Sunday, July 04, 2010

Genghis Khan Tech Museum exhibit review/Bay Area San Francisco Mongolian Naadam festival July 10

Here is my one word review of the Genghis Khan exhibit at the Tech Museum in San Jose: Disappointing.

The official billboard/banner should give you a clue as to the amount of thought, creativity, and effort they put into the show.

I paid $25 to see this.  I could have bought 50 paperbacks at a library book sale with that money.

My review will be just as simplistic, disjointed, and passionless as the exhibit.  There were many replicas.  The exhibit's lighting was poor (too dark, almost cave-like).  The mini-films projected on the walls were blurrier and shakier than The Blair Witch Project on meth.  Of the 200 or so "artifacts", only a handful were from the time of Genghis Khan.  I could have learned more from reading his Wikipedia page.  Did I mention it was $25?!  The only cool "object" was a mummy of a woman they found in Mongolia.  What did it have to do with Genghis Khan?  I have no idea.  I suspect that a second-rate museum in a provincial Mongolian town would be more interesting (and have better artifacts) than this.

13th century bronze passport

13th-14th century cavalry iron saber

Iron armor

The only positive thing I got out of this was that I learned that there will be a Naadam Festival at Golden Gate Park this July 10 from 10 am to 4 pm.  I will post the details once I find a Mongolian translator as all the info about the event is on a Mongolian website.  I think it's at Speedway Meadow.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for posting this. I was at the museum with my family and we passed on this as it sounded hokey and would have cost us $100 all together. Being a history buff, I have been having regrets since then about the missed opportunity. Glad to read that we made the right decision.