Friday in San Fran

The picture's a bit blurry, but this is inside the mission.

Still bleary eyed and carrying my pillow, I made it to the vans at 5:30 Friday morning. From there, we headed to San Francisco. Our first stop was at the oldest church in San Francisco, Mission Dolores Basilica. The mission and adjoining basilica were beautiful! The ceiling pattern of the mission was really cool--it hurt your eyes if you looked at it too long:

 After the mission and basilica, we went to the most contemporary church in San Francisco--the new St. Mary's. This church was not at all what I expected! 

St. Mary's

Two Thinkers.

After mass at Saint Mary’s we went to the Legion of Honor Art Museum. I really liked this museum. Do you know the famous sculpture of “The Thinker” by Rodin? It stands outside of this museum. 

Inside the Legion of Honor we saw The Russian Bride's Attire by Makovsky, which is a huge painting our art professor said would just wow us. It was huge, and to look closely at it and see everything that was going on in this painting was quite “wow”-ing. In my picture Bo’s looking at it. He was my “museum buddy,” lol. I saw a bunch of neat works in the Legion of Honor, including things by Van Gogh, Picasso, Daumier, and Rodin.

Bo in front of Makovsky's "The Russian Bride's Attire."

A man sketching a sculpture

 One thing which I thought was really neat about this museum was all the people doing art in there. I saw over four people who just came into the museum with a chair and either paints or pencils or pastels and used the artwork they saw as inspiration. Some would be sitting in front of a sculpture, capturing the shading. Others would be painting a painting or a conglomerate of paintings in one. It was neat to watch them work, and it really made me want to join them.

 

The special exhibition going on at the Legion of Honor was Pulp Fashion by Isabelle de Borchgrave. Isabelle designed all these dresses completely out of paper! It was crazy good! I wish I had a better picture than this one, but I guess we aren’t allowed to take pictures of the special exhibitions. (I found this out the hard way). But even this simple dress I have a picture of is amazing: it’s 100% out of paper! Isn’t that crazy!? She even designed some of the dresses from the painting in The Russian Bride’s Attire 100% out of paper! 

Here's a better picture I found online (these are life-size, by the way)

After the Legion of Honor, we went to our hotel, The Mosser. This old-fashioned hotel was quaint and pretty, but unlike any hotel I’ve ever been to before. The rooms were small—a sink in the corner, a closet, and a big bed, but they were cute. There was a community shower/bathtub on each floor, as well as one bathroom for women and one for men on each floor…kinda like the dorms! Haha

We did more adventuring later that night, but that will be in tomorrow's post =).