Day 2: San Francisco

This is the chronicle of the second day of our trip to San Francisco. (Our first day can be found here.)

On the morning of day two, The Brain tricked me into thinking that it was six a.m. and that the alarm on my phone was going off. I reached for the phone to turn off the alarm and, groping around, knocked my glasses off the nightstand. But of course the alarm wasn't going off. It wasn't going off because it was only four a.m. not six a.m. And that was how my second day in San Francisco started, with about four and a half hours of sleep.

YAWN!

I got up and ate some leftovers from dinner (stored in one of the two mini-bar refrigerators in the room), showered, dressed, read, and wrote in my journal. Then later while Dave woke, showered, and dressed, I watched the news.

Our plan for the day was to make it to the Farmer's Market by about nine a.m. because we erroneously believed that the Farmer's Market was on both weekend days. (In fact it is only on Saturday, Tuesday, and, I think, Thursday--and furthermore, the damn market doesn't start until 10:00 a.m. Who starts a farmer's market at 10:00?! A few weekends ago, I went to the farmer's market here in my little city with Kelly First at about 8:15 in the morning and when Kelly, thinking that one of the vendors might not have change, apologized for paying with a $20, the woman said, "Oh, it's late enough in the day that of course I have plenty of change." At 8:15 in the morning. Now that's a farmer! Get with it, you bay area pansy farmers. Though that makes it sound like they farm pansies, doesn't it?) Anyway, we also planned on joining a City Walk tour of the Castro at 11:00.

We were out the door a bit before 8:00, went back to Sears Fine Food for breakfast (mmmm...pancakes), and rode MUNI to Embarcadero station, near the Ferry Building. There, instead of the Farmer's Market, we saw a lot of these:



It was just after nine when we arrived, and none of the shops (with the exception of Peet's Coffee) had opened. We sat and watched the seagulls for awhile and got a couple of coffees. No market ever materialized. Very sad.

After a bit, we decided to walk back up to where some vendors were selling random things, a lot of jewelry and other crafty things. I bought a pair of earrings from one of the vendors for $12.

I bought the turquoise-ish blue and silver earrings on the left, which are way too heavy, but I liked the look. I chatted with the vendor about his prices being too low (his earrings started at $5 and went up to $20) and he was surprised that I would say that. We talked about how cheap people always try to talk him down on his prices and how annoying that it, especially when they're wearing designer clothes or driving big, brand new cars. (Grrr, people! Appreciate artists!)

After we talked with him, we caught a street car up to the Castro, where we wandered around a bit. Our tour didn't start for almost forty minutes, so we thought we might have time for a snack before so we stepped into a nearly deserted restaurant on Castro. Unfortunately the restaurant's kitchen was reeeeeealllly sloooooow, so we got our food at ten minutes 'til eleven. We wolfed down what we could and at five minutes 'til, we hurried up the street to meet up with our City Guide tour guide and about thirty lesbians and three gay guys.

City Guide tours, I should mention, don't just cover the Castro, they cover many parts of San Francisco. They are guided by volunteers and are free, but you should leave a donation with the guide at the end. (Not a tip, a donation to the organization--and not the dollar or two that some cheap bastards were leaving. Leave the guide at least ten bucks per person in your group, ya goddamn chintzy freaks. This has been a public service announcement!)

The walk was guided by a fabulous man named Sean Timberlake, which is a total show business name. Here's Sean:

When Dave took that picture, we were just starting our walk under the giant rainbow flag at Harvey Milk Plaza at Castro Station.

We walked the main business drag (get it? haha), stopping at the Castro Theater, at Cliff's Variety which is the famous hardware store there on Castro, and in front of the shop that used to be Harvey Milk's photography shop but which is now a gift shop.

That is the Castro Theater sign. Apparently, the film Harvey Milk had it's world premier there (but I've never seen the film because I think Sean Penn should take a long walk off a short pier).

After we left the main drag, we turned down some residential streets and started to look at the different styles of Victorian houses. My favorites are the really over-the-top, ridiculously ornate houses, with all the scroll-y crap on it painted all different colors and those insanely vertiginous steps leading to the front door. My other favorites are the houses that would be gorgeous Victorian houses except some genius stuccoed them with brown stucco.


Here's a photo of one of the houses. It wasn't that I particularly liked this house, it's that it sits on the corner of Eureka St. That's a gold rush name if I ever heard one.

We paused briefly in front of the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, in front of this mural made by the children who attend. Embedded in the mural were hundreds of pieces of glass with drawings and sayings written in children's scrawls underneath. This was one of my favorites:

"...I still believe that people are really good at heart." --Anne Frank 1944

Then we continued up the steep hill we were climbing. At a certain point, Sean gave us the option to continue climbing (and to add a half hour to the tour) for some special payoff. We opted to continue climbing and came to two little hidden gems:


A little park in the middle of a residential neighborhood that had a 3-D mural by artist Ruth Asawa (whose artistic touch is readily felt in San Francisco) and an amazing concrete slide that you could go down using some of the cardboard laying around.

(There's Dave on the left, trying to get out of the way of whomever was on the way down.)

For our group to slide down, we displaced a little girl who was so happy on the slide that she was just one enormous grin. We watched her slide down several times and then, when her father said it was our turn, she said, "Can we stay and watch?" She was just happy to be there; a lesson for us all, no?

So that was one gem. The other was at the very top of the hill we were climbing:
Look at that view!

That's looking toward the bay, from one of the highest points in San Francisco, quite near (the guide informed us) the geographical center of the city. It's really beautiful. The hill where we were standing is on the very edge of the Castro and is very, very high. The tour guide jokingly told us that it's sometimes called "The Swish Alps"!

From there, we continued downward, still making our way through the residential streets, down back to Harvey Milk Plaza. We stayed a bit to ask for some restaurant recommendations and to leave a donation with our guide, then Dave and I hopped a cable car back to the Ferry Building for late lunch fixin's, cheese from Cowgirl Creamery and bread and pastries from ACME, along with some fruit from the indoor market. (We ate back at the hotel.)

We both needed a breather, so we ate our lunch and had short naps at the hotel. Then of course it was time to go out again. There was another walk that evening at 7:30, a City Guide tour of North Beach, but there was no way I was up for that.

We went out, had a coffee at Starbucks of all places, wandered Union Square a bit. (We needed a new memory card for the camera so we ended up at Walgreens where we bought our card and I found myself in a discussion with a loud, likely tipsy Brit who thought that Walgreens was the only place to buy groceries in San Francisco (his basket was filled with Walgreens crappy junk food) and I had to tell him about the Farmer's Market at the Ferry Building, and the Safeway up on Market St., and Trader Joe's, and, hmmm, let's see, Whole Foods. All the while thinking: What a dolt!)

We decided on an early evening of dinner and perhaps some games back at the hotel. For dinner, we didn't stray far from the Tenderloin district, stopping at a sit-down Indian restaurant called Sultan where we ordered as though we were facing a firing squad in the morning. We had daal and vegetable jaipuri and naan and rice and raita and a spicy appetizer made of paneer. We had a couple of beers and pappadum while we waited. Oh, man! It was tasty.

But you don't have to take my word for it. Here's a thirty second video of Dave sampling our paneer appetizer:



A definite two thumbs up for our dinner. (Of which I have no other photos because, well, I am a glutton and the minute the food hits the table, I put down the camera and commence with the chowing.)

After dinner, we did come back to the hotel (loaded down with leftovers). We borrowed some games from the front desk and tried to play. After a couple of rounds of Boggle, we were just too beat to continue, so it was lights out!

And that was day two in San Francisco!