This morning we set out on foot again to explore more of the city. As in Savannah and Seattle, we decided that the best way to orient ourselves would be to get a good tour and use that as a way of finding out which areas and places would be worth re-visiting.
First though, we visited a great store called Rasputin's, in the Union Square area. Rasputin's is a new and second-hand place specialising in new and old, common and rare movies and music. We found many treasures and splurged on a couple. Overall, though, it was worth visiting just for the vibe.
So after exploring on foot for a couple of hours, we boarded a trolley car for a 2 hour whistle stop tour of the whole bay area. The tour left from near Fishermans Wharf and ran along the shoreline to Fort Point and over the Golden Gate Bridge to the north shore, then returned over the bridge and toured through thhe Presidio, up Pacific Heights, in Union Square, back through Chinatown and Little Italy, before returning to the wharf. It was a lot of fun and taught us a lot more about the city.
After that, we walked across town a bit and up the hill to Coit Tower, a city landmark named for a century old society figure, Lillian Coit, who apparently left substantial fortune to the city for the purpose of further beautifying it. As you walk about the city, Coit Tower constantly pops into view in the background, between buildings or over them. Its design is graceful and it is both a great landmark and a great legacy.
We walked through a portion of Chinatown that we hadn't seen yesterday, but that we had spotted on the tour earlier. We resolved to return in the evening for a Chinese meal. We then returned to our hotel for a period in the late afternoon.
Sure enugh, late evening found us in a second-floor Chinese restaurant in a small side street in Chinatown. I tried a Chinese beer, Tsingtao, while Pia had a Napa Valley Sauvignon Blanc. Our feast began with chicken potstickers and vegetable spring rolls for starters, then salt and pepper fried duck and mu-shu port for mains and a small bowl of green tea ice cream for dessert. The mu-shu pork wasn't my taste but other than that, it was very good. And the potstickers and ice cream were complimentary.
We returned to the hotel and went to bed late.
Independence Day - 4 July 2010
We slept in this morning, before striking out in search of the local laundromat. Of course, this being the 4th of July, it was closed. Most coin-op laundromats, we figured, would be open, but the only one within easy walking distance has a cafe attached, so we were out of luck.
On the bright side, we stopped for brunch at a cafe/ restaurant across the road called Triptych. It was awesome. The coffee, the food and the service. All awesome. And a nice place to hang out to boot.
In the early afternoon, we once again walked around the Bay City Area. It is stupendously hilly but we we're both used to walking a lot by now. There were people everywhere and a festive atmosphere. The only dampener is the large number of homeless and panhandlers we are seeing here. Still nnot quite on a par with Vancouver, but dispiriting nonetheless.
We stopped in a very cool old bookstore called City Light Bookstoore. It is in the middle of Little Italy. We browsed here for quite awile over the two storeys and the basement. We each bought a book. Pia bought Armistead Maupin's San Fancisco classic, Tales of the City and I bought, Iron Council by hard core fantasy writer, China Mieville.
The strangest thing happened though, when Pia humorously drew my attention to a 2 inch thick tome called Road Trip America on a budget. We laughed about how it was a bit too late and then I picked it up (it is the size of a telephone book) and it flopped open to a page with a downtown map of San Francisco. What a funny coincidence. This book has every city and area in the United States in it and thousands of pages of text and THAT was the page that flopped open. We laughed and then for added humour I started to point out on the tiny map, just where we were standing and the second amazing coincidence came. The tiny, backstreet bookstore in which we stood, was marked in bold on the map. A tiny map that reduces a city of nearly a million people to a single page, leaving out half of the famous buildings and landmarks because of a lack of space, had marked in bold the obscure spot where we stood. Weird.
One of the odder things for me (Mark), was seeing that some of the Fire Trucks here are tractor-trailer units. The truck is a regular fire truck, chopped off and fitted with a turntable behind the single rear-axle, then all of the ladders and equipmennt is carred on a purpose-built semi-trailer, which has one axle only. There is a small cab on the very rear of the trailer and a second driver sits there and steers the trailer axle. This allows him to track the trailer wheels exactly along the same line as the wheels on the truck, allowing them to get a truck the size of a semi through traffic and tight streets in no more space than an ambulance would use.
We had the very bizarre experience of watching one of these trucks reversing into the station house. First they block traffic, then the truck drives in the right lane while the guy on the trailer steers it into the left lane. They drive about 20 metres in a 45-degree jacknife, then, back themselves in trailer steered independently. It is a very weird sight.
It's just another example of the inventive "can-do" attitude that is seen throughout the city's public transport and tour services that include busses, both diesel and electric. The electric ones use overhead lines like the Melbourne trams. But the busses come in: regular, convertible, bendy, double decker, double-decker AND convertible and Duck amphibious busses. Then there are the old, open trolleys, enclosed trams, cable cars and a lot more besides.
In the late afternoon we returned to the Bay Bridge Inn for a relax. It is quite tiring walking up and down super steep streets all day for three days!
In the evening we went out to a local Irish Pub called the Chieftan, for a counter meal and celebratory drink. We then decided that due to the weather, which had been closing in all day, to go back to the hotel. All throughout the the afternoon the famous San Fran Fog had been rolling in and it now plastered the sky and it had brought the wind in to make it quite chilly indeed. We also figured that we had seen so much of the US over the past three months that we had been celebrating the whole time.
Francis Ford Coppolla owns this building. The Pyramid building beside it is another landmark of the city, the Trans-America Building.
The home from Mrs Doubtfire
Need I say any more!
The very cool trams that are still running
Coit Tower
How steep are these streets!
Chinatown, a fantastic place to walk through.
Fire truck, doing the reversing jacknife on purpose. Very strange indeed.
You know I'm just drooling over all these old bookstores!! You lucky ducks! Keep having fun! Laugh lots! Luvya.
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