Wes & Erica's Vacation Photo Album - San Francisco, CA (Chinatown) - August 2022

One part of our vacation that Wes & I were equally excited for was San Francisco's Chinatown. We were both anticipating all the delicious food (although I didn't get to eat as much as I had hoped to), and I was pumped for all the shopping. We left the hotel early to get a full day of sightseeing in and realized as soon as the Uber dropped us off that Chinatown's sleepy shops don't open until 10am. 😑 We wandered around and window shopped for about an hour. We went into the visitor's center as soon as it opened to get a map and picked out all the things we wanted to see and do.

We spent most of our time just walking around and looking at all the murals. There were so many!! I also loved all of the decorations on the buildings. We got a little turned around, so I think we walked around the same blocks over & over again. LOL It got busy pretty quickly and we were soon surrounded by a ton of other tourists, as well as locals. It was so weird hearing snippets of everyone's conversations in Cantonese. I used to speak it fluently, but I'm embarrassed to admit that I've forgotten about 50% of it (even though it's technically my native tongue) 😅

We went into a handful of souvenir shops; got something for our house, my mom & stepdad, and that was the extent of our buying. I really wanted a pair of jellies, but the shop didn't have them in my size. 😞 And I'm not completely sure they were for sale; they didn't have a price tag and they were the only pair sitting on a shelf of slippers. I also wanted a zodiac stuffed animal of a Rat (1984, baby!! 🐀) but I couldn't think of a place to put it, so I passed on it as well. Travelling with just one carry-on bag (and no checked luggage) is not conducive to souvenir shopping. Wes isn't a shopper and I quickly discovered that all of the shops sell almost the exact same thing, so we didn't buy much. I think it was more fun to just walk around and look at everything. 

There were a handful of things we wanted to see while we were in Chinatown. One was the Tin How Temple. I thought it was a tourist attraction that you could go into, but it's only open to members. It did look very nice on the outside, though.

After "visiting" the temple, we switched gears and headed for the St. Mary's Cathedral. ⛪ We got in at the tail end of midday mass. I'm glad we didn't barge in at the middle of mass or during communion. Wes isn't religious, and while I was raised Catholic, I don't practice anymore. We stayed toward the back while the priest finished up and then the church opened up to visitors. 

The Cathedral was the first in the Chinatown area and it's endured some natural disasters. You can tell from the inside that it definitely is old and has been through some rough patches. There was damage to the ceiling and some stained-glass windows. But it is a beautiful church. 

We were so lucky with timing the whole day. We got seated & served at the dim sum restaurant just before the lunch rush started, we got to the cathedral right as mass was ending, and we beat the line at the fortune cookie factory. I don't think we waited in line for anything. 👍

I normally don't like fortune cookies and give them to Athena & Zephyr when we get Chinese take-out, but the fresh ones from the fortune cookie factory were so good! 🥠 The fortune cookie factory was at the end of a very narrow alley. We walked by a few times and kept missing the turn into Ross alley. Ross alley is one of the notable ones in Chinatown (I think just because it's old). The factory was tiny! It had a gift shop at the front, the employees working on display in the back, then you make a U-turn and get a free fortune cookie on your way out. It was one of my favorite things we saw all day even though the "tour" took less than 5-minutes. LOL

I saw a Chinese American heritage museum on the directory at the visitor's center and added that to our list of places to visit. I also saw a bunch of signs for a Bruce Lee exhibit. For some reason I didn't put the two together until we got into the museum. The first exhibit (unrelated to Bruce Lee) was a textile exhibit. The dresses are made from shopping bags and some other materials--don't remember what and I also forgot the artist's intent. 🤷 I expected there to be some historical exhibits, but the rest of the museum was dedicated to the Bruce Lee exhibition. 

I am aware of the cultural phenomenon and significance of Bruce Lee, but I haven't seen any of his movies all the way through, and I didn't know much about him as a person. It was cool to read up on him and see all the movie memorabilia. The exhibit also had some of his original artwork and writings. Wes likes Bruce Lee's movies and seemed to enjoy the museum. 

