To San Francisco! (Again!)
Dec. 28th, 2025 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aA few years ago we expanded our days-in-Berkeley (sometimes Oakland) from three to four, mainly to make sure K. had plenty of time to visit with all of her friends. Meanwhile, I do more efficient visiting of friends because I can meet them two or three at a time for gaming. That means that I often end up with a day free in the East Bay. Last year I went and saw _Wicked_, which wasn't available in Kauai's single theatre. Today, I kept trying to offer people my free Saturday, but everything ended up clumped up on Monday instead. So Saturday remained a free day.
I woke up with no plans for the day, other than the thought that I was going to either go to a museum or go for a hike. And I wasn't totally enthused for the hike. Though the rain stopped a few hours after we hit Berkeley on Friday, I'm sure the paths are all various levels of muddy. (I do bring extra shoes with me for that possibility, but would prefer not to end up caked in mud while staying at an Air B&B.)
I'd been thinking about the Oakland Museum, which I hadn't been to for years, and which I was feeling kindly toward because they, much like the Louvre, were recently the victims of a big theft recently [https://museumca.org/press/statement-from-oakland-museum-of-california-on-recent-theft-at-off-site-storage-facility/]. But then I discovered that the Legion of Honor had an exhibit on Manet and Morisot, respectively the "father" of impressionism and the only woman to appear in the Impressionism Exhibitions under her own name. That was a must see, and even though the Legion of Honor is about as far as you can get from us in San Francisco, I was determined to go.
So I headed out and an hour and a half later (after taking the yellow line BART and the 38R MUNI) I found myself climbing the hill to the Legion of Honor.
--
The exhibit was amazing. I always read all the text on an exhibit like that, and it painted an amazing picture of Éduoard Manet and Berthe Morisot and their long-term friendship, how he influenced her early work, and how she influenced his later work. The curation was quite good, because it painted them as very human people, much more than you often see at such an exhibit, but probably a necessary requirement when it was talking about not just their artwork, but their friendship (and the fact that Morisot eventually married Éduoard's brother, Eugène, who not only supported her continuing to paint but also managed a lot of her work, altogether unimaginable in the Victorian age, when women weren't even "supposed" to be painters).
And the paintings were of course incredible. The exhibit interweaved the work of the two painters, but often brought them together in similar pieces that really allowed you to compare their two styles: one pair of a seaside summer; one pair of a woman partially dressed in her boudoir; and a four painting sequence of women representing seasons, two done by Morisot (summer and winter), two by Manet (spring and autumn), the set of which had never been exhibited together before. (Incredibly, there's never even been a Manet/Morisot exhibit, even though she was long seen as his protégé, even before newer scholarship suggested that he was influenced by her work in turn.)
And of course I love impressionism, and this was an impressionist exhibit — though Manet is actually on the cusp, as he was a studio painter and a constant reviser, and certainly his older works appear much more traditional. Which may be why, as a whole, I thought Morisot's work was better. She really embraced the movement. (Which makes it more ironic that back in the day Morisot was called a poor-man's Manet.)
Anyway, awesome exhibit. Awesome, beautiful art. Great history.
The store had a book called _Paris in Ruins_ covering much of this ground in greater length that I almost picked up, but I decided I didn't need yet another book in our luggage. So, while I would have loved to give more money to the museum, it went on my Amazon list instead.
--
I got to hike too!
I'd been thinking about walking over to Golden Gate Park, which is in the same northwest corner of San Francisco, but I realized that there's actually a path down from the Legion of Honor, through the golf course that pervades that corner of San Francisco, to the Lands End Trail, which runs along the north side of western San Francisco, offering great views of the Golden Gate, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Marin Headlands. So I hiked down to that.
Yeah, it was slightly muddy, but not enough to coat my shoes, just requiring careful walking. And it was somewhat crowded, something that I don't expect for my hiking trails, but Lands End is clearly a big tourist destination at this point. There's a big hill at about the halfway point, and that took more effort than it would have six years ago, because I'm not regularly walking hills like I used to when I lived in Berkeley.
Overall, a gorgeous hike.
Afterward, I walked down Sea Cliff into the Richmond District and made my yearly pilgrimage to my local bank to pick up some cash. I thought about going out to Golden Gate Park at this point and even started walking there, but decided my legs were getting too worn out, so turned around and hopped back on the 38R to take me back to BART.
--
Ah, BART. I got there and it was a weird mess. There were talking about cancelling whole lines in their typical inaudible fashion, so I hopped on the first train I could get, which was a red line, which goes to Richmond (the city, not the district). It wasn't the yellow line that I needed to get home, but the first rule of BART in San Francisco is take-whatever-train-gets-you-to-the-East-Bay if there's a trouble.
So the Red Line train took me to Embarcadero, the last stop in San Francisco, and then it indeed STOPPED.
I looked up bart.gov and got a bit more info: a train was stuck at West Oakland (the first stop on the other side of the Bay), and the red and blue lines under the Bay were both cancelled. There was no mention at all of the yellow line, nor any word on what to do, but pretty soon some partially inaudible announcements said (I think) that the train I was on was being turned around for SFO.
