Countless San Francisco museum guides exist. In fact, we’ve probably written a few ourselves. But we realized that there was a gaping, smoking hole in our offerings for those of us with legal ways of accessing marijuana. And now that Prop 64 has passed, we figure this guide can only be a good investment.
We’d like to note that these are all incredible museums, regardless of whatever mental state you bring to them. Just because we enjoyed them high doesn’t mean we haven’t enjoyed them while sober.
Exploratorium
This is a children’s museum, which means it’s optimized for trippin’ balls. There really is no way to do this museum incorrectly, but we have a suggested itinerary, starting with what you should not see.
What not to see: anything involving math. Also, don’t touch the coils that alternate between being hot and cold. Either they’ll be disastrously painful, or you’ll be too slow to notice anything going on there.
Now that we’ve clarified those details, here are the exhibits you should check out:
- The lockers with handles that play a musical note when you touch them.
- A sculpture of SF landmarks by Scott Weaver made entirely out of toothpicks. We stared at that thing for an hour.
- Kaleidoscope structure — it’s a triangular prism thing with three mirrors on the inside. In the words of Stephen Chbosky, “In that moment we were infinite.” Or something.
- Giant concave mirror that makes you look enormous and projects any appendage that you extend toward it back at you.
- The television with laughing people on it — it’s supposed to prove that seeing laughing people will make you laugh. As you can imagine, ganja gives this exhibit a specific potency.
- Any of those exhibits that project an image of you onto a screen, especially the heat-mapping screen. We suggest you do not try to grope your partner, because erogenous zones make the screen light up like a Christmas tree.
- The monochrome room was possibly the most confusing thing we’ve ever experienced.
- We tried to count the rings in the redwood tree, but decided to lie down on it instead.
Rating: 11/10, without question
California Academy of Sciences
The entire bottom floor is an aquarium. The fish seem especially beautiful and lethargic, and their fins will be more colorful to you than ever before. You have to give each fish its own adequate attention—possibly a name, maybe a backstory. Don’t try to leave the fish tunnel. It’s impossible.
There is an alcove in the pocket of a larger tank that is clearly meant for children. That did not stop us from crawling into the space to spend a solid 10 minutes looking at what our stoned minds could only describe as “tiny meerkat eels.” They’d stick their heads out, rotate a little and then immediately return to hiding when we tapped the glass. Yes, we know we weren’t supposed to tap the glass.
We were too high to remember the name of the eels on the label. Aspiring for journalistic integrity, we tried to find the scientific nomer but got distracted by Google’s auto-fill choices.
Rating: 9/10, even if we weren’t allowed to pet Claude, the albino alligator
De Young
This was by far the most difficult museum to exhibit self-control in.
In all the other places, either you’re allowed to touch everything, or it’s fenced off sufficiently/in a tank. But this place is not stoner proofed!!
We thought a security guard was going to throw us out, but instead he said, “Girls wearing that hat love to have their photo taken in front of the rainbow painting.” To preserve the identity of the innocent, we will just show you what the painting looks like rather than our photo.
There’s a giant safety-pin statue in the back area of the museum. The buildings have floor-to-ceiling windows, and if you stand at the right angle, you can hold up a normal-size safety pin, close one eye and try to get the sizes to line up perfectly. Not that we did this.
The highlight of the trip was definitely the African and Oceanic art — otherwise known as pillars and tiny statues with faces that we named and created sordid tales for. Most of the tiny statues lack digits on their limbs. You can guess where this is going. We’re going to cut off any nubbins jokes right now.
Rating: 7/10 for the quality the art, even if you can’t touch it
SFMOMA
We tried to go in here, but the architecture was so pristine and geometric, we got intimidated and left.
Rating: still rating this 6/10 for potential
Musée Mécanique
Maybe the weed was just from a bad batch, but this museum did nothing but exacerbate paranoia and make us feel overwhelmed. The old dilapidated figureheads on archaic pinball machines and that godforsaken puppet at the entrance. So much blinking and booping and spinning, and it wouldn’t stop.
It was hard enough to navigate Fisherman’s Wharf on our way to the museum without feeling like everyone was judging us. The arm-wrestling machine beat us, which is disappointing because even Julie Andrews beat it in the Princess Diaries, and she was in her 60s.
Rating: 4/10, because we’re still recovering
Museums we forgot or got wrong? Let us know in the comments section.