We finished up Chinatown a few hours before our dinner reservation so we Uber'd to Japantown. 🎎 Our Uber was a Tesla, which I'm sure is completely normal but I was impressed. LOL It's probably the hippest vehicle I've ridden in. I didn't know how to use the door handles, so our driver had to roll down the window and instruct me. 😅 San Francisco is as hilly as everyone says it is and traffic was madness, so I am so glad we decided to Uber and walk everywhere instead of renting a car. Anyway, Japantown is basically two malls with a pavilion in the middle. One of the malls has a majority of the shops and the other mall has a majority of the restaurants (and the MUCH cleaner restrooms). We mostly wanted to go to Japantown for the Kinokuniya bookstore. It is the first one in the States. We always go to the one in Carrollton, TX. This one is supposed to be way bigger with a ton more stuff but I wasn't impressed. Probably because I don't read manga or play video games. LOL Wes liked it and bought 2 video game art books. I like the store for its cute stationary and kitschy stuff, which it didn't have as much as I had hoped it would. We walked all around the malls and went into quite a few shops. One was Amiko...an authorized tokidoki retailer. Oh my freakin' gawd!!! 😲😁😍 I was in heaven. I wanted to buy it all, but I exercised self-control and only bought my traditional souvenir of a Unicorno figurine. 

I know the Guo Pei fashion exhibit at the art museum should be my favorite day in San Francisco since that is the reason why I booked this vacation, but I think my favorite day was our day in Chinatown. It was so neat to just walk around and see everything. My favorite parts of Chinatown were the fortune cookie factory, the mural of the Manchurian warriors, our meal at 8 tables, and Amiko boutique (okay, that was in Japantown). Wes said our day in Chinatown was awesome and I suspect it was his favorite part of our vacation as well. And here is a random picture of our hotel (right in the most "beautiful part of San Francisco" as our first Uber driver sarcastically told us), because I have nowhere else to put it in this blog. 😅

Wes & Erica's Vacation Photo Album - San Francisco, CA (Legion of Honor Museum) - August 2022

I follow a bunch of designers on Instagram because I love fashion.👗 I am not a fashionable person and I'm not a consumer of anything in the high-end fashion world, but I do greatly enjoy looking at it. One of the designers I follow is Guo Pei. Earlier this year, she posted that several of her collections will be on display for a temporary exhibition called Fantasy Couture at the Legion of Honor Museum. Right then and there, I knew we'd be travelling to San Francisco to see it. 

The Legion of Honor Museum is modeled after its namesake in France. It is located in the center of Lincoln Park and is a gigantic museum!! I think we spent over three hours there. Luckily, we got in early because it got insanely busy around lunch time. We had planned to have lunch at the museum café, but the line was out the door and down the hallway. Its website stated that everyone was to purchase a timed ticket in advance, but I don't think they followed that rule because the museum felt like it was above capacity. 

Fair warning - I took at least one picture of every single dress that was on display, so this blog post will be 90% photo album---which you've probably already noticed. If you don't like dresses, turn back now! 👗 There were other works of art throughout the museum. Only the basement was dedicated to Fantasy Couture. A ton of paintings were housed on the main, second and (maybe) third floors -- I honestly don't remember how many floors it had. LOL 😅 But, there were MORE DRESSES scattered throughout the museum to accent the other artworks. I found it hard to appreciate the other pieces because my attention was immediately drawn to the gowns. 

One thing that I really appreciated about Guo Pei's dresses is that I understood them. I looked at the dress, then read the description with the artist's intent, and I could comprehend her vision. They weren't too pretentious, philosophical, or political. That's not to say that I thought her dresses were simple, because they definitely weren't. I don't like when designers are too artistic; their garments don't make sense, and the viewer won't "get it" unless they're as enlightened as the designer is. I also don't like the opposite of that when designers try to have an ultra-woke message, and it seems like they're just pandering. I felt neither of those intentions when I was at the Fantasy Couture exhibit.  

Another thing that I really liked about the exhibit is that the dresses looked like real wearable dresses. I like avant-garde stuff, too, but I want my clothes to mostly resemble regular silhouettes. Although I could never add all the intricate detailing and handiwork to any of my dresses, if I wanted to sew one that looked somewhat like what I saw at the museum, I probably could find a pattern for it.