Now I'd looked at some travel times while I was on that 38R bus, and they'd shown me all kinds of weird ways to get home, most of them involving taking an "NL" bus from the transit center. Suddenly, that made sense. So with the train still idling at the station, I got up and went upstairs, to head out of BART and over the transit center, with the hope of getting home *SOMETIME*.
Except that when I tried to exit the station, I discovered my Clipper card was gone. I searched through every pocket at least three times. And it wasn't there.
Though it seemed pretty pointless, I headed back down into the station, hoping that maybe my card had fallen out of my pocket when I sat down on the train, and no one had taken it, and the train would still be there, and the card would still be there.
Yeah, pretty unlikely.
There was indeed still a train idling where we'd been, and I was able to easily locate my seat from the landmarks in the station, and there on the blue seat was nothing ... or so I thought at first and second glance, but eventually after popping in and out of the train a couple of times, and finally determining this was indeed my seat ... I saw there was a blue Clipper card on the blue seat! I'd clearly put it in my back pocket (which I wouldn't have done when we lived here, it would have gone into a wallet or a jacket pocket with a zipper), sat down, and it had slid out.
So, I grabbed my Clipper and got off the train before it headed back to SFO.
But I ended up not exiting the station, because they were FINALLY saying what people should do. They said that the red line train was going to go back to SFO and that a yellow line train would then come in (on the same track! good trick!) and take us across the Bay.
So that happened. Under the Bay we went and to West Oakland and past the stalled-out train at like 1 mph, and finally back to Rockridge where K. and I are staying! Whew.
--
Staying in Rockridge has been super-convenient, which is almost certainly what we discovered last year as well. We're right on the BART yellow line, which means that we have straight-through transit to Concord (where I'm going today) and San Francisco.
If we were over in downtown Berkeley instead (where we stayed probably two years ago and maybe three years ago), where we're within a mile of our old house, you have to change trains that aren't timed well to get to Concord, which makes it a big pain in the neck, and you often have to rush from one train to another to get to SF (but not always; as that red line sometimes gets you through).
So it's weird that we're going to be in our long-time city-home, but quite possibly I will never go down to Telegraph Avenue or downtown Berkeley, which were our civic centers when I lived here. (K. is actually down in downtown Berkeley this morning, but it's just not on my itinerary at the moment.)
--
Today is gaming with my "Wednesday" group of friends. Tomorrow is lunch and then dinner with different people, then another play in the evening. That's my busy day. Then Tuesday is gaming with my "Thursday" group of friends, who I hosted at my house for many years.
Then, it's back home to our much warmer island. (But the brisk weather has been fine here, as long as we layer before leaving; the pause in the rain is very convenient.)
I woke up with no plans for the day, other than the thought that I was going to either go to a museum or go for a hike. And I wasn't totally enthused for the hike. Though the rain stopped a few hours after we hit Berkeley on Friday, I'm sure the paths are all various levels of muddy. (I do bring extra shoes with me for that possibility, but would prefer not to end up caked in mud while staying at an Air B&B.)
I'd been thinking about the Oakland Museum, which I hadn't been to for years, and which I was feeling kindly toward because they, much like the Louvre, were recently the victims of a big theft recently [https://museumca.org/press/statement-from-oakland-museum-of-california-on-recent-theft-at-off-site-storage-facility/]. But then I discovered that the Legion of Honor had an exhibit on Manet and Morisot, respectively the "father" of impressionism and the only woman to appear in the Impressionism Exhibitions under her own name. That was a must see, and even though the Legion of Honor is about as far as you can get from us in San Francisco, I was determined to go.
So I headed out and an hour and a half later (after taking the yellow line BART and the 38R MUNI) I found myself climbing the hill to the Legion of Honor.
--
The exhibit was amazing. I always read all the text on an exhibit like that, and it painted an amazing picture of Éduoard Manet and Berthe Morisot and their long-term friendship, how he influenced her early work, and how she influenced his later work. The curation was quite good, because it painted them as very human people, much more than you often see at such an exhibit, but probably a necessary requirement when it was talking about not just their artwork, but their friendship (and the fact that Morisot eventually married Éduoard's brother, Eugène, who not only supported her continuing to paint but also managed a lot of her work, altogether unimaginable in the Victorian age, when women weren't even "supposed" to be painters).
And the paintings were of course incredible. The exhibit interweaved the work of the two painters, but often brought them together in similar pieces that really allowed you to compare their two styles: one pair of a seaside summer; one pair of a woman partially dressed in her boudoir; and a four painting sequence of women representing seasons, two done by Morisot (summer and winter), two by Manet (spring and autumn), the set of which had never been exhibited together before. (Incredibly, there's never even been a Manet/Morisot exhibit, even though she was long seen as his protégé, even before newer scholarship suggested that he was influenced by her work in turn.)
