besides, there were seagulls on the beach also staring at the penguins) they would run back into the water instead of crossing the beach. But once they thought the coast was clear, then they would all sort of line up, and then run like mad across the sand until they got into the safety of the bushes. It was really funny. I thought the penguins were quite amusing, but I had to leave because we were supposed to meet some other folks to eat dinner in a Chinese restaurant. Sigh.

Well, this post is getting really long and confusing, so I shall continue another time.

Labels: animals, aquarium, australia, batteries, beach, birds, butterfly, california academy of sciences, camera, fish, macaws, museum, penguins, preserved, rainforest, rats, running, squirrels, sushi

A few people asked me what I was going to do during our three-day weekend (at my school, the students have Friday off since it was Staff Learning Day) and I told them about going to see mummies. (Not that I actually saw any, but that's what I had expected to see) There is an exhibit going on at De Young Museum in San Francisco, called Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs. It started in June 27 of this year and ends on March 28 in 2010, so it's a pretty long exhibit. It seems not many people my age are particularly interested in archaeology, though. It's disappointing. According to my mother, the people in the area where I live don't love the arts and history as much as they should. That's why we don't have famous musicians from the area or good ballet troupes and orchestras... So you have to go to San Francisco to find the better museums.

I really would've liked to take some photos, but you're not allowed to take photographs in the exhibit. In fact, everyone pays more money to go to the exhibit, unlike the usual De Young exhibits (if you have membership, you can go in free! But not this time. Members get a discount, though). I suppose the artifacts are quite valuable and fragile. After all, they are from thousands of years ago...And yet some of them still look to be in good shape. I heard there were mummified fetuses that had been found and I thought that sounded really disgusting. And the fact that the brains of a dead person are removed with a hook through a person's nose is kind of disturbing too. Luckily you don't actually have to see that.

I was disappointed that the real King Tut coffin was not at the exhibit, though there was an animation showing the layers of the coffin. It reminds me of those Russian dolls that look like this.

If you remove the coffin layer by layer, you start out with a box, then another box, and another box, and then eventually to the actual person-shaped coffins, which also contain multiple layers, and finally you reach the dead person inside. So that's why I thought of the Russian dolls when I saw the animation.

There was a mummy coffin at the exhibit, though. It just wasn't Tut's. It was bigger than I thought. I would have liked to open it but practically everything is in glass cases.

I read an article about Tut which was free for the taking at the museum. Tut's lineage is a bit of a mystery. It is rumored that he is the son of the previous king, Akhenaten (his real name was Amenhotep but he changed it when he decided to change the religion of Egypt) and one of the king's wives, Kiya. Akhenaten had another, more famous wife called Nefertiti who might've been jealous enough of Kiya to have banished or killed her. Sort of reminds me of the Romans plotting to kill each other before.

By the way, let me explain why I said "kings of the valley"...It's because many of the Egyptian kings were buried in a valley named The Valley of the Kings. (Pretty obvious name, eh?)

Labels: akhenaten, artifacts, brain, coffin, de young, egypt, exhibit, fetus, kiya, mummy, museum, nefertiti, pharaohs, russian dolls, san francisco, tut, tutankhamun, valley of the kings

I can't speak French. But I saw this on some of the De Young Museum's souvenir merchandise. (Like t-shirts and bags) Apparently it was the old motto of Yves Saint Laurent. It means "Fashion passes, style remains". I don't really get it, so good luck to you figuring it out.

...Maybe I'd better clarify, before everyone gets confused. My family has membership to museums in San Francisco, and we heard there were some new exhibits, so we went to see the De Young and Legion of Honor (both art museums). At De Young, the special exhibits right now are 1) Yves Saint Laurent, and 2) Andy Warhol...While at Legion of Honor, the special exhibit is Artistic Luxury - Fabergé - Tiffany - Lalique.

Yves Saint Laurent is a French, high-end clothing brand. Apparently the guy who started it and owned it (until he died of brain cancer o_O ) was called Saint Laurent. The clothing in the museum wasn't all that old, I mean, my parents were alive then (1960's was around the oldest of the clothes displayed) but still, flash photography seems to damage clothing and art for some reason, so this guy in a black suit leaped out to stop a woman who was taking pictures with her camera. (That must be what those security guards do...I always thought it was weird since they usually just stand there, or walk around looking at you)

Anyhow, the YSL clothing is kind of odd. Some of it is really freaky, like this black, tall hat, and a "wedding dress" which covers you and makes you look like a little dressed-up doll. Here's some pictures of various types. (The third one is really disturbing, but apparently it is also a wedding dress)







And about Andy Warhol...He was an artist, who painted portraits of people, designed record album covers, acted as producer for some band called Velvet Underground (no idea what that is, even my dad doesn't know), and made short movies. My dad wanted to see a picture of Chairman Mao which Andy Warhol created, but apparently that picture isn't featured, so he was quite disappointed. I was pretty freaked out since when I walked in there was a little sign to the side that said there was nudity in the exhibit. Still, people bring their kids in!!

Finally, about the exhibit at the Legion of Honor...Carl Fabergé, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and René Lalique were all male jewelry/decorative art designers. Just so you know, the Tiffany's products we see today are from the same Tiffany's company in the exhibit. I thought Louis's name was weird, since Comfort is an actual word, and Tiffany usually seems like a girl's first name, not a last name.

If you like shiny things, you should look at that exhibit. It had a lot of things, like Easter eggs (made of rare stones, and they were bigger than usual eggs; sometimes there were other decorative items put inside the eggs) and combs (like a comb made from the shape of two swallows, carved out of wood; looks pretty, but would you want to use it?) and even dog collars (whoa, they look so expensive, people would probably steal your dog just to get the collar).

My feet got really tired from tromping around all day. My mother thinks that I need to exercise more, but...that's a different story. If you want to go to San Francisco's museums, and need a bite to eat, go to the cafe on top of De Young Museum. It has tasty food. :D

Labels: andy warhol, clothes, de young, dog collar, exhibit, france, jewelry, legion of honor, lunch, motto, museum, oddity

Top ↑