The more labor intensive dresses had labels that showed how many hours it took to make each dress. Some were up into the tens of thousands of hours!! The labels also showed the materials used. Guo Pei worked mostly with silk and exclusively Swarovski crystals. 

My favorite of her collections is Garden of the Soul. I loved the vibrant colors of the floral motifs. Each dress had so much detail. 😍 There was the dress itself, but if you looked underneath the skirt or inside the sleeves, there would be more crystals and flowers!! I also liked the wigs. Shoes and accessories were an important part of each of her ensembles. One of the placards stated that she liked dressing women in insane shoes with impossible heels to show off how strong her women (models) are. 

My second favorite of her collections is Alternate Universe. Her pieces imagined a world where the animals took over and she advised us to be gentle to all creatures because we never know what will happen after reincarnation. I was astounded by the dresses at the exhibit so I watched the runway show for this collection when I got home. I wasn't as impressed with them when they walked. I think it is because I didn't see all the details and the dresses mostly looked heavy and static on the runway. On the other hand, a collection that wasn't a favorite of mine at the museum, Elysium, walked magnificently down the runway at its show.

One of the dresses had several dolls/puppets sewn in. Each one of her ateliers made one to add to the dress. I thought that was a nice gesture since so many of her dresses are done by hand. I was completely mesmerized by the detailing in her designs. So much so that I was doing the "you're in someone's way so you move left and they move left, and the dance continues for a while" thing without knowing it. The woman who's way I was in glared at me and said some nasty remark before I noticed I was in her way. 😬 LOL I was just trying to get to the next dress! 

Wes's favorite collection is Himalaya. It was a summer collection but the fabric made me think of winter. I guess the colors were summer. Wes said it would be too obvious as a winter collection. The dresses were made from old Japanese silk scarves. She noticed the strange patterns that the embroidery made on the back of the scarf so she used inside-out scarves in her designs. 

I don't remember the name of it, but she had a collection inspired by nighttime in Paris. It was so shocking to see the black dresses. 😮 Everything up until then was either gold or colorful. The back of one of the gowns had a silhouetted scene (like a shadow puppet show) embroidered onto it. It is the bottom right picture in the collage below.

I love everything about the pants in the bottom row of the above picture. 😍 I actually majorly adore both of the outfits on the bottom row. It's weird looking at my pictures again as I type this because I was in a daze the entire time at the museum; I don't even remember taking some of the pictures. It felt like a dream being surrounded by all of the dresses.

I felt so alive and inspired while walking through this exhibit. I told myself that after this experience, I would learn how to sketch (a very far fetched idea ... a toddler draws better than I do, but you get crazy thoughts while you're immersed in something you love, right?) so I could start designing some of my own dresses. As of now, 2 months after our vacation, I haven't drawn a single thing, haven't designed a pattern, and have only sewn a few subpar dresses. 😕 I need to get my motivation back in order!! Wes bought the gallery art book for me -- best souvenir ever but a encyclopedia-sized book is NOT the best gift when you're travelling with only carry-on luggage -- so I probably just need to look through it again to get my brain going.

The last collection in the exhibit was one that she dedicated to her youngest daughter. She designed it while pregnant, and imagined what her daughter would do if her Barbie's came to life. Her models (above) dress a zillion times nicer than my Barbie's ever did! 

After floating through the Fantasy Couture exhibit, we still had time to see the rest of the museum. I took a picture of each painting that I noticed a dog in. There was a mummy on display, which was cool. I really like mummies and artifacts.

We went to the museum on a Thursday and flew out early Friday morning. I still had visions of dresses dancing through my head when I noticed a tiny fashion exhibit at the San Francisco airport! It showed fabric and dresses made from pineapple leaves. Apparently, artists use the hairs on the leaves to weave fabric. How amazing!! 🍍 I am so glad that I got to see the Fantasy Couture exhibit. It is the third fashion exhibit I've seen and I think it is my favorite so far!