And of course I love impressionism, and this was an impressionist exhibit — though Manet is actually on the cusp, as he was a studio painter and a constant reviser, and certainly his older works appear much more traditional. Which may be why, as a whole, I thought Morisot's work was better. She really embraced the movement. (Which makes it more ironic that back in the day Morisot was called a poor-man's Manet.)
Anyway, awesome exhibit. Awesome, beautiful art. Great history.
The store had a book called _Paris in Ruins_ covering much of this ground in greater length that I almost picked up, but I decided I didn't need yet another book in our luggage. So, while I would have loved to give more money to the museum, it went on my Amazon list instead.
--
I got to hike too!
I'd been thinking about walking over to Golden Gate Park, which is in the same northwest corner of San Francisco, but I realized that there's actually a path down from the Legion of Honor, through the golf course that pervades that corner of San Francisco, to the Lands End Trail, which runs along the north side of western San Francisco, offering great views of the Golden Gate, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Marin Headlands. So I hiked down to that.
Yeah, it was slightly muddy, but not enough to coat my shoes, just requiring careful walking. And it was somewhat crowded, something that I don't expect for my hiking trails, but Lands End is clearly a big tourist destination at this point. There's a big hill at about the halfway point, and that took more effort than it would have six years ago, because I'm not regularly walking hills like I used to when I lived in Berkeley.
Overall, a gorgeous hike.
Afterward, I walked down Sea Cliff into the Richmond District and made my yearly pilgrimage to my local bank to pick up some cash. I thought about going out to Golden Gate Park at this point and even started walking there, but decided my legs were getting too worn out, so turned around and hopped back on the 38R to take me back to BART.
--
Ah, BART. I got there and it was a weird mess. There were talking about cancelling whole lines in their typical inaudible fashion, so I hopped on the first train I could get, which was a red line, which goes to Richmond (the city, not the district). It wasn't the yellow line that I needed to get home, but the first rule of BART in San Francisco is take-whatever-train-gets-you-to-the-East-Bay if there's a trouble.
So the Red Line train took me to Embarcadero, the last stop in San Francisco, and then it indeed STOPPED.
I looked up bart.gov and got a bit more info: a train was stuck at West Oakland (the first stop on the other side of the Bay), and the red and blue lines under the Bay were both cancelled. There was no mention at all of the yellow line, nor any word on what to do, but pretty soon some partially inaudible announcements said (I think) that the train I was on was being turned around for SFO.
Now I'd looked at some travel times while I was on that 38R bus, and they'd shown me all kinds of weird ways to get home, most of them involving taking an "NL" bus from the transit center. Suddenly, that made sense. So with the train still idling at the station, I got up and went upstairs, to head out of BART and over the transit center, with the hope of getting home *SOMETIME*.
Except that when I tried to exit the station, I discovered my Clipper card was gone. I searched through every pocket at least three times. And it wasn't there.
Though it seemed pretty pointless, I headed back down into the station, hoping that maybe my card had fallen out of my pocket when I sat down on the train, and no one had taken it, and the train would still be there, and the card would still be there.
Yeah, pretty unlikely.
There was indeed still a train idling where we'd been, and I was able to easily locate my seat from the landmarks in the station, and there on the blue seat was nothing ... or so I thought at first and second glance, but eventually after popping in and out of the train a couple of times, and finally determining this was indeed my seat ... I saw there was a blue Clipper card on the blue seat! I'd clearly put it in my back pocket (which I wouldn't have done when we lived here, it would have gone into a wallet or a jacket pocket with a zipper), sat down, and it had slid out.
So, I grabbed my Clipper and got off the train before it headed back to SFO.
But I ended up not exiting the station, because they were FINALLY saying what people should do. They said that the red line train was going to go back to SFO and that a yellow line train would then come in (on the same track! good trick!) and take us across the Bay.
So that happened. Under the Bay we went and to West Oakland and past the stalled-out train at like 1 mph, and finally back to Rockridge where K. and I are staying! Whew.
--
Staying in Rockridge has been super-convenient, which is almost certainly what we discovered last year as well. We're right on the BART yellow line, which means that we have straight-through transit to Concord (where I'm going today) and San Francisco.
If we were over in downtown Berkeley instead (where we stayed probably two years ago and maybe three years ago), where we're within a mile of our old house, you have to change trains that aren't timed well to get to Concord, which makes it a big pain in the neck, and you often have to rush from one train to another to get to SF (but not always; as that red line sometimes gets you through).
So it's weird that we're going to be in our long-time city-home, but quite possibly I will never go down to Telegraph Avenue or downtown Berkeley, which were our civic centers when I lived here. (K. is actually down in downtown Berkeley this morning, but it's just not on my itinerary at the moment.)
--
Today is gaming with my "Wednesday" group of friends. Tomorrow is lunch and then dinner with different people, then another play in the evening. That's my busy day. Then Tuesday is gaming with my "Thursday" group of friends, who I hosted at my house for many years.
Then, it's back home to our much warmer island. (But the brisk weather has been fine here, as long as we layer before leaving; the pause in the rain is very convenient.)